This seminar is an invitation to explore the forms, values, and dangers of intimacy and estrangement as political and aesthetic positions today. It is inspired by the sense that global events of the last decade and a half—pandemic isolation, targeted attacks on schools and in streets, authoritarian occupation of cultural spaces, intensifying environmental crises—warrant a new outlook on where, when, and how people make and sever meaningful connections in public life. The conditions themselves are not new, but the opportunities for interaction that they interrupt and sometimes generate are mediated in new ways. What new theories, trains of thought, and revisions of prior concepts (e.g. anomie, alienation, cosmopolitanism, action, globalization) capture the volatility, immediacy, and nuances of volition and vulnerability of our public appearances now? What part does the relatively slow medium of literature play, both as a representation of contact and occasion for it?

A stimulus for this discussion is a comment made by author Rachel Cusk in a 2018 interview. Noting the “separateness, distinction” among people that characterizes her Outline trilogy, Cusk described the extension to readers. “I mean, the whole book is set up so that you can walk away from it if you’re not interested,” she said. “Go and do something else.”  The comment addresses critics of her work, but it also reflects questions about relational identities and intersubjectivity as a transient or false state that are key to the novels themselves. What other experiences and models could help us describe and evaluate the freedom and losses of being able or unable to “walk away” from the variously public roles we play, for instance, as readers, writers, teachers, students, members of couples and families, citizens, and noncitizens?

Discussions of any representational forms that capture and comment on public encounters (cell phone videos or posters or murals, for example) are welcome, and considerations of human-nature relations as well as treatments of comics and graphic storytelling are especially encouraged. Participants are invited but not required to use brief comparative case studies— two or more texts, authors, or types of encounters—to consider related aspects of intimacy and/or estrangement in contemporary public life so that acts of synthesis and distinction begun in individual papers might be carried forward as threads of our discussion. Our virtual gathering should enhance the geographic diversity of our perspectives and welcome participants at any career stage, as well as provide an opportunity to consider the public stages of academic conferences in a new light.