Situation, Situationism, Situationship
Description
“Situationship” almost made it as the OED’s word of the year in 2023. As the name for a relationship that falls short of full commitment, the term is both vague and specific in its designation. How short does a relationship have to fall to achieve situationship? How far from commitment before it fails to be a relationship altogether? This uncertainty makes applying the term both useful and opportunistic. But this combination of features conforms to the ways the concept of situation has been used before. We propose to investigate how the combination works.
Situation was granted conceptual importance in many nineteenth- and twentieth-century discourses and practices, including pragmatism, psychoanalysis, sociology, and existentialism. According to Karl Jaspers, first a psychiatrist and then a founder of existential philosophy before World War I, it is because we find ourselves in situations that we philosophize to begin with. Sartre had translated Jaspers’s General Psychopathology into French in the 1920s, though he also later made the situation concept a pillar of his own thought. Guy Debord and other situationists both built on and diverged from Sartre’s uses of the concept, which continues to be important in literary theory and political activism (Lauren Berlant, Anthony Reed), performance art (Tino Sehgal), and game design (Brian Upton). Across these cases, situation is readily understood. It retains a vernacular status though it is also sometimes used to indicate a technical matter. It seems to elude general theorization, though this elusiveness may tell us something about theory and its limits.
This seminar invites papers that consider the striking combination of conceptual capture and open-endedness in historical or contemporary instances. What can the utility and plasticity of situation as a concept tell us about how we conceive of social interaction? What can its status tell us about the limits of theory? How does situation work to describe, model, or structure actions or outcomes? How is it useful to interpretation? We welcome work that uses situation in individual cases insofar as it illustrates the difference that situation makes.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
I am Professor of English at Concordia in Montreal who has co-authored an article, "Situation: A Narrative Concept" published by Critical Inquiry 50:4, 659-76, and published a number of single authored books, including, most recently, The Novel Stage: Narrative Form from the Restoration to Jane Austen (Bucknell UP, 2020). I am currently working on a project about the relations between the points of view in the long history of the novel.
Speaker Bio
Kasia Van Schaik is assistant professor of English and co-director of creative writing at the University of New Brunswick. She is the author of the story collection We Have Never Lived on Earth, which was nominated for the Giller Prize and the Concordia University First Book Prize, and the co-editor of the essay collection Shelter in Text: Essays on Dwelling and Refuge. Her most recent book, Women Among Monuments, asks what, beyond a room of one’s own, are the necessary conditions for artmaking.
Speaker Bio
Scott Black is Professor of English and Director of the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Adam Hill is a PhD student in McGill University’s Department of English whose research interests centre on the affective, aesthetic, and ethical stakes of eco-anxiety. His dissertation project explores these through a series of narrative figures – only children, energy infrastructure sabotage, extreme weather events, and forest fire – in the late twentieth- and twenty-first-century novel and film.
Speaker Bio
Eliot D'Silva is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. He holds a BA in English from Cambridge University, an MA from McGill University, and a PhD from UC Berkeley. His research focuses on experimental art and literature since the 1960s, particularly performance and conceptual art, avant-garde networks, and the relations between poetry and photography.
Speaker Bio
Lonnie Monka is a PhD student in the Theater Studies Department at Hebrew University (Jerusalem). His dissertation examines the innovative conception of orality developed by the American avant-garde poet and artist David Antin (1932–2016). Within the university, Lonnie has facilitated multidisciplinary groups exploring performance theory and practice-based research methodologies. In addition, he teaches and curates literary and art events for a range of institutions.
Papers
Speaker Bio
A.field (www.afield.ca) is a design research practice bringing comparative interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary perspectives to contemporary global challenges. The work of a.field is differentiated by its alignment of design with other disciplinary methods and approaches. Kai Wood Mah and Patrick Lynn Rivers are a.field co-founders and co-directors.
Speaker Bio
Ned Schantz is Associate Professor of English at McGill University. He is the author, most recently, of Hitchcock and Hospitality, forthcoming with SUNY press, and the co-creator of the experimental theatre project Procession. He co-authored the Critical Inquiry article “Situation: A Narrative Concept.”