Weird academic papers:

(I probably shouldn't put this on my blog in case someone from the department is stalking me. . . but such a classic example of academic bizarreness!).


Carnivorous Virility, or Becoming-Dog

*Monday, November 16, 2009* Please note date!
3:00-5:00pm

Humanities Instructional Building
Room 135

This paper argues for a queering of temporality that would undo our
nationally circumscribed and periodized fields of literary study in order to
work through topoi--discursive commonplaces--that haunt texts across
historical eras. Prof. Freccero's case study involves cyanothropy, the
merger of human and dog; it takes as its starting point the Columbian New
World encounter, from reports of dog-headed cannibals to accounts of the
devouring dog as the ubiquitous companion/weapon of Spanish colonizers; and
concludes with the attack of Diane Whipple by two Presa Canarios in San
Francisco in 2001. The symptomatic figure--itself already haunted by long
histories--repeats itself, travels between and among subjects and objects,
and condenses in itself a whole series of New and Old World meanings, from
companion to cannibal, primitive savage to savagely civilizational. Prof.
Feccero wants to argue that in order to understand the historical and
affective work such figures do, we must make use of fantasmatic
historiographies whose temporalities resemble psychoanalytic understandings
of the working of time as subjectivity and affect more than they do the time
of progressive history