We Meet Again: The Psychoanalytic (Re) Turn in Literary Studies

By the end of the 20th century, psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic and clinical practice seemed to be on its deathbed in US culture. It was battered by criticism from feminist and queer perspectives, seemingly supplanted by psychopharmaceutical solutions, and dismissed as unscientific. Yet, the last decade has witnessed a surprising resurgence of psychoanalytic thought and terminology in unexpected places: the emerging genre of autotheory, queer and affect theory, and experimental graphic novels. We even witness key analysts writing fiction themselves. Is American culture being reminded that psychoanalysis, both as a clinical practice and as a theory, is essentially a literary pursuit, a practice of the letter?

A return to psychoanalysis it may be, yet this is no mere repetition of history. As Freud's concept of Nachträglichkeit taught us, no rewriting is ever exactly the same. The way contemporary literary critics and writers view "the letter" and its interaction with psychoanalytic thinking requires careful examination to understand this current boom. This seminar aims to revisit recent interactions between contemporary literary and psychoanalytic thought and practice, unpacking the new views of writing, reading, subject-formation, and the unconscious they advance, as well as the epistemologies, phenomenologies, and hermeneutics they embed.

This seminar invites papers exploring, among other options:
1. The humanities crisis and psychoanalysis's literary return
2. The tension, if any, between views of psychoanalysis-literature affinity as embedded in language (e.g., Lacan) or affective sensibility (e.g., Ogden)
3. Klein and Winnicott's newfound prominence in literary studies 
4. Affect theory and queer theory reshaping psychoanalytic literary engagement
5. Trans theory's role in psychoanalysis-literature interactions
6. The role of reading as a praxis central to both psychoanalysis and literature
7. Autotheory and experimental fiction’s dialogue with psychoanalysis 
8. Current vs. past "returns to Freud" in literary theory
9. The role of embodiment in the current psychoanalytic-literary encounter
10. The literary-psychoanalytic affinity with other fellow-traveling discourses, including pedagogy, philosophy, history, and sociology
11. Potential limitations or criticisms of the psychoanalytic return in contemporary literary studies