Special Topics Session: "Productive" Silences (Annual RMMLA Conference October 6-8, 2011)

full name / name of organization: 
Pamela J. Rader/ RMMLA
contact email: 

"Productive" Silences
History and the history-making process, while seeking to remember, often call attention to singularity of perspective, which results in silencing the memories of survivors. Literature then steps in to fill the gaps or
the lacuna of silence. In this imaginative, fictional realm, silence and those silenced by historians, dictators, and forgetfulness find agency. Understood as a form of resistance, silence becomes a literary ruse: a voice or a perspective that once lacked agency now finds a place on the page.

I am particularly interested in papers that examine extended metaphors for and various tropes of silence in twentieth and twenty-first century fiction, plays, and poetry.

Please submit your abstract of 350 words to:
Pamela J. Rader, Ph.D.
raderp@georgian.edu
Abstracts due February 25, 2011
Presenters will need to be/become RMMLA members by April 1, 2011
For membership and other information:
http://rmmla.wsu.edu/default.asp