(An) Aesthetic of Absence. The 23rd annual conference of the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto

9 Mar 2012 - 00:00 / 11 Mar 2012 - 00:00

Centre for Comparative
Toronto, Ontario
U of T

Keynote Addresses by J. Hillis Miller (University of California, Irvine)
and Rebecca Comay (University of Toronto)

 The 23rd annual conference of the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto will be held from March 8-10, 2012, and will focus on the concept of “Absence”: the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of that which is not present. Following from last year’s conference, “Iconoclasm,” we now consider not that which has been broken, but that which is simply—and yet profoundly—absent.

This year’s conference invites explorations of the representation and sensation of absence, be it the absence of things, of ideas, of text or of language, and the epistemological consequences of theorizing what is not, or no longer, there. Our interrogation of absence is a broad one, one that includes notions of loss, lack, and scarcity, but which also stands in contradistinction to them. Furthermore, we wish to investigate the function of absence as an aesthetic that stimulates sense and sentiment and also as an anaesthetic, which negates the former, which numbs and desensitizes.

For more information, please visit http://conference.complit.utoronto.ca/Absence/