What keeps us from seeing something hiding in plain sight?
Literary critics, like the hero of a detective story, need a puzzle to solve, a question to answer, an elision in the text, an impossible crime. The inept policeman, the naive reader, does not see what is hiding in plain sight—the significance of a plain thing is unseen, its distinction unappreciated.
Hiding in plain sight also describes crimes we collectively and individually choose not to see, such as domestic violence, incest, genocide. The rejection of evidence in plain sight, too close to our present, our home—or too far—casts the detective as suspect, the reader as villain. The uncanny of politics, for example, is the worry that “conspiracy theorists” have at the very least noticed something troubling that we conspire to hide in plain sight.
Our central question (above) that names this collective endeavor is therefore both pointedly literary and openly political. We are asking: What perceptual mode might make "plain sight" a place for hiding? What are the representational strategies that hide objects in plain sight? These questions proceed from our discipline’s traditions of reading Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter," Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and Jorge Luis Borges' "Kabbalistic stories," as much as they do from Maurice Merleau–Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible, Jacques Lacan's "Seminar on the Purloined Letter" and its literary-critical responses, Marshall McLuhan, and W. J. T. Mitchell.
What it means to be in plain sight, indeed the very space, context, or frame of "plain sight," has been increasingly problematized by literature and film, philosophy, politics, and (other) media. Our seminar will examine perceptions and problematics of "in plain sight." Scholars studying conspiratorial thinking, literary omissions, discoveries (archival, archeological, or scientific), and things “hiding in plain sight” are invited to apply. We welcome papers at the intersection of Literature with: Visual Arts, Psychology, Phenomenology, Perception, Criminology, Media Studies, Politics, Aesthetics and Critical Theory.
Literary critics, like the hero of a detective story, need a puzzle to solve, a question to answer, an elision in the text, an impossible crime. The inept policeman, the naive reader, does not see what is hiding in plain sight—the significance of a plain thing is unseen, its distinction unappreciated.
Hiding in plain sight also describes crimes we collectively and individually choose not to see, such as domestic violence, incest, genocide. The rejection of evidence in plain sight, too close to our present, our home—or too far—casts the detective as suspect, the reader as villain. The uncanny of politics, for example, is the worry that “conspiracy theorists” have at the very least noticed something troubling that we conspire to hide in plain sight.
Our central question (above) that names this collective endeavor is therefore both pointedly literary and openly political. We are asking: What perceptual mode might make "plain sight" a place for hiding? What are the representational strategies that hide objects in plain sight? These questions proceed from our discipline’s traditions of reading Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter," Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and Jorge Luis Borges' "Kabbalistic stories," as much as they do from Maurice Merleau–Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible, Jacques Lacan's "Seminar on the Purloined Letter" and its literary-critical responses, Marshall McLuhan, and W. J. T. Mitchell.
What it means to be in plain sight, indeed the very space, context, or frame of "plain sight," has been increasingly problematized by literature and film, philosophy, politics, and (other) media. Our seminar will examine perceptions and problematics of "in plain sight." Scholars studying conspiratorial thinking, literary omissions, discoveries (archival, archeological, or scientific), and things “hiding in plain sight” are invited to apply. We welcome papers at the intersection of Literature with: Visual Arts, Psychology, Phenomenology, Perception, Criminology, Media Studies, Politics, Aesthetics and Critical Theory.