Addiction is strongly associated with what Jacques Derrida termed “our narcotic modernity,” to the point of being synonymous with its ills––even, or especially, as both addiction and modernity flicker between their narrowest and broadest senses. On one hand, according to an influential Foucauldian line of thought, addiction as an identity and an institutional formation dates to the nineteenth century, when certain kinds of drug use, much like certain kinds of same-sex intimacy, were pathologized by medicine and criminalized by law. At the same time, addiction’s challenges to subjecthood and agency––and its extension as a model for everything from shopping to smartphone use––have made it a powerful figure for capitalist modernity’s effects on the self. Taken together, these accounts of addiction as specifically modern and modernity as generalized addiction render the two terms at once interdependent and unstable, a problem of definition running parallel to the urgent social problems of addiction and its failed carceral solutions. Building on recent scholarship by Jennifer Fleissner, Rebecca Lemon, and others, we seek to retheorize addiction and its periodization through a wider view of its articulation across different eras and contexts.

This seminar seeks to bring together scholars working at the intersection of addiction and literature from the premodern to the postmodern, to reconfigure our understanding of how these concepts are negotiated and narrativized across time. How has the concept of addiction changed over time, and how have these shifting conceptions been represented in literary terms? How can a critical examination of addiction narratives reconfigure our concept of “modernity”? Is addiction literature a distinct mode? What does addiction look like in the present, and in contemporary literature? What norms, histories, and assumptions overdetermine its representation? Crucially, what do these changes mean in practice–that is, how do they impact our cultural understanding of addiction and how our society treats those living with it? The stakes of these questions are particularly high in the context of a society grappling with the ongoing opioid crisis and related debates about harm reduction, who is deserving of care, empathy, and self-determination, and what we owe to one another as members of a human community.

Potential topics include (but are not limited to):

• Free will, self-possession, agency, and self-control
• Capitalism, consumption, and commodity fetishism
• Narratives of slavery and enslavement
• Literary forms and genres associated with addiction: allegory, picaresque, memoir, trip report, confessional, cautionary tale, body horror, etc.
• Character theory and the “Addict” (character systems and economies, depth and typicality, etc.)
• The individual body and the social body
• Shifting narratives of subjecthood and the Self
• Medicalization and moralization of addiction
• Shifting approaches to conceptualizing and treating addiction