Public Fantasy:
New Work on the Role of Fantasy in Collective Imagination
55th Session
Friday - Sunday
October 11-13, 1996
Longfellow Hall
13 Appian Way
Harvard University
What is the role of fantasy in collective imagination – in the social institutions, media technologies, and aesthetics of identity that shape the public sphere? Bringing together disciplines as diverse as politics, visual culture, literature, and philosophy, the 1996 English Institute program explored such recurrent public fantasies as race, sex, and subjectivity – as effects of history and preoccupations of contemporary culture.
Racial Imaginaries
JUDITH BUTLER, University of California, Berkeley
Directed Racial Imaginaries
SAIDIYA HARTMAN, University of California, Berkeley
Belated Encounters on the Gold Coast
HOMI BHABHA, University of Chicago
The Nearness of You: Proximity, Anxiety, and the Emergence of Minority
Erotic Arts
LEE EDELMAN, Tufts University
Directed Erotic Arts
WAYNE KOESTENBAUM, Yale University
Stein’s Posthumous Porn
CONSTANCE PENLEY, University of California,Santa Barbara
From Casting Couch to The Sperminator: Porn Knocks-Off Hollywood
LEO BERSANI, University of California, Berkeley
Caravaggio’s Secrets
Mediated Publics
DIANA FUSS, Princeton University
Directed Mediated Publics
THOMAS KEENAN, Princeton University
Live Feed: War, Humanitarianism, and Television
KOBENA MERCER, New York University
Hetero-Ethnic Anxieties: Interracial Coupling as Object of Fear and Fantasy in Responses to Tongues Untied
PATRICIA WHITE, Swarthmore College
Pathetic Queers: Affect, Audience, and Independent Media
Collective Memories
K. ANTHONY APPIAH, Harvard University
Directed Collective Memories
MARIANNE HIRSCH, Dartmouth College
Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy
MARGARET HOMANS, Yale University
Queen Victoria’s Memorial Arts