Over the past few decades, human beings have been pictured not so much as rational creatures, but as beings who exist primarily in relation to one another. This so-called 'Relational Turn' has taken place on multiple fronts. The feminist ethics of care; Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the Other; the ontological claims for the social nature of the self and the normative claims for community by Communitarianist thinkers in the 1970s and 1980s; the role relations play in development and self-formation according to Objects Relations Theory and then later on, in Attachment Theory, and Relational Psychoanalysis and Transpersonal psychology; and the work of Carol Gilligan, John Bowlby, Audre Lorde, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, and many others besides have all variously called for a fuller, and in some cases, potentially revolutionary recognition of our interdependence in all its complexity. Their work has contributed to a valorisation of relations. It has also developed a slew of concepts, such as care, Recognition, the Other, or attention, with which we conceive relations. 


Less attention has been given to what might be called 'Bad Relations', that is to the concepts which describe how we both fail to relate to one another and the relations we would, supposedly, be better off without. Alienation, obsession, domination, violation, appropriation, misrecognition and objectification are just some of the many types of 'Bad Relations' that provoke consternation or moral opprobrium, and yet, which nonetheless shadow much work in ethics, psychoanalysis, postcolonial studies, feminist, queer theory, and many other fields of literary study. 


The gambit of this seminar is that we have not adequately conceptualised these bad relations that exercise such a negative force on our thinking, and, indeed, our relating. To that end, this seminar then invites contributions from scholars working in the Literary Anglosphere on the following topics:

- The role of Alienation in the development of psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, moral philosophy, or literature and theory generally. 

- The Aesthetics of Bad Relations (e.g. in writers like George Bataille, Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper etc.)

- The medicalisation/psychologicalisation of certain relational concepts such as obsession across the late 19th and 20th-centuries.

- The development of relational concepts (e.g. fetishism or orientalism) in colonial encounters.

- Works of literature that reconceive just what is apparently bad (i.e. harmful, dehumanising, mischaracterising) about these relations.