Dirty Talk
The 11th Annual Graduate Conference
on Language and Literature
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
The Forms and Language of Pleasure
Dirty talk. Guilty pleasure. Darkest desire. Our everyday discourse is littered
with phrases that shun or shame the pleasurable. Yet seeking pleasure, as figures from Chaucer to Freud have argued, is a basic human instinct. Scholarship
across a variety of fields has gravitated toward humanity’s complex relationship
with pleasure.
We seek proposals for 15–20-minute papers, three-person panels, and non-traditional presentations that explore these or any other meanings and functions of
pleasure. We invite papers about any time period and any genre; we also invite
papers from across disciplines and fields. Please send abstracts of no more than
300 words to uwmadlit@gmail.com by January 3, 2015.
Important works like Laura Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema” and Carole Vance’s anthology Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female
Sexuality, for example, have established pleasure as a central concept across
disciplines such as gender studies, feminist theory, and film studies. Prompted
by Lauren Berlant’s Desire/Love, which suggests that the seemingly personal or
private pleasures in life are culturally shaped, theorists also examine the way
pleasure straddles both public and private spheres. Queer rhetorical scholars,
such as Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes, have called for increased
attunement towards pleasure, emotion, and desire. Pleasure is also a prime
element of art-history scholarship, where recent works on the topic range from
the sexual imagery in sixteenth-century witch iconography to nineteenth-century Mexican crafting traditions. Literary criticism, meanwhile, possesses a rich
genealogy of the so-called dangerous book – the burlesque, the gothic novel,
science fiction, erotica, the comic book – such ‘low brow’ works across centuries that have lured their readers with the promise of pleasure. Recently, critics
have grappled with how to understand passionate ‘fandoms’, from Jane Austen’s
Janeites to J.K. Rowling’s Potterphiles and Stephanie Meyer’s Twihards.
Possible topics might include:
· Theoretical notions of pleasure (historical or contemporary)
· Pleasure in literature
· Reading for pleasure
· Value of pleasure in scholarship
· Pleasure and new media (gaming, binge-watching, etc.)
· Sensuality, eroticism, pornography
· Sexual economies
· Embodied pleasure
· Genre or popular fiction
· Fandoms, fan fiction, adaptation
· Sensation and the sensational
· Dark pleasures (voyeurism, morbidity, perversion, BDSM)
· Hoaxes, humor, parody
· Visual pleasure, art, the “gaze”
· Resisting pleasure; displeasure
· Pedagogy and pleasure
· Public vs. private pleasure, social pleasures
· The politics and rhetoric of pleasure
Scholars have also traced the unexpected places in which we find pleasure.
Felicity Nussbaum’s new work, for instance, studies the seemingly paradoxical
pleasure of eighteenth-century tragedy, while William Logan’s recent book,
Guilty Knowledge, Guilty Pleasure: The Dirty Art of Poetry investigates both the
joy of writing American poetry and the even greater joy of reviewing it. Recent
composition and rhetorical scholarship has invited us to consider the function
of pleasure in writing pedagogy, and the process of meaning making and consumption. T.R. Johnson’s A Rhetoric of Pleasure: Prose Style and Today’s Composition Classroom argues that pleasure plays a key role in the classroom for both
instructors and students as they come to see the composing process as lively and
fulfilling. Finally, scholars from library sciences, education, and literary studies
have recently turned to a renewed interest in the pleasures of reading. Surface
reading, uncritical reading, symptomatic reading – these new theories and approaches prompt a reconsideration of pleasure’s place in academia.
This year’s MadLit conference, “Dirty Talk: The Forms and Language of Pleasure,” will be held from Thursday, February 26 to Saturday, February 28, 2015.
The English Department Graduate Student Association (GSA) is pleased to announce that this year’s keynote address will be delivered by Dr. Kathleen Lubey,
Associate Professor of English at St. John’s University. Professor Lubey’s research
moves across literature, philosophy, sexuality and gender studies, feminist theory, the history of pornography, and theories of the novel and literary form. She
is the author of Excitable Imaginations: Eroticism and Reading in Britain, 16601760, and her current book project studies manuscript records of early English
feminism and the overlap between the histories of feminism and pornography.
Her talk will take place at 7pm on Thursday, February 26.
Please send abstracts by Jan. 3 to uwmadlit@gmail.com or to one of our sponsored panels listed below.
PaneLs Sponsored by UW Colloquia
To apply to one of these panels, please submit abstracts to the contacts listed below by Jan. 3, 2015.
This year, in addition to our general call for papers, MadLit has invited colloquia from across the UW-Madison campus to sponsor panels. Participating colloquia have designed
panels that adapt our theme, “Dirty Talk: The Forms and Language of Pleasure,” to particular fields of research. To apply to one of these panels, please contact the panel organizers
directly. Panel organizers and contact information are listed in each panel description.
“The Sensual Middle Ages”
(The Graduate Association for Medieval Studies)
In the Middle Ages, the senses were central to aesthetic and religious experience. This panel invites abstracts for papers exploring sensuality, pleasure,
vision(s)/the visionary, beauty, and tactility in medieval literature, art, and
culture. How did the senses shape or enhance religious experience? How was
the body viewed as both a temptation to sin and the provider of access to the
divine? What kind of formal relationship between text and image might engage
the senses? Please send abstracts of 250-300 words to Ashley Cook (alcook2@
wisc.edu) and Leah Pope (lepope@wisc.edu).
“Profitable Pleasure in Early Modern Print (1500-1700)”
(The Renaissance Colloquium and the Early Modern English Reading Group)
Early printed works of nearly every imaginable genre—from religious tracts and
husbandry manuals to collections of poetry, plays, and masques—seem invested
in their readers’ experiences of “pleasure and profit.” This panel will examine
the intersections, intercessions, and other intimate relations between profit and
pleasure, didactic and delight in early modern printed works—literary or otherwise. Applicants to this panel should submit their abstracts to azito@wisc.edu.
“Dis/Pleasurable Bodies”
(The Middle Modernity Group)
From Gulliver’s defamiliarizing encounters with Brobdingnagian breasts to
Edmund Burke’s theorization of the beautiful by way of “the easy and insensible
swell” of a woman’s décolletage, the terrible chiaroscuro of Geraldine’s disrobed
body to Laura’s corruption under the influence of goblin fruit: eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century literature is replete with bodies in various – and sometimes
simultaneous – states of dis/pleasure. The panel organizers invite papers that
examine this persistent and multifarious interest in the embodied experience
of pleasure and its discontents. Please submit proposals of no more than 300
words to Mid Mod coordinators, Devin Garofalo (dgarofalo@wisc.edu) and
Katie Lanning (klanning@wisc.edu).
“Memory and Desire: Modernist Erotics”
(The Modernisms/Modernities Colloquium)
The Modernisms/Modernities Colloquium is seeking individual proposals
for two sponsored panels at the 2015 MadLit Conference. In keeping with the
conference theme of “pleasure”, the first panel, entitled “Memory and Desire:
Modernist Erotics”, seeks proposals relating to manifestations and mechanisms
of pleasure in modernist literature. How does pleasure operate in modernist
texts? What formal, thematic, or critical functions does pleasure perform, and
what aesthetic effects does it produce? To be considered for a 20-minute presentation, send submissions to mmc@english.wisc.edu by January 3. Proposals
should include a title, your name and affiliation, and a 300-word abstract.
“Animal Magnetism”
(The Modernisms/Modernities Colloquium)
The second MMC panel, entitled “Animal Magnetism”, seeks proposals that
reexamine the intersection between pleasure and animality. At least as far back
as Aristotle, the Western tradition has delineated and ranked different modes
of pleasure, typically associating physical gratification with the corporeal condition that humans share with animals. How do modernist texts sustain, challenge, or reject hierarchies of pleasure through the figure of animality? To be
considered for a 20-minute presentation, send submissions to mmc@english.
wisc.edu by January 3. Proposals should include a title, your name and affiliation, and a 300-word abstract.
“Putting the Dirt in Dirty Talk: The Pleasures of the Environment”
(D.I.R.T.: The Environmentalist Reading Group)
In this panel, we will explore increasingly fraught questions of pleasure, enjoyment, beauty, and fulfillment in the natural environment. While literary
scholars rightly tend to focus on the grim realities of the contemporary environmental context, from extinction to climate change to ocean plastification,
those same scholars almost invariably have strong attachments to pleasurable
environmental places and experiences. Meanwhile, the environmental literature
canon has expanded considerably in recent decades, so that unflinching novels
about toxicity like Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People now sit next to poetry of praise
by Mary Oliver and ecstatic essays by John Muir. How should we understand
these widely varying versions of environmental consciousness? What role does
or should pleasure play in an age of environmental devastation? Send submissions to Sarah Dimick and Nathan Jandl at njandl@wisc.edu.
“Pleasure and Its Limits in Contemporary Poetics”
(The Felix Series of New Writing)
Sponsored by The Felix Series of New Writing, this panel invites papers investigating how contemporary writers working within the small and independent
press economy create and promote pleasure in their writing while also implicating pleasure as insufficient in and of itself as a response to contemporary social
and political crises. How do poetry and its related hybrid genres, which are
perhaps particularly suited to offer pleasurable experiences of rhythm, sound,
polyphony, and surprise in language, complicate pleasure and our sense of what
it can and cannot accomplish? Send submissions to Rebecca Couch Steffy at
rsteffy@wisc.edu.
MadLit 2015
February 26-28, 2015