The ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100-1800) presents:
“Weird Reading”, a masterclass run by Eileen Joy

Date: Tuesday 24 June 2014
Time: 2:00-4:00pm
Venue: Linkway Room, 4th floor, John Medley Building, The University of Melbourne
Registration: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1cRd32hOxh8ad8r5ZxwccJvI9WhivJnYsxgWYavuA2BA/viewform
Reading packs will be distributed after close of registration on 14 June 2014
For more information: contact Jessica Scott at: Tel: +61 3 8344 5152 or jessica.scott@unimelb.edu.au

This workshop will explore descriptive reading modes as forms of attention (which would also be a type of care) to texts in order to try to capture the traces of the strange voluptuosity and singular (and unique) tendencies of textual objects. What might happens when we start looking for things in texts that don’t typically get observed because they don’t easily correspond or answer to traditionally humanist questions and concerns. The idea might then be, not to necessarily “make sense” of a literary text and its figures (human and otherwise) — to humanistically re-boot the narrative by always referring it to the Real (context, historical or otherwise, for example, or human psychology) — but to better render the chatter and noise, the gestures and movements, the appearances and disappearances of the weird worlds that are compressed in books, and to see better how these teeming pseudo-worlds are part of our brains already, hard-wired into the black box of a kind of co-implicate, enworlded subjectivity in which it is difficult and challenging to trace the edges between “self” and “Other.” This would be a reading practice that would multiply and thicken a text’s sentient reality and might be described as a commentary that seeks to open and not close a text’s possible “signatures.” In her late essay, “The Weather in Proust,” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick wrote,

For Proust, the ultimate guarantee of the vitality of art is the ability to surprise — that is, to manifest an agency distinct from either its creator or consumer. “It pre-exists us” is one of the ways he describes the autonomy of the work, and only for that reason is it able to offer “celestial nourishment” to our true self.

For Sedgwick, Proust’s work offered access to a psychology of “surprise and refreshment,” one which emphasizes the “transformative powers of the faculties of attention and perception.” Aesthetics may constitute a domain of illusions, but these illusions posses their own material reality and are co-sentient with us. As Timothy Morton has written, the existence of an object is irreducibly a matter of coexistence. How to better reckon this state of affairs in our encounters with texts, which are also events that “pre-exist” us in the way Proust believed?