Keynote Speakers:

​Professor Naomi Segal (Birkbeck, University of London)
​​and
​Professor Josh Cohen (Goldsmiths, University of London)

Peter Brooks tells us that, "we constitute ourselves as human subjects in part through our fictions and therefore that the study of human fiction-making and the study of psychic process are convergent activities and superimposable forms of analysis" (Brooks "The Idea of" 341). Here Brooks invites a reflection on how individuals are structured both physically and psychically through language through reading, writing, images, and fiction. The central theme of this conference is about how the literary text and the soma interlink. We are interested in sharing thoughts about how the body is composed as a fiction and through fiction, and how fiction is created as and through the body.

Textual embodiment conjures ideas about how bodies of literature are written and read. Furthermore, it raises notions about how reading and writing affect the individual both physically and psychically. Textual endeavors may alter the way a person imagines herself, how she feels and acts, how she is constructed.

Psychoanalysis has always been concerned with what everyday language and gestures can tell us about our internal selves. Moreover there is a parallel between how the analyst/analysand and reader/writer exchanges may modify one's psychic and somatic constitution. In light of these concepts, we're interested in how physical and psychical signs and fictions are inscribed upon the body.

We invite panels and papers from postgraduate students and early career researchers on the relationship between literature and the body, especially in light of psychoanalysis.

Subjects for consideration might include (but are not limited to):

▪ The skin ego, the word as flesh, affect
▪ Fictional and bodily traces, conversion, the "foreign body"
▪ Pain and wounding, violence and destruction, fragmentation, negation
▪ Object relations theories, holding and containing, physical space, bodily borders
▪ The "Mystic Writing Pad," palimpsest and rewriting, screen memory


Abstracts of no more than 300 words are invited for submission by 25th June 2014.

Please email Monika Loewy and Beth Guilding at textual-embodiment@gold.ac.uk to submit