cfp.english.upenn.edu

The 2010 Ucl English Graduate Society Conference seeks to address ideas of nightmare, in all their myriad forms. We would like to draw together work from a range of disciplines including but not limited to literature, art history, philosophy, classics, neuroscience, music, history, psychology, architecture and politics, in order to consider perceptions, representations and implications of nightmare throughout the ages.

Keynote speakers to be announced.

“Have you ever noticed that there is never any third act of a nightmare? They bring you to a climax of terror and then leave you there. They are the work of poor dramatists.” (Max Beerbohm)

“The traditions of the dead generations weigh like a nightmare upon the living.” (Karl Marx)

“The city as we imagine it … soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.” (Jonathan Raban)

“America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream.” (William S. Burroughs)

“We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose.” (Charles Baudelaire)

“’Ere we will eat our meal in fear and sleep
In the affliction of these terrible dreams
That shake us nightly: better be with the dead,
Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace,
Than on the torture of the mind to lie
In restless ecstasy.” (Shakespeare, Macbeth)

“I see the player piano as the grandfather of the computer, the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in, the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or no and where there is no refuge.” (William Gaddis)

“What if nothing exists and we're all in somebody's dream? Or what's worse, what if only that fat guy in the third row exists?” (Woody Allen)

PROPOSALS NOW BEING CONSIDERED: Please send a 300 word proposal for a 20 minute paper to nightmareconference10@googlemail.com by January 11 2010. Joint papers welcome. Gallery space available for nightmarish artwork.