A symposium in celebration of fifty years of the OLR, Thursday 24 June 2027, at the University of Sussex
We invite proposals (200 words max) for presentations on ‘after the event’, to be given on Thursday 24 June 2027 at a one-day summer symposium at the University of Sussex. Papers must be short (no longer than 1200 words). Prospective speakers are encouraged to make specific reference, where appropriate, to some text or aspect of ‘after the event’ evident in an earlier volume or earlier volumes of the OLR. It is envisaged that a special issue entitled After the Event, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Oxford Literary Review, will be published in 2028, edited by Geoffrey Bennington and Nicholas Royle.
Since the publication of its first ‘theory issue’ in 1978, the OLR has been a leading journal in deconstructive thinking across the fields of literary and cultural studies, philosophy, psychoanalysis, colonialism, sexual politics, ecology, political theory and related forms of exploratory thought. From the beginning it has been preoccupied with what Jacques Derrida more than once described as perhaps Freud’s greatest discovery: Nachträglichkeit, a term variously translated as deferred effect, action or meaning, delayed effect, après coup, afterwardsness, after-effects, after-sense, blowback, after the event. If Derrida’s announced ‘final intention’ in writing Of Grammatology was ‘to make enigmatic what one thinks one understands by the words “proximity”, “immediacy” [and] “presence”’, this was and remains indissociable from thinking after the event.
The Oxford English Dictionary insists on the orderliness of hyphens in providing its definition of the adjective, ‘after-the-event’: ‘Occurring or performed after a particular event, frequently with the implication of being too late; characterized by retrospectivity.’ The retrospectivity or retroactivity of after the event is not, however, a mere addition, simply to be adjusted to a pre-existing linear logic (past, present, future). As Derrida suggests, it should also deconstruct some construals of Nachträglichkeit itself (Afterw.rds, 201).
Topics for discussion might include:
- How the logic of ‘after the event’ impacts the theory and practice of reading in general
- How thinking after the event affects genres and disciplines such as politics, history, literature, autobiography, film and media studies, psychoanalysis, ethics, aesthetics, music, ecology
- After the event and Artificial Intelligence
- How ‘after the event’ shows up in a specific text (philosophical essay, poem, novel, photograph, etc), whether as an explicit focus or as a surreptitious effect
- After the event in its relation to Derrida’s early interest in the inevitability of the ‘false start’
Proposals should be sent to Geoffrey Bennington (gbennin@emory.edu) and Nicholas Royle (n.w.o.royle@sussex.ac.uk) by 31 December 2026.
