Global Anglophone / Comparative Literature

Fiana Kawane (University of British Columbia)

What is the potential, liberatory or otherwise, of excess as a figure, motif, scene, or problem? Blake’s “road of excess” offers a counterpoint to an industrial-capitalistic ethos of productivity, frugality, and reason. Moreover, Bataille speaks of “excess” as a form of unproductive expenditure of energy under modernity. If “animatedness” (Ngai) operates as a racialized iteration of exaggerated affect, how does one read the overdetermined sentimentality of the lyric “I”? Lyric excess, then, invites an engagement with scenes of excess, or in other words exuberance, surplus, or waste, to rethink lyric poetry’s non-utilitarian possibilities in form and content. The panel aims to consider how excess in lyric poetry enables a disruption of expected structures of the "sensible" (Ranciére). Centring dialogue, the panel invites proposals in response to questions such as, how does lyric excess circumvent the logics of capital understood as rubrics of productivity, efficiency, and usefulness? What liminal or alternative conditions of life could be imagined within an economy of excess? The panel invites abstracts (up to 300 words) and brief bios across periodization, geographies, and approaches. All proposals that address excess as a lyric inquiry on the following topics and beyond welcome:

● Critiques of colonial, imperial, or neoliberal enclosures of life;

● Queer, feminist, trans approaches to lyric excess;

● Environmental humanities readings of overflow, waste, and detritus;

● Ornamentation, extension, or exuberance in the verse form.

The panel explores the significance of excess in lyric poetry under the conditions of modernity and logics of capital. Lyric excess invites an engagement with scenes of excess, or in other words exuberance, surplus, or waste, to rethink lyric poetry’s non-utilitarian possibilities in form and content.