Atemporality
Description
Atemporality. The atemporal has been identified with aesthetic achievement by critics such as Cleanth Brooks, Murray Krieger, Michael Fried, and Anne-Lise François. At the same time other critics like Fredric Jameson, Stephen Best, and Frank Wilderson have identified the atemporal with the anti-aesthetic, the anti-human, and the anti-narrative. Within these broad parameters we invite papers on the atemporal in literature, literary criticism, and literary and aesthetic theory. We are interested in papers on works from all literary genres, periods, and traditions and on all modes of the atemporal including (but not limited to): the perpetually present, the forever incipient, the non-actualized, the virtual, the still, the recursive, the eternal return, the infinite loop, and permanent stasis. We are also interested in papers on both works of non-literary media and works of literature that remediate non-literary media in order to either achieve or escape atemporality. We understand the atemporal broadly, as an aspect or phenomenon that can be characterized positively, negatively, or neutrally. It can be the opposite of the temporal but it also can be the quintessence of time. It can be what secures aesthetic achievement or what makes such achievement impossible. It can be a formal aspiration or an ontological impediment. It can manifest as the simultaneous or the instantaneous but also as the stochastic, the incremental, or the sequential. In short, we are interested in presenting the range of contemporary positions on the problem of atemporality, and highlighting both the resonances among, and the conflicts between, these positions.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Nan Z. Da teaches literature at Johns Hopkins University in the departments of English and East Asian Studies. She is the author of Intransitive Encounter: Sino-US Literatures and the Limits of Exchange, published by Columbia University Press in 2018, and The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear, published by Princeton University Press in 2025. With Andrea Gadberry she edits the Thinking Literature series housed at the University of Chicago Press.
Speaker Bio
Gina Case is a graduate student in English at Boston College. She studies aesthetics, theories of reading, and the intersection of art and literary criticisms. Her research focuses on the functions and aesthetic effects of meta-literariness and self-acknowledgment in the late modernist novel, especially those of Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, and Flann O’Brien.
Speaker Bio
Jason Gladstone is an Assistant Professor of English at The University of Colorado Boulder. His work has appeared in American Literature, American Literary History, Criticism, Twentieth-Century Literature, and Contemporary Literature.
Speaker Bio
Zina Giannopoulou is Professor of Classics and European Studies at UC Irvine. She has written extensively on Greek philosophy, comparative classicisms, film aesthetics, critical theory, and environmental humanities. Her books include Plato’s Theaetetus as a Second Apology (OUP, 2013), Philosophers in Film: Mulholland Drive (ed., Routledge, 2013), and Plato’s Symposium: A Critical Guide (co-ed, CUP, 2017). Her monograph Plato’s Cave, Film, and Critical Theory is forthcoming from OUP.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Beth Blum is a Professor of English at Harvard University. Her first book, The Self-Help Compulsion: Searching For Advice in Modern Literature, was published by Columbia UP in 2020. Her work examines the intersection of therapeutic culture and the literary.
Speaker Bio
I am a professor of English at Pomona College. My books include Cold Genius: A Book of Poems and Love Three: A Study of a Poem by George Herbert.
Speaker Bio
Michael Clune is a professor at the Chase Center of The Ohio State University. His most recent critical book is A Defense of Judgement (U of Chicago P, 2021); his most recent creative book is the novel Pan (Penguin, 2025). Clune's work has appeared in Harper's (where he is a contributing editor), Critical Inquiry, PMLA, Representations, and other venues. His work has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim, Mellon, and Baker-Nord Foundations.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Griffin Shoglow-Rubenstein is a PhD student in Comparative Thought & Literature at Johns Hopkins. His primary research areas are 20th- and 21st-century poetry and poetics, post-Kantian philosophy, and aesthetics. He earned his BA in Comparative Literature at Yale and has published or presented on N. H. Pritchard, Alejandra Pizarnik, Aaron Kunin, Wallace Stevens, and other writers.
Speaker Bio
Charlie Ericson is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Oberlin College. His writing has appeared in Contemporary Literature, Renaissance Drama, The Atlantic, and elsewhere.
Speaker Bio
Elaine L.Wang is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, writing a dissertation on aesthetic judgment from Blake to Lessing. Her essays have previously appeared in Granta, Raritan, Literary Hub and The Point, where she was contributing editor. She has received fellowship and research support from the Nicholson Center, Vermont Studio Center, and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.