Murmur
Description
Murmur
Contrary to what Michel de Certeau, in May 1968, famously called the recapture of speech ("prise de la parole"), there is the unnerving sense today that speech, ever more proliferating, massified, mediated, polarized, ventriloquized, mischaracterized, weaponized, is less a tool than a trap for counterculture and critique. To resist is to argue, refuse, convince, touch and move with spoken and written words: yet we witness in our time informed and addressed gestures of protest being drowned out or disfigured, turned perilous yet powerless. How might thought survive such enunciative saturation? What para- or infra-discursive modes may allow an act of counter-imagination to elude the forces of its neutralization?
The notion of murmur is proposed here as one that might offer unexpected potential. Unsettling the clarity of source and of meaning, a murmur can be collective and indistinct, thus evading distortion or capture. A form of voicing at the limit of the regulatable, a rumbling of collective dissent, a muttering "below one's breath" that defies cooptation, a murmur can also be a simple emanation of the friction or empathy of being, the sound of water, wind or a forest.
Murmur conjures a complicit recipient and activates a deep listening practice. In relation to speech or writing, murmur opens a poetics of discerning interpretation or delicate reading. Understood broadly, murmur implies attending and attuning to the transpersonal--the emotion of a group, the energy of a historical moment--and the infra-symbolic--signs beyond articulated language, from asemic speech and writing to the murmurs of plants and animals, the tones of stones.
We invite proposals that consider the politics and poetics of murmur: whether to reflect on subdued or encrypted expressions that unnerve reigning regimes of discourse and power, or to call for more subtle modes of observation that might register alternative intensities of collaboration and dissent. We welcome critical as well as critical/research-based creative approaches to the theme, which incorporate poetry, fiction, performance, or multimedia components.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Josh Dittrich is the author Geosonics: Listening through Earth’s Soundscapes (Bloomsbury, 2024). His work in German Studies has appeared in New German Critique, Discourse, and the edited volume Utopia: The Avant-garde, Modernism and (Im)possible Life. His media studies publications have appeared in Ethnologies, Intermedialities, and Substance. He is currently a Lecturer in writing and media studies at the University of Toronto.
Speaker Bio
Karl Manis is assistant professor of Media Studies at Trent University Durham, where he teaches cinema, media history, and digital culture. His research examines the overlaps and tensions between aesthetic experience and technology, particularly how contemporary fiction imagines phenomenologies of media use. His writing on comics, postmodernism, noise, and reading styles has appeared or is forthcoming in Critique, Novel, Sound Studies, and the collection The Crossroads of Music and Literature.
Speaker Bio
Pierre Cassou-Noguès is professor in the University Paris 8, and senior member on the IUF. His last book, with Gwenola Wagon, Pyromaniac Images is currently being translated into English.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Xinyu H. Zhang is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Cornell University and holds an M.A. in Icelandic Literature from the University of Iceland. His interests range across modern Icelandic, Faroese, Greenlandic, and African literatures in the longue durée of peripheral negotiations with scarcity and planetarity, object-relations psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and dialectics terminable and interminable. He has translated many works of Icelandic literature into Chinese.
Speaker Bio
Tianmo Wang, 4th year Phd student in the department of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine. Drawing upon psychoanalysis and deconstruction, her research examines the relationship between morality and speech in 20th and 21st century China, attending specifically to moments where it is impossible to hear and impossible to speak.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Rachit Anand is an Assistant Professor of literary studies at the American University of Armenia in Yerevan, Armenia. He did his PhD in Comparative Literature at the University at Buffalo in 2023, where he also taught as a Visiting Assistant Professor of English for two years. He works on 20th and 21st century fiction, postcolonial theory, translation studies, and psychoanalysis. His work has appeared in Cultural Critique and The Comparatist, among other notable publications.
Speaker Bio
Jill Jarvis is an associate professor in the Department of French and a member of the councils on African Studies and Middle East Studies at Yale University. Her new book The Desert is Alive builds a case for how writers and filmmakers from across the African Sahara confront the deadly idea that deserts are empty. With Brahim El Guabli and Francisco Robles, she is a founding member of the Desert Futures Collective.