At the same time, early modern English literary studies is in the midst of several waves of methodological innovation: premodern critical race studies (https://acmrs.asu.edu/RaceB4Race), eco-theory and posthumanism, disability studies, and the early modern trans studies movement (https://www.colbygordon.com/emotrans-ii-conference). One through-line of these recent turns in the field is the imperative to confront our discipline’s unacknowledged inheritances, the foundational assumptions that have shaped the study of English Renaissance texts, and to openly contend with the racism, essentialism, etc. of our scholarly “primal scenes.” Early modern queer and trans theorists in particular are re-writing the field’s narratives about gender and sexuality, both exposing the drawbacks of longstanding critical paradigms from psychoanalytic thought (castration, the unconscious, fetishism, sadomasochism, and infantile development, to name just a few) and, at the same time, making use of other psychoanalytic tropes and structures that have so infused the discipline as to become almost synonymous with the form of literary criticism tout court (symptom, substitution, condensation, fantasy, drive).

This Special Session is one scene in a much longer conversation that we, the participants, are staging in our field. We seek tol offer a forum at MLA in which the complicated histories of critical terms can be explicitly interrogated, and the rich proliferation of new psychoanalytic thinking is used to read and re-read early modern texts. The current psychoanalytic moment needs scholarship on the Renaissance, to elongate its historical perspective by making visible the strange, and strangely familiar, forms that populate earlier archives. Likewise, it’s time to ask afresh what psychoanalysis offers to the study of Renaissance literature, moving beyond the historical question of whether the period’s model of selfhood was sufficiently interiorized so as to permit the use of Freudian interpretive concepts (the governing question of the 1980s and 1990s debates).

Each of the 3 papers performs an example of the new approaches we seek to invite. Adam Rzepka (Montclair State) proposes the Freudian notion of the drive as an alternative, transhistorical model for the implacability of Old Hamlet's Ghost in Hamlet, reading the drive as a motive force that ruptures psychological explanation and renders a dramatic character (as Lacan describes Sophocles’s Antigone) “inhuman.” The structure of the drive, Rzepka argues, can disrupt historicism’s explanatory models which seek out possible causality and influence, like that of Sophocles on Shakespeare.

Steven Swarbrick (Baruch College) offers a psychoanalytic and eco-critical re-theorization of Henry Vaughan’s metaphysical poetry, analyzing Vaughan’s “retroactive” poetics of repetition as an alternative to previous critics’ focus on the moment of birth. What comes “After Infancy” is the extended temporality of repetition, and of the psychoanalytic symptom, which, Swarbrick argues, contain their own under-explored potentialities for radical new forms of life.

Beatrice Bradley (Muhlenberg College) re-theorizes the history of disgust – from Lacan's "self-shattering," to Julia Kristeva's "abjection," and Sianne Ngai's "minor affects" – through the 17th century poem most often called “disgusting,” Richard Crashaw’s “The Weeper.” Bradley re-examines the structure of “minor abjections” in light of the poem’s “microaffects” (queasiness, distaste) rendered through its figures of diminutive scale, sensory cacophony, and copious bodily fluids. This reading occasions a revised critical history of reading disgust in/and Crashaw across historical time.

After these three short papers (7-8 minutes each), our Respondent, Drew Daniel, will synthesize the methodological stakes of the speakers’ interventions, and Presider Christine Varnado will moderate a discussion in which the audience is invited to reflect on their own critical “primal scenes,” and on what psychoanalytic methods can add to our field today. This panel will appeal to our colleagues in queer theory (“Queer Theory and Psychoanalysis”) across historical periods, and to early modernists in related areas (“Queering the Renaissance at 30”), as well as to our Renaissance colleagues across national literatures – many of the psychoanalytic concepts we engage with are much more operative in the current scholarship of literatures other than English represented at MLA.