THEME

Stemming from the project “Mapping performative writing and the page as an expanded field (1966- the present): experimental, exophonic and ecstatic literatures in transcultural Anglophone spheres”, this conference will focus on performative writing. 

We understand this to be writing wherein the materiality of a text and the act of writing in itself are strategic, creative-critical devices that fuse form and content. Performative writing is an urgent theme given its enactment of self and/as language. This can broaden our understanding of what literature is or can be on and beyond the page. Perhaps more importantly, we find it to be uniquely capable of reflecting a rich, complex world. In her essential text “Performing Writing” (1998), Della Pollock identified one of performative writing’s core characteristics as its intersubjective ability to “bring the reader into contact with ‘other-worlds’ [...]: worlds of memory, pleasure, sensation, imagination, affect and in-sight.” (80). 

Hence, our invitation to three interlocking lines of enquiry that point to a relationship beyond the limits of the self:

• Experimental: conceptual writing (from poetry to fiction) that employs conceptual strategies, typically in the second half of the 20th century. Its origins can be found in the art and literature of the late 1960s and 1970s. Strategies such as appropriation, typographical experiments, collage, insertion of multiple genres, found text, image/text juxtapositions, repetition, artistic/objectual conceptions of the book, etc. contribute to the performativity of the work on the page.

• Exophonic: located outside the “monolingual paradigm”, this writing prioritises the voices (in the largest sense of the term) through which meaning is transmitted, especially when “understanding” is compromised. Outside language(s) as we are used to conceiving of them, it may even attempts to escape language itself. Devices used here are explicitly multilingual writing, self-translation and bilingual versions, accents free of relation to identifiable language.

• Ecstatic: invested in citational practices, this writing uses (and acknowledges) other people’s words not only to scaffold critical discourse, but also as a creative device. This may have implications in the way we theorise and narrate the self (for example, in autotheory, see Fournier, Brostoff); and it is, inevitably, political (Ahmed). Katherine McKittrick, writing from a Black studies perspective, asks that referencing “takes us outside ourselves” (16), an unhinging of the self (16). By using citations as creative literary devices, the textual body ecstatically stands outside itself. New meaning emerges as the text is iterated and performed anew.

• and to an “expanded page”, a riff on Krauss’ expanded field, aiming to provoke a far-reaching conception of what space the writings above can inhabit.

We invite contributions from scholars and practitioners that relate to one or more of the lines of enquiry above, dealing with questions such as:

• What insights may be gained from considering the conceptual literary work as possessing both material properties (in the form of the book as object, its various material drafts, etc.) as well as immaterial properties (performances, practices, etc.)? 

• How does a language that speaks, or attempts to speak for itself, signify, or reach the other? 

• How does performative writing contribute to creating unexpected, ecstatic encounters between different texts, materials, periods, theories, disciplines, and languages? What is there to be learnt from these?

• Which specific strategies does performative writing use to reflect the multiplicity and complexity of its contemporary period?

• How does the incursion of new media and the “expanded page” contribute further to this reaching of other worlds?

• What emerging genealogies of performative writing have emerged since the conceptual experiments of 1966?