Sensation and/as Method

This seminar seeks to explore the ways in which sensation works as a critical method in relation to modes of reading and writing. Our goal is to uncover new practices of knowing and knowledge-making that are shaped by sensory orientations both affective and embodied. The premise of this seminar is based on two broad and interlocking lines of academic inquiry. In the first instance, we are inspired by a generative dialogue that has emerged between literary criticism and sensory studies – a recent special issue of American Literature has foregrounded not only the mutually sustaining energies of these two fields, but also called for new approaches to engaging literature that account for its powerful ability to enact a “more equitable, ecologically responsible, and illiberal redistributions of the senses.” In the second, following scholars such as Neetu Khanna (2020), Julietta Singh (2018), Amber Jamila Musser (2024), Kyla Wazana Tompkins (2012), and others, we are invested in ongoing efforts to decolonize theories of affect and emotion through the lived realities of the body. We seek to examine how what Musser has aptly called “body work” - undisciplined methods grounded in bodily knowledge arising from otherness - can offer rich sensory evidence of the histories and politics of race, class, and gender that mark our every encounter with a literary text.
We invite papers that grapple with the stakes of sensation as a disruptive analytic. Some questions that we ask as points of departure include: How might sensation in relation to, or indeed as, method enable us to reimagine dominant histories and locate emergent futures? How do modes of reading and writing attuned to sensation reimagine histories, relations, archives, and critiques? How do the embodied, metabolic senses resonate with theories of worldmaking? How might acts of speech and writing coextensive with the experience of corporeality speculate strategies of insurgence or resistance? This seminar aims to challenge disciplinary enclosures and partake in critical practices that are invested in examining how reading and writing are shaped by the sensory and vice versa. It ultimately asks what it means to speculate emergent and indeed emancipatory possibilities through resonances between the textual and the sensory.