The 11th Annual Conference of the English Department of the University of
Bucharest will be held between 4 â€" 6 June 2009.
        
DURABILITY AND TRANSIENCE: CULTURAL BORDERS OF TEMPORALITY

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:

Prof. ROBERT YOUNG, Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature,
New York University
TBA

Prof. JOHN LOWE, Professor of English, Louisiana State University
“Calypso Magnolia: Durability and Transience in the Global South”

The 2009 edition of our Annual Conference invites interdisciplinary
approaches to the subjects of time and temporality, with focus on specific
differences at work in such domains as Literature, Social Anthropology,
Cultural Studies, Communications, Cultural Theory, Media and Film Studies.
Our contemporary social, political and psychological predicaments are
culture- and time-bound. At a time of culture-specific differences
occupying the minds of academics in the humanities and social sciences,
more alert than ever to change, it is certainly a challenge to turn to the
question of time in an academic conference. Haunting presences in the
intellectual debates of the last half century or so (with names such as
Heidegger, Braudel, Vovelle, Ricoeur, Pomyan, to say nothing of the New
Historicists holding pride of place), time and temporality, history and
historicity appear as consubstantial with the discourse of modernity. In
the Kantian tradition, time and space are a fundamental legacy of Western
thought, undissociable from each other, as, indeed, confirmed by such
concepts as espace-temps or chronotope.
Some related queries are likely to need an urgent answer: Is time treated
differently in various humanistic disciplines nowadays? Do they regard it
as a sequence of discrete moments or as a continuous flow? How is
temporality used in the investigation of individual psychologies and of
social groups? How is it interpreted today in different culture areas? What
are the possible mutations which that notion may undergo in the near future?

        Here is a list of possible topics to be approached by the participants,
which should not be interpreted as a limitation of their choices:
- Durability vs. change, essentialism vs. relativism
- Universal vs. culture-specific, enduring vs. perishable values
- Time warps, temporal narratives, narratives of time
- Assessing time, durability and transience
- Cultural amnesia and cultural anamnesis, retrieving time lost or wasted,
(re)living time and history
- Time-bound cultural institutions(literature, literary history, the canon
etc.)
- Time in/and literature; Literary categories in/and time.
- Aesthetic temporality versus social, religious, moral, political,
perspectives on time
- Historicity and genres
- The ideology and sociology of time
- Cultural identities in temporal perspectives
- Geographic temporalities
- Temporal dimensions of trauma
- Gender temporalities
- Metropolitan vs. colonial time(s)
- War((s) and time(s)
- Temporality and technology
- Digital temporalities (computer time, digital history, virtual lives etc.)

Conference fee: 50 euro (conference documents, refreshments).
Presentations, in English, will be 20-min. long plus 10 min. for
discussion. Authors are invited to submit abstracts, which will be
published in the Conference programme. Abstracts may not exceed 500 words
(including a list of keywords). They should be submitted in word format.
Proposals must include titles of papers, name and institutional
affiliation; mailing address, phone, fax and e-mail address.

Please note the new deadline for receipt of proposals: 1 March 2009.

Please send proposals (and direct inquiries) to the following e-mail addresses:
irina.pana_at_rdslink.ro AND

litcultstbucharest_at_gmail.com

Please note the webpage of the conference:
http://www.english-unib.ro/events.htm

A selection of papers will be published in University of Bucharest Review.

We are looking forward to welcoming you in Bucharest,

Assoc. Prof. Octavian Roske
Head of Department

The Organizing Committee:
Prof. Irina Pană
Prof. Radu Surdulescu, literature section coordinator
Assoc. Prof. Ioana Zirra
Assoc. Prof. Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru
Asst. Prof. James Brown
Ms. Ruxandra Rădulescu, junior lecturer
Mr. DragoÅŸ Ivana, junior lecturer
Ms. Daniela Cârstea, PhD candidate

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Received on Wed Feb 11 2009 - 05:45:49 EST