(Dis)enchanting Modernity: Witchcraft, Magic, and the Occult in Global Literatures
Description
In a 1918 speech at Munich University, sociologist Max Weber observed a widespread cultural loss of belief in magic and the supernatural: “the fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization, and above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’… the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life." Weber’s idea of disenchantment is borrowed from the Enlightenment-era playwright Fredrich Schiller's exploration of Entzauberung, the "de-divinizing" of art, literature, culture, and existence. As Richard Jenkins clarifies, Weber's disenchantment is “right at the heart of modernity,” a product of the world becoming “knowable, predictable, and manipulable by humans ... understandable and tameable.” By peering through a literary lens, we might come to a greater understanding of when this “disenchantment of the world” began, if it is a distinctly post-Enlightenment phenomenon, and how it continues to unfold in contemporary contexts.
Some questions we will ask ourselves are: how does literature respond to Weber’s exhausted cry for a return to enchantment? Is the process of writing and producing imaginary worlds, whether realist or fantastical, an answer to this need to “re-enchant” human life? If, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, to enchant means to “exert magical influence upon; to bewitch, lay under a spell,” then how does literature, and the act of reading itself, problematize or align with this definition? What does “(dis)enchanted literature” look like, and how do certain texts, authors, literary traditions, or critical paradigms traverse the transhistorical sphere between enchantment and disenchantment?
This seminar invites proposals that engage with these and related questions, with a grounded focus on texts, authors, critics, themes, genres and/or forms from the eighteenth century to the contemporary era, though papers that make comparisons beyond these temporal boundaries are welcome. Possible lines of inquiry include, but are certainly not limited to: representations of witches and witchcraft in literature; the history of tarot and divination (the Rider-Waite cards; T.S. Eliot); the phenomena of New Age spirituality, on #WitchTok and beyond; occultism and belonging; new popular genres of literature and their conventions (magical realism, romantasy); origins in global folklore, mythology, or fairy tale; cunning-folk, herbalism, alternative medicine, and alchemy; the disabled body and enchanted reclamation; Wicca, neo-paganism, or new religious approaches (Aleister Crowley; Gerald B. Gardner); queering the world of magic and/or witchcraft; cliches, stereotypes, and cultural perceptions ("we are the daughters of the witches you could not burn"); trauma, marginalization, postcolonial and feminist resistance.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Adrian Deveau is a PhD Candidate and sessional instructor in Art History at Concordia University and holds an MA in Art History and Theory from the University of British Columbia. Adrian has worked with arts-based organizations, including Thinking Through the Museum: Museum Queeries, the Museum of Anthropology (Vancouver), Vancouver Biennale, and Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre. In their SSHRC-funded research, Adrian is interested in the intersection of queer art and witchcraft within the archive.
Speaker Bio
Ben LaBreche is professor of English literature at the University of Mary Washington. His research focuses on the intersections of early modern literature with political and social theory, with particular attention to the histories of liberty and rationalization. He works primarily on John Milton and is a past winner of the James Holly Hanford Award for the year’s most distinguished essay on Milton. If he has been good, however, sometimes he is allowed to present on other authors.
Speaker Bio
Kara Abdolmaleki is a scholar of modern and contemporary literature and culture with a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Alberta. His research examines the intersections of modernism, intellectual history, and cultural critique across the Middle East, with a focus on Iranian literature, film, and intellectual movements after the 1953 coup.
Speaker Bio
Michaela Telfer is a Research & Instruction Librarian at the University of Connecticut-Stamford. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California and an MLIS from UCLA. She has published in Nineteenth-Century French Studies and Administory, and is currently adapting her dissertation, “The Chinovnik and the Rond-de-cuir: Bureaucratic Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Russian and French Literature” into a first monograph.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Amelia Reardon is a current first-year PhD student in English at Concordia University and holds a B.A. and M.A. from New York University in Individualized Studies and English and American Literature respectively. Her research focuses on reconceptualizing the Gothic genre as an interlocutor between literary studies, cognitive sciences, and quantum narratology. She is currently working on expanding her M.A. thesis on Gothic cognition and vampiric spectrality in Vernon Lee’s “Amour Dure”.
Speaker Bio
Rhiannon Vogl is a writer, curator, and SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at York University, Toronto in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies. She completed her PhD in Art History at the University of Toronto in 2025. Her dissertation Putting Oneself Down on Paper: Re-reading, Re-publishing, and Re-enacting Lucy R. Lippard’s I See / You Mean focuses on the alternative and underground systems of artist-initiated publishing that art critic Lucy Lippard’s only published novel circulates within.
Speaker Bio
Sana Akram is a Pakistani XR creator, media artist and an urbanist, currently pursuing a doctorate in Cinema and Media Studies at York University as a recipient of the prestigious Elia Scholars Program Award. Her research-creation explores the themes of wonder, relationality, and enchantment in storytelling, performance, and worlding. Her broader research interests include immersive storytelling and performance, oral tradition, worldbuilding, emergent media, cocreation, and civic engagement.