Apathy and Interpretation
Proposed special session for MLA 2004 in
Philadelphia, PA.
Apathy -- the subject’s non-pathos, non-interest,
non-concern -- is the excluded fact of the political
and ethical discourses (and fantasies) that inform
so much of contemporary literary criticism. The
subject in apathy is a blankness that resists
interpretation, a blockage of the subject’s meaning
and presence in its social world. In their neglect
of apathy, political and ethical criticisms have
neglected that which negatively defines them, as if
politics and ethics were without this fundamental
opposition or contradiction. But apathy can be
considered the contradiction on which these
discourses rest, the incoherence in the subject that
politics and ethics must ultimately address.
This proposed panel calls for papers that
investigate apathy from any angle, examining how it
works and how it can be interpreted. Papers might
address how specific texts thematize apathy, pose
apathy as a formal or stylistic problem, or
otherwise work through (or out of) apathy. Papers
might also theorize apathy in the classroom,
connecting pedagogical to political, ethical, or
textual issues. Other possible topics include:
- apathy as an aesthetic issue or phenomenon
- the relationship between apathy and irony; between
apathy and boredom
- how apathy is troped in terms of age, race, class,
gender, sexuality, nationality, religion,
secularism, etc.
- how apathy is a function of commodification; how
it has been commodified
- the different relations to apathy among the
politically engaged right and left; how apathy
confuses the layout of this political spectrum
- the process by which matters of concern and
interest are determined in different public
discourses; the role of ideology in apathy
- how apathy informs different narrative techniques;
how narrative is a response to apathy
- how particular approaches to apathy have animated
specific political campaigns
- why we should care about apathy anyway
Paper proposals of 500 words should be emailed by
March 10 to David Sherman at drs211@nyu.edu. No
attachments please.
David Sherman
English Department
New York University
19 University Place, 5th floor
New York, NY 10003
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