cfp.english.upenn.edu

Deadline extended:

IASIL Sydney - Thursday 20 July to Sunday 23 July 2006 inclusive
http://www.iasil.org/sydney/
Reply to irish_at_unsw.edu.au

This is a Second and FINAL Call for Papers for the 2006 meeting of the
International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures.

Proposals are warmly invited on the general conference theme: exploring
'intertextuality' in all its forms in Irish literature and culture. Papers
on any other aspect of Irish writing (in English and/or Irish) are also very
welcome.

Please submit a title and 200 word abstract to irish_at_unsw.edu.au by 18
February, 2006.

Papers should not exceed 20 minutes duration.

Anyone delivering a paper at the 2006 IASIL conference must be an IASIL
member for 2006.

***

In writing The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland, Edna
Longley says that she found she was often 'tracing a textual web', and that
the term 'intertextuality' applied to what she was investigating 'not as a
theoretical dead letter, but as a creative dynamic working upon mechanisms
of tradition and cultural definitions alike'.

This conference is devoted to exploring 'intertextuality' in all its forms
in Irish literature and culture from earliest times to the present.

The creative dynamic that Edna Longley detects is of course even at work in
her own formulation with its echoes of Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual
Talent", Barthes' "The Death of the Author", and Yeats's "Easter 1916".

And it seems equally true of critic as of creator, though Wilde has
brilliantly collapsed that distinction.

In terms of creativity W.B. Yeats celebrates a 'self-affrighting',
'self-delighting' process by which art generates art-'Those images that
yet/Fresh images beget'.

Others use different metaphors. W.H. Auden writes of his awareness of
'ghostly presences'; Harold Bloom of 'the anxiety of influence'; Richard
Ellmann of 'eminent domain'; M.H. Abrams of exploring 'serviceable
analogues, whose properties were, by metaphorical transfer, predicated of a
work of art'; Edna Longley of a 'dispersed collectivity' that is the domain
of 'intertextual antagonism'; Seamus Heaney of 'overhearing'; and T.S. Eliot
of his belief that 'between the true artists of any one time there is S an
unconscious community'.

Not that such 'influences', 'exchanges', 'transactions', 'borrowings' or
'intertextualities'-or whatever one wants to call them-are always as benign
as inferred by 'community' or as organic as implied by begetting. They might
contaminate, distort, or perhaps render stereotypical.

But if such processes are as powerful and as pervasive as writers and
critics claim, shouldn't we enquire into how they function? and shouldn't we
ask what are the implications for Irish Studies-particularly about the ways
we research and teach?

IASIL 2006, which will meet in Sydney from Thursday 20 July to Sunday 23
July inclusive, has committed itself to exploring, explicating and enjoying
the 'textual web' that is Irish Studies.

http://www.iasil.org/sydney/

--Dr Patrick LonerganIASIL WebmasterEnglish DepartmentNUI GalwayIreland.webmaster_at_iasil.orghttp://www.iasil.org ========================================================== From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List CFP_at_english.upenn.edu Full Information at http://cfp.english.upenn.edu or write Jennifer Higginbotham: higginbj_at_english.upenn.edu ==========================================================Received on Tue Jan 24 2006 - 17:18:08 EST