ecstatic writing: a symposium

This symposium explores the relationship between the practice of writing and forms of ecstasy, bliss, joy, jouissance. Focusing on feminist and queer literature and theory, a series of dialogues between writers and critics will ask how literature can move beyond a representational relationship to ecstasy. How might practices of reading and writing occasion an erotics that is coextensive with sexual intimacy? How, in turn, might the embodied quality of sexual practice bring into focus the embodied aspects of producing literature? How might framing both sex and literature as ecstatic practices shift attention to the ways in which both make and unmake subjects? And how do other forms, traditions, and histories of ecstatic practice—spiritual, religious, artistic, psychedelic—relate to the ecstasy of literature and sex?

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Symposium Schedule

Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality, Creative Writing, the Department of Comparative Literature, Department of English Language & Literature, the Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Martin Marty Center, and the Program in Medieval Studies.