Taking its title from J.L. Austin’s How To Do Things With Words, this seminar is interested in various attempts to bring deconstruction, speech act theory, and postanalytic philosophy together via an analysis of literature, specifically around the question of what literature can do. This seminar is, thus, an attempted rapprochement between deconstruction and speech act theory, from the standpoint of literature. We welcome submissions examining: how we read literature in the wake of Austin, Searle, Derrida, and Stanley Cavell; interpretations of specific texts, be they philosophical or literary; an inquiry into literary or philosophical authors and their relevance for this debate; metaphysical speculations on the being, activity, and possibility of literature; methodological analyses of the activities of literature.
What does literature do, and how do we see it in action? Is it political, focused on socio-economic concerns, purely aesthetic, an individual art, or does it constitute the conditions for its own reading? Should literature be examined from the point of the reader, the object itself, the author, or a mixture of all three?
Additional information can be found here: https://www.acla.org/how-do-things-literature
The due date for submissions is: 9am on Thursday, September 20th, 2018.
Please submit calls to the panel “How to Do Things with Literature” on the ACLA submissions page (https://www.acla.org/).
You can also contact Osman Nemli (onemli@vassar.edu) with any additional questions.