English MA's Explore the 'Archives of the Self'

Is the queer bent of TV’s Sherlock really queer? Is latrinalia–bathroom graffiti–a kind of performance art? How does Braithwaite’s poetry envision negritude?

On December 10, 2015, graduate students in the Literatures of Modernity program engaged with these and other subjects in the “Archives of the Self” symposium. They presented recent work engaging a range of cross-disciplinary approaches to texts, history, identity, and genre. Issue clusters included bodies in competition, reading culture through performance, and recuperation and commodification. Crossing literary and visual genres as well as temporal periods, presenters addressed the relationship between the immediacy of the embodied self and the historicizing practices through which it is archived.

The sessions were followed by a cathartic end-of-term celebration at the Arts and Letters Club, with conversation continuing into the wee hours.