cfp.english.upenn.edu

"The Art of Oblivion"

Seminar at the 2010 ESSE conference in Torino, Italy, 24.-28. August 2010.

Cultural memory has been a highly productive field of research lately, developing, however, its own blind spot: forgetting. This seminar devoted to the exploration of oblivion in cultural and literary interzones invites discussion about issues such as:

• The literary techniques of forgetting as mechanisms which facilitate, demand or produce forgetfulness.
• The media of forgetting (aesthetic forms, structures or tropes) which not only represent but also perform forgetting.
• The regime of forgetting hesitating between a politics of erasure (amnesties, censorship, iconoclasm…) and a strategy of resistance (lethargy, laughter, or indifference).
• The right to forget and be forgotten.

Please note that authors of seminar papers will be expected to give an oral presentation of not more than 15 minutes duration, rather than simply reading their papers aloud. Reduced versions of the papers are circulated among all speakers in advance of the seminar.

Please send a 200-word abstract of your proposed paper by 31 January 2010 to all seminar convenors:

Prof. Didier Girard (Université de Strasbourg): drgeere@free.fr
Prof. Ingrid Hotz-Davies (Universität Tübingen): ingrid.hotz-davies@uni-tuebingen.de
Dr. Isabel Karremann (LMU München): isabel.karremann@anglistik.uni-muenchen.de