“Historicizing Memory / Remembering History”

40th Anniversary Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
Feb. 26-March 1, 2009
Hyatt Regency - Boston, Massachusetts

This panel seeks to investigate the relationship between history and memory in modern and
contemporary American literature. Does memory constitute history or counterbalance it? How
does memory affect both the perception of historical experience and the production of historical
narrative? What is social or collective memory? How can the literature of memory help narrate
histories that otherwise resist representation? Theoretical and cross-disciplinary work will be
particularly welcomed, as will work focusing on how particular literary modes of representing
history and/or memory serve to construct or deconstruct national and communal allegiances and
identifications.

Possible issues to address may include the following:

*Writing and remembering lives in autobiographical or biographical texts
*Authority and archives
*Historical fiction / historiographic metafiction
*Political, ethical, and legal implications of historical fiction
*False histories / faux autobiographies
*Problems of epistemology and temporality in writing history and/or memory
*The rise of the memoir
*Memory / mourning / memorializing
*Forgetting / disavowed histories
*Representations of specific historical events
*Literature after history (Fukuyama)
*Oral histories
*Literature and cultural memory / collective history
*Memory and colonialism / post-colonialism
*Trauma and testimony
*Alternative historical narratives
*Postmemory (Hirsch)

Abstracts of 500 words should be emailed to Lisa Hinrichsen at lhinrich_at_bu.edu no later than
September 15, 2008. Questions or queries are welcomed before the deadline.
Please include with your abstract:
Name and Affiliation
Email address
Postal address
Telephone number
A/V requirements (if any)

For the complete Call for Papers for the 2009 Convention (posted in June), please visit
www.nemla.org. Interested participants may submit abstracts to more than one NeMLA panel;
however, panelists can only present one paper. Convention participants may present at a paper
session panel and also present at a creative session or participate in a roundtable.

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Received on Thu May 22 2008 - 12:48:43 EDT