Loughborough, United Kingdom
Writings of Intimacy seeks to explore the significance of intimacy in and for the writings of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Our most intimate relationships are those which can powerfully define and nurture us, hurt and grieve us. Our intimate relationships can powerfully define and nurture, hurt and grieve us. Yet intimacy is not always experienced with those we know well: it is possible between strangers or in temporary situations. Nor is it always positive: intimate acts can involve violence, torture and rape. Writings of Intimacy wishes to investigate the way in which intimacy has been written: its representation and theorisation.
Over the course of the twentieth century there was a marked rise in the explicitness with which intimacy was represented in literary texts. In part this was linked to challenges to, and the subsequent relaxation of, censorship laws. Literary writers have used intimacy in various ways to disrupt genre boundaries, to question the definitions of taste, and to experiment with literary forms and narrative voices, as well as to present their readers with a more visceral engagement with the body, its acts, and our desires. There are intimate forms of writing, such as love poetry, autobiography, eulogies and personal letters, which are an essential part of our literary heritage. Critical theory, too, has become increasingly interested in defining and discussing intimacy and its impact upon our lives, and this engagement is much indebted to the discourses of psychoanalysis.
Writings of Intimacy has seen an exciting international response to the call for papers. Our delegates will be addressing some of the following areas in relation to intimacy: poetry, prose, theatre, theory, life writing, modernism, aesthetics, art, creative and artistic practice, law, experimentalism, violence, psychoanalysis and the clinical encounter, feminism, gender and queer theory.
For more details click here
