October 2008

This one-day conference is organized by GRAAT, Université François Rabelais, Tours, France. It had originally been announced for 16 May 2008.
The term modernity is used to describe a particular set of historical, cultural, economic and political conditions, and promotes - in opposition to tradition or community - a linear model of time and the abstract apparatus of the State. Modernism refers to the literary and aesthetic representations of, and responses to, those same historical conditions.

Modernity is therefore the historical and cultural condition which makes modernism both necessary and possible. The synergy between the two concepts, however, is often resolved into a contradiction. Modernism often sits, that is, in a highly ambivalent, critical, subversive, relationship to the process of modernization: except when, through an enduring commitment to innovation, modernity shades back towards - in a new contradiction - the tradition of the modern, or indulges in a scientific or utopian discourse on the future revolution. And here, certain forms of progressive radicalism appear almost indistinguishable from elitist nostalgia.

The organisers invite proposals for twenty-minute papers on aspects of late-Victorian/Edwardian society which foreground and explore these tensions. The aim is to encourage an interdisciplinary approach linking social and intellectual history with music, architecture, the visual arts, and literature.
Colleagues who work on British civilisation may want to consider the many confrontations between the forces of radicalism and reaction, the ambiguous positions taken up by some intellectuals in the development and reform of the British State and constitution, the sometimes paradoxically conservative implications of popular protest and emerging gender politics; or the many tensions and contradictions inherent in the status of Britain‚s empire at this time, expanding, yet fragile, at once an instrument of social policy innovation and the locus of pride in the favoured race. For colleagues working in literary studies the aesthetic movement and end-of-century "decadence" also provided a variety of opportunities to theorise ambivalence and subversion, contradiction and paradox. The theme also allows those who may wish to bring together the historical and the literary, to explore modernity/modernism through a cultural approach.

(posted 19 Feb '08)

This conference, which is hosted by the Equipe d'Accueil EA 853 Laboratoire d’Etudes et de Recherche sur le Monde Anglophone (LERMA, Université de Provence, Aix-en-Provence) proposes to investigate the contradictions, tensions or articulations between two notions, or two important transversal topics. The Anglophone world as a whole will be at the core of the matter. This meeting first aims at establishing as precisely as possible the specific relations between the feeling(s) of fear conveyed by some texts and those raised by some images, phenomena which could be studied in parallel. An image is the visual representation of something through various means or media: it plays a major role in art and society, especially in the religious field in which it is endowed with a particular status.
This choice excludes analyses exclusively devoted to literary images or to the different existing forms of ekphrases or hypotyposes. However, these figures could be used to pave the way for a comparative approach and they could also be related to pictures, frescoes, illustrations or any other kind of representation (emblems, paintings, caricatures and so on). We will pay attention to much more than mirror effects between plural forms seen as parallel. Indeed, we will consider the complex link between several forms of expression, which sometimes echo each other but never really dovetail.
Our ambition will therefore consist in exploring the links which have been weaved between fear, images and texts in the Anglophone world from the Middle Ages to the present day. We wish to address such subjects as iconoclasm or visual representations of fear thanks to interdisciplinary approaches which will be focused on literary or mental representations favouring concrete images. The subservience of images to political or religious purposes, their didactic power and their ability to strike the senses or even to bypass reason could be used as guiding principles for some studies.
The theme of fear will frame this meeting between words, feelings and colours. The representation of fear through images (images of fear) and the fear aroused by images (fear of images) are two trajectories that we propose to study. Etymology (imago, imagine) will be carefully considered since it closely associates images with death.
The main objective of our meeting will therefore neither merely consist in better addressing key periods of Anglophone countries through images and movements of fear, nor exclusively in probing their visual culture. Much more than that, we would like to stress the mechanisms which generate the fear of images and the images of fear, thereby focusing on the fundamental role played by these two important phenomena in the building of collective representations.
All schools are welcome in the vivid exchanges which, we hope, will take place. Varied ideas are sure to provide food for thought and generate a richer debate.

(posted 24 Sep '07)

The international research team "Afroeuropeans: Black Cultures and Identities in Europe" (http://www.afroeuropa.eu) will celebrate its II International Conference in León, Spain, from 6th to 10th October 2008. Among the invited speakers are: Joan Anim-Addo, Tomi Adeaga, Sabrina Brancato, Cesar Mba, Aminatta Forna, Justo Bolekia, Maxim Matusevich, Valerie Mason-John, John McLeod, Grace Nichols, Pedro Pérez Sarduy, Gloria Rolando, Dorothea Smartt, Mark Stein, Stuart Ward, Gloria Wekker and many others.
There will be several open sessions for the presentation of papers during the conference; we seek contributions from activists, academics and artists who are developing their work, research or creation in any discipline related to black cultures and identities in Europe and/or their connections with the Black Atlantic. Some of the proposed topics are:

- Blackness?
- African-ness as counter-culture
- Diasporas
- New and old migrations
- Citizenship
- Border spaces
- The New Europe
- Imaginaries
- Gender(s)

Please submit an abstract of around 200 words in Spanish, English or French (the final presentation will be limited to a maximum reading time of 20 minutes) to Dra. Marta Sofía López <marta-sofia.lopez@unileon.es> before June 1rst 2008. Selected papers will be published in the group’s electronic journal, Afroeuropa, Journal of Afroeuropean Studies (http://journal.afroeuropa.eu), or in an independent volume of essays. For their final submission, they must follow the conventions of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (6th edition).

Lagunair and Iberia fly from and to Madrid and Barcelona; Easyjet flies from London to Oviedo, and Ryanair flies to Valladolid. From both airports, there are regular buses, which also serve the line Madrid-León: you can check the timetables here. There is also a good train service from Madrid.

There many nice hotels in the University area, where the venue will be held, and in the city centre. León is small and the university is within walking distance from the city centre, and well connected by bus, so it is advisable to book a downtown hotel. Among the most convenient are:

From 60 to 100€: Hotel París, Hotel Infantas de León, Hotel NH Plaza Mayor, Hotel Alfonso V &, if you are for something special, Parador de San Marcos (*****Luxury).

(posted 14 Apr '08)

ISLE, the International Society for the Linguistics of English, and the English Department of the University of Freiburg are pleased to announce the society's inaugural conference. Its aim is both to explore the role that descriptions of English can play in the development of linguistic theories and to explore ways in which current theoretical approaches can be made fruitful for the description of English. We invite linguists of all theoretical persuasions to submit proposals for papers and poster presentations which deal with aspects of the structure and the use of English.
The following keynote speakers have agreed to participate: Bas Aarts (UCL, London): [title to be announced]; David Crystal (Bangor): "The public understanding of linguistics"; Olga Fischer (Amsterdam): "The importance of analogy in language acquisition and change"; Raj Mesthrie (Cape Town): "The sociophonetics of English in post-apartheid South Africa"; John Rickford (Stanford): [not yet confirmed]; Elizabeth Traugott (Stanford): [presidential address]; Anna Wierzbicka (ANU, Canberra): "NSM Semantics and corpus linguistics: Unlocking the meanings of English collocations"
In line with the keynote speakers' research emphases, we envisage a programme of contributions taking shape around the following major areas of concern: the study of spoken English: transcription, corpus technology; new approaches to the study of variation and change; linguistic theory/linguistic description; web-based linguistics: "caveat googlator"?; linguistic theory and the history of English; the linguist and the public: (mis)communication and the popular understanding of linguistics. We explicitly welcome proposals for further thematic sections, especially from colleagues willing to take responsibility in organising them.
If you are interested in attending and/or contributing to the conference, please ask for and return the completed pre-registration form below by 31 October 2007. You will be notified of the acceptance of your contribution by 30 November 2007, when official registration will start and detailed information about travel and accommodation will be provided.
Contact: e-mail: <isle2008@anglistik.uni-freiburg.de>; fax: +49+761-203-3367; post: ISLE 2008, Englisches Seminar, Universität Freiburg, D-79085 Freiburg, Germany.
Proposals for papers or poster presentations should be accompanied by an abstract of not more than three hundred words in length. Participants planning panels and workshops should contact either or both of the organisers: <bernd.kortmann@anglistik.uni-freiburg.de>; <christian.mair@anglistik.uni-freiburg.de>.

(posted 2 Jul '07)

Annual Conference of the French Society for Scottish Studies.
Organisation : Morag Munro-Landi(Pau), Lesley Graham (Bordeaux II).
The 2008 conference will be held in the Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour, on the 10th and 11th of October, in collaboration with the Pau research centre Langues Littératures et Civilisations de l'Arc Atlantique (LLCAA), EA 1925, and research group Politique, Société  et Discours du Domaine Anglophone (PSDDA).
The conference proceedings will take place on the campus. The dinner on Friday evening will be in one of the town centre restaurants, and a guided walking tour of the centre will be included in the programme.

The conference will focus on Scotland and its doubles: doubles of any nature (see below), to be found in the Old World, in Europe and especially in the states, nations and territories of the Atlantic Arc, and/or in the New World, that is, the Americas: North America, Central America, South America and the Caribbean. The principle of the "double", a second object, obviously presupposes an original, the first object, opposite which may stand its mirrors or reflections in a relation of equivalence. These second originals, exact or carbon copies may be perfectly symmetrical, or there may be distortions, even excesses depending on the viewpoint of the initiator or observer of these doubles. Contributions to the conference might analyze any drifting towards a travesty of the original or examine the differing approaches in the various domains considered, be it in the comparison of the original and any given double or that of any given double with another.

Papers will be welcome on all aspects of the Arts and the cultural heritage of Scotland and their doubles in the fields of literature, visual arts, music, song, dancing. Those whose interest lies in literature in all its forms, lyric poetry, the romance novel, the novel, children's literature, detective novels, plays, war fiction etc. should endeavour to demonstrate the links -  and the nature of these links - between Scotland, the Scottish tradition, Scottish writers, poets or playwrights and the literary tradition and productions across the Atlantic or over the English and Irish Channels during the 19th and 20th centuries.

In the areas of history, sociology, politics and anthropology, the scope of the conference includes the notion of the Scottish Diaspora, the widespread dispersion of Scots in Europe in the Americas and the Caribbean, as well as those communities themselves, encompassing  such historical aspects as the  early settlement of Scots in the Ulster plantations then their 'forced' emigration  to the American plantations to flee persecution, the transportation of rebels in the Cromwell period, the transportation of Jacobites in the 18th century, commerce before and after the Union of 1707 in South, Central and North American and in the West Indies/the Caribbean, Scottish Loyalists and the American Revolution and their further settlement in Acadia, emigration to the United States and to Canada from rural Scotland, the Clearances and Emigration etc. We also invite studies of important figures whose reputations were made in their chosen territories abroad.
The proposals will be examined by a scientific committee and the results sent to authors by the 20th March at the latest.
The publication of the proceedings is to be in the form of a collection of articles after consideration by a reading panel.
Papers can be delivered in English or in French.

This conference is organised by the Centre d'Analyses et de Recherches sur le Monde Anglophone (CARMA), Université Lyon 2 and Université Lyon 3.

The theme of  this conference purports to examine the notion of "correspondence" in every sense of the word and to see how the various meanings intertwine. As, for a long time, women were not supposed to speak in public, letter-writing became their privileged mode of expression. Through  epistolary exchanges, they found a way to elude confinement to their traditional sphere. The New Historians turned to these precious sources intending to re-write the male-dominated "lopsided" History deprecated by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own.

Over the years and the centuries, other means of communication (not only books, magazines and newspapers but also improved travelling facilities and transatlantic voyages) ensured the opening of new channels through which women were able to build and reticulate a gendered identity, all the while paving the way for the emergence of militant movements.

Emphasis should be given to the circulation of ideas between feminists (women, men or organisations) in a particular country, or from one to any other English-speaking country, or from any English-speaking to any other country (France, for instance, but not exclusively).

These exchanges should reveal how thinking on woman's rights was not restricted to a few at a particular place and a particular time but how a universal aspiration for human rights as concerning both men and women gradually came into existence. It will be interesting to show how this internationalization occurred early, long before the emergence of a "global feminism" as advocated in the 20th century by the third wave of feminists whose contribution is not to be underestimated, however.

With the exception of strictly literary papers on works of fiction, all schools of thought will be welcome in the conference workshops, with no restriction on the adopted methodological approach.

You are invited to submit propositions for papers (approximately 150 words) with a short resumé before March 31, 2008
- or to Françoise Orazi, Associate Professor (British History & Civilisation) at Université Lumière-Lyon 2 :

The Symposium's thematic issues include: 1) Care-giving and care-receiving, 2) Dependency, provision and sustainability, 3) Ageing populations and climate change, 4) Ageing, migrants and exiles, 5) Aged electorates and democracy, 6) Longevity, the family and social stability, 7) Ageing and New Technologies, 8) Ageism and Youthism, 9) Old People and bureaucracy, 10) Ageing and globalisation, 11) Ageing icons and stereotypes, 12) Creativity and ageing, 13) The language of ageing, 14) Media representations of ageing, 15) Ageing in popular culture, and 16) Fictionalising and narrativising ageing in literature.

The Organising Committee invites submissions of proposals for 20-minute papers and poster presentations. Paper submissions will comprise a title and a 250-word abstract. Poster submissions will comprise a title and a 200-word description of the main theme or topic of the poster. Paper and poster proposals must include author's(s') full name(s), postal address(es), telephone number(s), email address(es), and institutional affiliation(s). Paper and poster proposals should be sent as email attachments in Word.doc format to <nbureu@dal.udl.cat>.

(posted 25 Jan '08, updated 6 May '08))

After the first day spent studying the translation of grammatical gender from French into English and from English into French, the focus  will then move to the translation of  gender as a socio-cultural construction in the two languages. Some ten years after the works of the Canadians Sherry Simon and Luise von Flotow (respectively, Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission and Translation and Gender: Translating in the 'Era of Feminism'), the time has come to assess the fertile interaction between gender studies and translation studies. How is the question of gender constructed, de-constructed, and re-constructed in the passage from one language to the other? What light is thrown on gender, and to what end, when one culture moves to another? Can gender be blurred or denied in the process? If the state of relations between male or female authors and translators can put identity at stake, with translation bringing about a negation or affirmation of self in relation to others, is it not necessary to re-assess the dialectics of the translator/text process by taking into account the position of the translating subject in relation to the text as object, its context and the translating project/scheme? Can otherness be maintained entirely? Or is it absorbed in the act of being appropriated in translation? Weighing up sex in translation must lead to questions being asked about social stereotypes and linguistic forms, and the cultural context of the original and that of its translations, since the place of the masculine and feminine varies according to the era and the culture. Lastly, translating the body depends not only on these factors, but also implies a political positioning.
These are just some of the questions that will be asked with a view to shedding light on the conditions of production, transmission and reception of works by and on women in the transcultural exchanges between French-speaking and English-speaking countries.
The colloquium will take place on October 17 and 18  2008 at the Institut du Monde Anglophone of Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3.
Suggestions for talks (a half-page summary, in English or French), and a short CV are to be sent at the latest for March 31 2008 to :
Christine Raguet <c.raguet@univ-paris3.fr>, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3, Institut du Monde Anglophone, 5 rue de l’École de Médecine, 75006 Paris or Pascale Sardin <pascale.sardin@u-bordeaux3.fr>, Université Bordeaux 3, UFR des Pays Anglophones, Domaine Universitaire, 33607 Pessac Cedex.
If accepted by the reading committee, articles and talks will be published in Palimpsestes 22.

(posted 9 Nov '07)

Writing from/about other countries such as Italy, India, Mexico, the United States or France, twentieth-century British writers such as E.M. Forster and Lawrence Durrell, but also Ford Madox Ford, D.H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Kazuo Ishiguro, Zadie Smith, Patrick Mc Grath or  Salman Rushdie - among others - cast a different light on Englishness. Other countries are perceived in terms of exile and estrangement, or as imaginary havens breeding shock or revelation. We move from step-by-step exploration through travel narratives to the purely abstract recreation of an elsewhere which is also nowhere to be found. This symposium will probe into the double bind of belonging and not belonging, into the dynamics of resentment and appropriation, or simply into the way foreign countries free British writers and provide a new, maieutic space which kindles new ways of thinking and writing. Papers may focus on the paradigms of displacement, the transposition of patterns and the blurring of genres triggered by otherness; the poetics of space will lead to a geographic and political, but also textual, appraisal of the imaginary recreation of both home and abroad.

(posted 27 Feb '08)

This conference is organized as part of the events celebrating the 400th anniversary of the University of Oviedo. It is addressed to scholars from various fields of research as well as translators and postgraduate students who are interested in the translation of information in the various media (printed, radio, television, the internet). The conference encourages interdisciplinary approaches involving linguistics, cultural studies and translation studies as well as other areas, such as sociology and business studies, that may throw light on the nature and strategies of translating information in the 21st century. The main areas to be covered at the conference include the interplay between translation and news writing, tourist information, product information, and specialised non-specialist information (such as documentaries or feature articles in news channels).
Contributions are invited to explore the polysemiotic nature of translated information, its hybridity as texts that retrieve material from multifarious sources (typically a tourist brochure will provide information about accommodation and transport and also about the various sites to be visited with references, for instance, to their artistic value), its temporariness and the effect of the quality of the final product, the difficulties faced when working with material that is of an immediate consumption and has a short life span, etc.
Organizing committee: Roberto A. Valdeón, University of Oviedo; Ana Ojanguren, University of Oviedo; M. José Álvarez Faedo, University of Oviedo.
Scientific committee: Margarita Blanco, University of Oviedo; Delia Chiaro, University of Bologna; Marta Dalhgren, University of Vigo; Henrik Gottlieb, University of Copenhaguen; M. José Hernández, University of Málaga; Krisztina Károly, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest; Marta Mateo, University of Oviedo; Ovidi Carbonell, Universidad de Salamanca; Lourdes Pérez, University of Oviedo; Myriam Salama-Carr, University of Salford.
Papers are invited on the following topics but contributions dealing with other related topics are also welcome:
News translation. Translation of news events on television (for instance the Euronews channel), press (such the use of material produced by news agencies and translated for printed newspapers, the exchange of reports in the various associations across Europe, news writing in the internet and their translation into various languages (e. g. the internet service of the BBC has versions in 39 other languages, where a huge number of the items are translations from BBCWorld). Papers might explore, for example, the different approach to news translation in the various versions of the Euronews television channel, on the one hand, and the non-English sites of bbcnews.co.uk.
The translation of tourist brochures. Tourism plays an increasingly important role in the income of both developing and developed countries. Thus, information about tourist destinations, means of transport, accommodation, attractions are essential to attract international tourism. Although English has become the language of international tourism, local, regional and national tourist boards are also targeting prospective visitors in other languages.
Product translation. In an increasingly globalized world, consumers are likely to purchase similar products no matter what part of the world they live in. Thus, multinationals translate and adapt the information included in the labels of their products for the various markets, often grouping countries, languages and consumers under the same label. Translation becomes, thus, a powerful way of selling a product.
Translating information as entertainment. In contemporary Western societies information has also become an end in itself, although it may aim to interact with the consumers and move them to act in one direction  or another. Television documentaries and information books or booklets provide consumers with non-specialist information. This is presented as part of the leisure industry of our times. We read about other cultures or the environment, but these multimodal texts, where both the visual and the verbal provide information, also aim to promote good practices.

500 word abstracts for 20-minute papers should be sent by March 31, 2008 (new extended deadline), preferably in electronic form, to <valdeon@uniovi.es>.
Spanish and English are the official conference languages, although papers in other major languages will be accepted. No interpreting service will be provided during the conference.
Registration fee: Early registration: 130€ (by July 15, 2008). Late registration: 160€ (by September 30, 2008)
Contact Details: <valdeon@uniovi.es>.

(posted 6 Nov '07, updated 26 Feb '08))

The conference on "Modernism and Unreadability" aims to explore a major literary movement, Modernism in the English-speaking world, from the perspective of one of its most obvious though rarely mentioned effects: unreadability. Modernism will be approached through the lens of various texts known to be particularly resistant to interpretation. Several "borderline" Modernist texts fall de facto under the category of the unreadable. For a number of reasons and following various modalities and individual procedures which call for description and analysis, those texts, now part of the literary canon, raise problems of deciphering as well as comprehension which defer and displace the question of interpretation. From Joyce's Finnegans Wake to Stein's The Making of Americans via Virginia Woolf's The Waves, some of Pound's Cantos or Beckett's Molloy, several canonical texts foil reading, articulation, and commentary.
The paradoxical fact that several of the greatest Modernist texts skirt the limit of unreadability needs to be elucidated and deconstructed. The question of the relationship between Modernism and unreadability is far from anecdotal or secondary. Unreadability is not simply a by-product of excessive aestheticism: it characterizes and stems from heterogeneous poetics; it points to a crisis in meaning, and bears the signature of a literary movement whose very unity is problematic. Admittedly, texts bordering unreadability are found at all times and throughout various literary traditions. Yet given its intensity, it may be worth wondering to what extent Modernist unreadability defines a unique historical moment in the literature of the English-speaking world.
This latter hypothesis may in turn be submitted to a critical reading, since by contributing to the construction of the Modernist master narrative, it also underwrites a polemical notion of literary history as a succession of breaks made manifest by the emergence of radically new paradigms (such as unreadability) through which Modernist writings question literariness from the angle of literalness and challenge literature (both as a practice and as a historical institution) to account for itself, to justify its procedures and its tacitly or implicitly held beliefs, to deconstruct the very meaning of writing and reading.
What of the failure of signification and meaning that Modernist writings repeatedly stage? The question of meaning, of signification and its other, lurks beneath the obstacles that frustrate reading. Faced with a wall of literalness, with a deluge of referential data, readers are thwarted, thrown off balance in their alleged "natural" competence. The complex procedures whereby reading is thwarted deserve to be analyzed. Language itself is being put to the test as it is alternately Babelized, disfigured, or exhausted. The nature of the transgressions in which these Modernist texts originate needs to be examined: what exactly do they forsake? What liberties do they allow themselves to take? There is not just one version of unreadability: its manifestations are multiple and unique. In particular, it needs to be distinguished from obscurity, enigmaticity, even hermeticism. We must ask ourselves how such literary productions confront writing itself with a dimension of impossibility; how unreadability impacts writability. It is also worth examining the specific forms of boredom and jouissance it generates.

Papers may examine specific modalities, strategies of unreadability at work in individual tests, or investigate general issues of poetics pertaining to unreadability, the aesthetics of reading and reception theory. Critical responses and positionings vis-à-vis hermetic texts may also be held up to scrutiny, notably attitudes of denial towards the unreadability of texts which border the undecipherable and the incomprehensible.

The international conference on "Modernism and Unreadability" will be held over three days, from October 23-25, 2008, at the Centre d‚Etudes Poétiques (Ecole Normale Supérieure Lettres et Sciences Humaines / Université Lyon 2) in Lyon, France.

Abstracts may be submitted by April 15, 2008 to Isabelle Alfandary <isabelle.alfandary@free.fr>, Axel Nesme <Axel.Nesme@univ-lyon2.fr>, and Lacy Rumsey <lrumsey@ens-lsh.fr>.

(posted 30 Nov '07)

The English Department of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków is holding the 6th Joyce Conference under the title: James Joyce and after: writer and time, on 24-25 October 2008. Our central theme is the question of time in the works of James Joyce and writers following in his wake. Suggested topics include:

sense of time / subjective / objective time/ memory/rememebrance/recollection
open time / closed time / cyclical time / linear time
finite time / infinity /time-space continuum
chronology / chronicle /chronotope
epoch / period / cycle
temporary / contemporary
duration/ continuation / retrospection
simultaneity / synchronicity / contemporaneity

The conference will be held in English. Please, send proposals of papers with brief abstracts to the organizers before 1 September 2008 at the addresses below. The organizers reserve the right to choose papers. Authors of accepted proposals will be informed about it by 15 September 2008. Selected papers will be published in a conference volume; the deadline for paper submissions is 25 November 2008.

Registration deadline for the conference is 25 September 2008. Conference fee of 180 PLN / 50 Euro should be paid by 25 September 2008; late registration possible.

Instytut Filologii Angielskiej
Uniwersytet Jagielloński
Al. Mickiewicza 9
31-120 Kraków
Poland

(posted 29 Apr '08)

The Departments of English Philology II, Philosophy IV and the Departamental Section of History of Art III of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid are pleased to announce the celebration of the IV Interdisciplinary Seminar of Literary Studies. The seminar is addressed to all researchers interested in approaching any literary, cultural or artistic phenomena from a multidisciplinary perspective. The title of the present edition is Poetics to Come, Politics of Mourning.

We find both in political action and aesthetic praxis a common insistance which suggests the existence of a close link between the two forms of action. This link is the bursting into the public sphere, with the power of lightening, of the untold, of that which is gone or absent, othe voice of those who were not considered to have a voice. Setting out from this connection between politics and aesthetics, this year’s edition of the Interdisciplinary Seminar of Literary Studies aims at becoming a space from which to reflect on the modes of artistic and literary production; a space that could become the means of articulating Walter Benjamin's political imperative redeem not the future generations but the past ones. Based on this imperative, according to which  the not-been in the past must reappear in the present of mourning with the strength of a revolution, art and literature have the mission of building a future based on the political act of memory. It is, thus, a matter of analysing any aesthetic proposal which may render possible that idea of a future based on the politics of mourning; the building of a community with those who are not present and, especially, with the not-yet-been in the past as a principle from which to articulate a future grounded on responsability, and a present provided of meaning.

Although the seminar is open to all kinds of proposals, papers taking into account the following topics are especially welcome: the relationship between memory, mourning and the cinematographic image; the political specificity of mourning as a way of memory; memory as counter-history; the poetics of made-up memories; the question of the subject, the ways, processes, and artistic materials taken in order to create memory; and, in general, the way in which art, literature and thought are at the disposal of the past in order to build a politically responsible future.

Proposals, both in English and Spanish, should be sent in the form of a 250-300 word abstract, together with a short CV including interests and institutional affiliation, to <seminter08@filol.ucm.es>.

Participants whose proposals are accepted will be informed via email on September 1st, 2008 and shall be asked to fill out a registration form which will be available on the conference website.

(posted 10 Apr '08, updated 30 Jun '08))