Art and Compulsion: A Symposium
Contemporary commentators have often claimed we are living through a crisis of agency, our free will more and more compromised by the incursions of shopping and scrolling. ‘The arts’, by contrast, have been held to offer an alternative or antidote to those modes of compulsion. This symposium will explore a different possibility: that works of art are themselves deeply implicated in the troubled relationship between agency and mediation, and have been since long before smartphone, gaming and pornography addictions were causes for concern. Focussing on literature from the early modern period to the present, eight participants have been invited to consider such questions as: what do books make us want, and how? What can past concerns around aesthetics and addiction reveal about current ones? What has been the role of reading and writing in how we control ourselves and others? How have particular conceptions of compulsion, such as Sigmund Freud’s 'compulsion to repeat' and Karl Marx’s 'silent compulsion of economic relations', come to shape how art works or what art should work to liberate us from? Can text still be a compelling medium, and is there something distinctive about how text 'shackles attention', to quote Samuel Johnson? What’s so bad (or good) about compulsion anyway? Contributors will consider how aesthetic compulsions hold us in place—stuck to our phones and our books—but also how they might unexpectedly move us forward.
Organisers:
Damian Maher, University of Oxford
Conrad Steel, University of Oxford
Speakers and Titles:
‘Compulsive Listening’, Edward Allen, University of Cambridge
‘Bewitching forms: Marianne Moore and the glamour of verse’, Saskia Barnard, University of Oxford
‘Pater’s Aesthetics of Compulsion’, S. Pearl Brilmyer, University of Pennsylvania
‘Deluded Away: Children and Bondage in the Early Modern World’, Urvashi Chakravarty, University of Toronto
‘Critical Homographomania’, David Kurnick, Rutgers University
‘Macbeth in the Theatre of Compulsion’, Gerard Passannante, University of Maryland
’TBC’, Keston Sutherland, University of Sussex
‘Animal Fascinations from The Peregrine to Wild London’, Lewis Wynn, University of Oxford
Respondents:
Kathryn Murphy, University of Oxford
Helen Small, University of Oxford
Sign up:
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Image credit: Still from Little Miss Sunshine (2006), directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris. © Fox Searchlight Pictures.
