Keynotes

Professor Timothy Bewes (Brown). ‘Recent Experiments in American Fiction’

Professor Steven Connor (Cambridge). ‘Public Reading and Reading in Public’

Professor Janet Sayers (Kent). ‘Reading Art Objects Psychoanalytically: The Case of Adrian Stokes’

The way that we read has been a source of much contention in contemporary evaluations of theory in the arts and humanities. A number of theorists – Bruno Latour, Steven Connor, Rita Felski and Franco Moretti among them — have placed critical reading under intense scrutiny. Critique has become, in Rita Felski’s words, our ‘shield’, enabling us to resist alternative modes of reading. Is it the case that locating our point of critique has come at the cost of our critical ingenuity? If so, what comes after critique? Moreover, does renewed consideration of the materiality, or ‘thingness’, of the objects we study compel us to read differently? Responses to these post-critical conditions have emerged across institutional disciplines, and have included the development of approaches such as Surface Reading, Distant Reading, Big Data, Postcritical Reading, and reading ‘with the grain’. These new approaches have often proved contentious, sparking rebukes which have centred on allegations of their dangerously apolitical positions. In the wake of recent political upheavals, are these new modes of reading capable of meeting the interpretive challenges of our contemporary moment?

This two-day conference will play host to a number of keynotes and panels, but in addition, the second day will feature a seminar led by Steven Connor in which all attendees will be invited to participate. With two short pieces of reading circulated ahead of the event, we hope to foster a discussion in which all participants can explore the aesthetic, social and political cross sections that inhere in contemporary debates about reading and critique, and which will encourage reflection on the methods of reading that underwrite each particpant's own research.

This two-day conference is generously supported by the University of Sussex’s Researcher-Led Initiative (RLI) Fund, CHASE-DTP and the Centre for Creative and Critical Thought at Sussex.