The fourth in the department's series of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Memorial Symposia, Reparative Reading at 21 returns to consider Sedgwick's seminal 1996 essay, 'Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You're So Paranoid You Probably Think This Essay is About You'. The symposia will take place in the Treehouse of the Berwick Saul Building, between 1pm and 6pm, and will feature short position papers from a number of speakers, followed by a round table discussion. Confirmed speakers include:

To prepare for the discussion, there will be two informal reading groups, each taking place between 5 and 630pm, in BS/007, on Tuesday January 31 and Tuesday February 7th, that will each consider a pair of landmark essays that have sought to change the way that reading happens across the humanities, social sciences and beyond. 

Starting with Sedgwick’s paradigm-shifting account of paranoid and reparative reading, and moving through Bruno Latour’s polemical argument that critique has been co-opted and run out of steam, we move to Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best’s conceptualisation of surface reading, and Heather Love’s claim for the virtues of description; articles which each, in their different but related ways, seek to challenge the received wisdom of the hermeneutics of suspicion and depth.