The conference

Mourning is the repetition of what we do not have. But it is not just a yearning for what will never again make itself present: what distinguishes mourning from what Freud and his time called melancholia is that mourning affirms—or learns to affirm—this absence. On a thin thread of words, mourning calls up what was perhaps never there to begin with, and brings it into being. And that means that mourning is at the heart of so much we most value, and its continuing claim on us. The late Jacques Derrida catalogues many of these in the course of his work: friendship, justice, the debt and the gift, inheritance, responsibility, hospitality, tradition; literature, and the arts in general. In that mourning is inseparable from speculation in all senses of the word, its hospitality to the new is also at the heart of the scattered and various disciplines that make up the humanities.

Mourning and its Hospitalities  |  (after ...) is a three-day conference at the University of Queensland. It has as its focus the implications of the work of mourning for the humanities in general, and for literary studies in particular. What can mourning tell us about the humanities, and about literature? What does it have to say about the roles the humanities claim for themselves, the situations in which they currently find themselves, and the differences between these two? What roles do they have in the broader culture, and in education in particular? Formerly the gate-keeping discipline to the humanities, literary studies have been through boom and decline. What is, or can be, their rationale in a time of economic rationalism, vocationalism, and debates over critical literacy?

Derrida's work is not so much the theme of this conference as a starting point for its questions about mourning, literature and the disciplines. Given that our two plenary speakers, J. Hillis Miller and Derek Attridge, are both former colleagues of Derrida, this is a particularly appropriate and timely place to begin. Nevertheless, it is not the only approach that will be represented here. As the call for papers says, we welcome proposals for papers on a wide range of topics and approaches. This conference is intended to foster an exchange of work across boundaries on questions that affect us all as teachers and researchers in literary studies and the humanities. We want to use this work to seed a number of innovative publications coming from both the conference and the symposium, and through that to foster an ongoing community of scholarship.

How does one live with absence, with less? How does this absence become the opening of possibility? In times when the humanities are under threat, these are questions with a pragmatic and even political dimension. The symposium to follow the conference, Hospitalities of Literature  |  (teaching after...) will pursue these questions in close structured discussion, focussing on the specific issues of the teaching of literature.