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Translating Holocaust Literature, 15-16 June 2013, Dublin
La nostra lingua manca di parole per esprimere questa offesa, la demolizione di un uomo - Our language lacks words to express this offense, the demolition of a man. (Primo Levi, "If this is a Man")
With more than 14% of the world's refugee population, South Asia, as a region, hosts the fourth largest concentration of refugees. Displaced on account of religious, ethnic and political conflicts, refugee communities force us to experience the fluidity of borders from within the cartography of nations. From the refugee cross-border migrations during the Partition of India in 1947 to the more recent Tamil refugee crisis in Sri Lanka, the influx of Afghan war refugees in Pakistan, and the relocation of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, modern South Asia has repeatedly witnessed the pain of people in a state of statelessness.
"The United States," says Bruce Cumings, "is the only great power with long Atlantic and Pacific coasts, making it simultaneously an Atlantic and a Pacific nation." Yet, theorizations of transnational America conventionally focus on one or the other, not both. This seminar explores the challenge of situating America bicoastally as a problem of epistemology that engaging with American literary and philosophical histories can illuminate. We posit alongside Carolyn Porter that what vexes the American subject's ability to position itself in history and geography is an Emersonian literary tradition of ahistorical and reified consciousness.
"The United States," says Bruce Cumings, "is the only great power with long Atlantic and Pacific coasts, making it simultaneously an Atlantic and a Pacific nation." Yet, theorizations of transnational America conventionally focus on one or the other, not both. This seminar explores the challenge of situating America bicoastally as a problem of epistemology that engaging with American literary and philosophical histories can illuminate. We posit alongside Carolyn Porter that what vexes the American subject's ability to position itself in history and geography is an Emersonian literary tradition of ahistorical and reified consciousness.
Organization: American Comparative Literature Association (http://www.acla.org/acla2013/propose-a-paper-or-seminar/); please be sure to mark your submission for this particular seminar: Counterfeit Realities
Location: University of Toronto
Proposal due date: November 15th
Conference date: April 4-7
Seminar Organizers: Wesley Burdine (University of Minnesota), Andrew Marzoni (University of Minnesota)
The 10th Annual Miami University English Graduate Student and Adjunct Association (MEGAA) Symposium
In Conversation with the 2012-13 Altman Program:
The Human and the Non-Human
March 22nd, 2013 -- Oxford, OH
"Beyond the edge of the so-called human, beyond it but by no means on a single opposing side, rather than "The Animal" or "Animal Life" there is already a heterogeneous multiplicity of the living or more precisely...a multiplicity of organizations of relations between living and dead" - Jacques Derrida
What is (dis)reality? In The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, Michael Heim notes the multiple attempts to define reality in Western history. The effort to delineate reality begins with Plato's notion of ideal forms as the "really real," through Aristotle's emphasis on material substance. Reality in medieval times is mirrored in the shimmer of religious symbols; efforts to catalogue the real mark the Renaissance, and the atomic bomb defines the reality of the Modern era. In contrast, material representations of the "real" are often surreal, intangible, and unregulated in Latin American, Caribbean and African literatures and cultures e.g. the work of Gabriel García Márquez, Ben Okri amongst many others.
Have a great paper on a literary topic that you're dying to share with the SW/TX PCA/ACA, but can't find a home for it in a special literature area? Fret no more, friend scholar, for I give you… the General Literature Area!
Categories of criticism that were initially developed following the birth of nation-states have long served their (mostly academic) purposes well -neatly ascribing whatever was remarkable in the arts or literature of the Americas to the familiar and accepted factors of "national origins" or national history, with scholarly classifications and modes of cognition duplicating, as on library shelves, the attendant territorial boundaries of countries.
Ecocriticism has been a flourishing field of inquiry for the past three decades. However, literary critics have only recently begun to explore literature and the environment from postcolonial perspectives. In an attempt to theorize postcolonial environmental criticism, this panel examines the intersections of postcolonialism and environmentalism in the context of contemporary globalization. With the intensification of globalization in the 1990s, there has been an explosion of local environmental movements in the global south protesting neoliberal agendas, such as development, modernity, and progress, often collaboratively implemented by national governments and international finance.