University of Pennsylvania
French and Italian Graduate Society Conference - March 26, 2016
BITTERNESS
Keynote Speaker: Prof. David Marsh (Rutgers University)
The affective turn reminds us that emotions have a history, a history that isrooted in the visceral, corporeal experience. In bitterness, pleasure and pain meldtogether, and aesthetic, cognitive, sensory and emotional registers cannot be so easilydisentangled.In the history of French/Francophone and Italian literature, writers havewielded their pen with the intent of retribution, mockery or lament in bitter moments ofloss, anger, exile or despair. They have performed bitterness to break with the norm,reveal hypocrisy, shock and indulge in the aesthetics of decadence, excess andtransgression. They have used their medium to confront the trauma of truths or bitterinjustices and to help give a voice to those for whom injustice has been the status quo.
Lastly, literature itself and, in turn, literary theory and critique have been the objects ofbitterness.
Examples of bitterness persist through Italian literature from the verses of Dantein exile to the lashing satire of Aretino, Machiavelli’s counsel in ruthlessness, and ElsaMorante’s bravery in facing the Holocaust. In French literature some examples rangefrom Sade’s prison writing to the biting wit of Voltaire, Baudelaire’s spleen, the Saint-Simonian gaze of Proust and the sacrificial transgressions of Georges Bataille. InFrancophone literature, one often finds strong voices responding to the experience ofbitterness, as in the explosive manifestoes of Senghor and Césaire.
This conference aims to consider a wide range of literary figures, canons andmethodologies by interpreting “bitterness in literature” broadly. We seek presentationsworking with critical approaches as diverse as affect, gender and queer theory, postcolonialand critical race theory, performance theory, psychoanalysis, narratology andgenre theory, post-structural and cultural studies approaches.
Presentations should not exceed 15 minutes. Please send a 250-word abstract withyour name and affiliation to upennfrenchitalian@gmail.comby February 5, 2016.
To inspire your interventions, the conference proposes a thematic series of“degrees” of bitterness:
-The bitter comic: satire, caricature, grotesque/black humor, caustic wit
-The bittersweet: nostalgia, melancholy, regret
-The bitter tragic: trauma, mourning and lament, irony, catharsis
-The bitter decadent: the lurid, the improper, the excessive
-The bitter criminal: the vengeful, the imprisoned, the angry, the damned
-The bitter marginal: the wretched, the abject, the discarded, the exiled
-The bitter plot: narratives of conspiracy, rebellion, and revenge
-The bitter truth: the monstrous, the secret, the repressed
-The bitter critic: the anti-literary, the skeptical, the cynical
Vanessa DiMaggio Igor Dombrovsky French and Italian Graduate Society co-presidents