For a Future After / Anti- ‘Literature’: Experimentation, Affect, Event, and Boundary

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Misreading aesthetics is widespread in contemporary Latin American criticism. Experimentation is often framed as derivative in terms of paradigms of identity, abstract universalisms, and “real” politics. With a focus on experimentation, affect, event, and boundary that challenges such compensatory frameworks, this panel examines the political potential and force of Latin American experimental texts and media in 20th and 21st century Latin America. As a reassessment of the projection of aesthetics in the field that underscores the need for a sharper, more comparative, and inter-American mode of thinking, this panel is grounded through theoretical, historical, and above all, close materialist readings of Latin American and inter-American experimental works from the twentieth century to the present. What is more, this panel engages a unique, diversified corpus of texts that includes the visual arts and literary works that defy genre, representation, and the word-center. It seeks to contribute to a deeper understanding of the politics of aesthetics, and responds to recent scholarship on the legacies of the avant-garde. The panel proposes, therefore, not a formalist account, but a thoroughgoing critique of the historical projection of what is meant by experimentation in the field, as it combines historically situated close readings of texts and media with multilayered theoretical analyses that probe the limits and possibilities of aesthetics as a site for radical reflection and reaction to contemporary conditions.

Sub Track

• Literature and Culture: Interdisciplinary Approaches

Session Organizer

• Adam Joseph Shellhorse, Temple University

Chair

• Ali Kulez, University of Chicago

Discussant

• Erin D Graff-Zivin, University of Southern California

Individual Presentations

• At the Boundary Between Media: The Avant-garde Poetics of Juan José Saer and James Agee - Ashley Brock, University of Pennsylvania

• For a Future After / Anti- ‘Literature’: The Untimely Political Poetics of Augusto de Campos - Adam Joseph Shellhorse, Temple University

• Borges and the Habits of the Clinamen - Jon P Beasley-Murray, University of British Columbia

• Gender and Genre: XXI Century Latinx Poetry and the Canon - Paula Cucurella, Texas University at El Paso