Critical/Liberal/Arts 2 @The Graduate Center, CUNY

by EILEEN JOY

What are the new scenes or spaces of critical invention? What different faces might critique have? What does it feel like? What does it do? How does historical consciousness play a role in generating new forms, tools, or ideas? What does it mean to be “uncritical”? Is there an erotic hermeneutics, pace Sontag, or an eros of critique? How do we engage criticism and art and techne against the actuarial interests of the corporate university? Can we “afford” to nurture speculative creation, or pure science, in an age of austerity? Do delight, rapture, or the drift of daydreams have a role in criticism? Is there value in maintaining what separates the injunctions to critique and to create? How might our practices cross-pollinate the sciences and the fine arts? Or politics and aesthetics? Or the future and the past? 

I'm excited to announce that our program for the BABEL Working Group's 1-day symposium, to be held at The Graduate Center, CUNY [September 27th], Critical/Liberal/ Arts 2, has been finalized [co-hosted with great generosity by the Medieval Studies Certificate Program and the PhD Program in English @The Graduate Center, with great thanks, especially, to Steven Kruger and Glenn Burger]. This follows from Critical/Liberal/Arts 1, held at UC-Irvine this past April, and the proceedings from both will be published as a special issue of postmedieval, edited by Allan Mitchell, Julie Orlemanski, and Myra Seaman.

If you are, or will be, in the NYC area this coming September, you should join us for what promises to be an enlivening series of conversations and performances on the entangled relations between creativity, critique, activism, and the liberal arts [and you can pre-register HERE]. Speakers include medievalists [Ammiel Alcalay, Bruce Holsinger, Eleanor Johnson, and Allen W. Strouse], early modernists [Henry Turner, Michael Witmore], the Hollow Earth Society [Ethan Gould + Wythe Marschall], multimedia artists/new media + performance specialists [Jamie "Skye" Bianco, Una Chaudhuri, and Marina Zurkow], and a poethical pamphleteer [Eirik Steinhoff] -- and hopefully, by the end of the day, these so-called "disciplinary" markers will be complicated all to hell. The fact of the matter is, all of these speakers conduct nighttime, extraterritorial raids into various republics (digital humanities, poetry, filmmaking, novel writing, genetics, zoopolises, soft architecture, etc.]. Topics will include queer compositionism, sabotage poetry, fuzzy structuralism, survivalism, corporate personhood, the university, new critical vernaculars, post-Chaucer pilgrims, pedagogies of transmission, and MORE. See the full program HERE.

This promises to be a full week, with Steve Mentz also hosting "Oceanic New York" at St. John's University in Queens on Thursday, September 26th (featuring myself, JJC, Karl, Allan Mitchell, Jamie "Skye" Bianco, Marina Zurkow, G. Ganter, and Nancy Nowacek), and punctum records + punctum books will also be hosting a book/record release party, with live music from Taft Mashburn, on Saturday, Sep. 28th [details forthcoming].

Seating is LIMITED for the Critical/Liberal/Arts event, so be sure to pre-register, details about which are HERE.