cfp.english.upenn.edu

“Carried Across: Translations, Temporalities, and Trajectories”
A Graduate Conference hosted by the Department of English at University of Rhode Island
Saturday, April 24th, 2010

Translatus (Latin root of “translation”): transferred, handed over, conveyed, carried across

We emphasize these definitions of translatus in order to reframe the concept of “translation” and to draw it into constellation with two other words that also evoke images of something (or someone) being carried across: “temporality” and “trajectory.” The phrase “carried across” constructs a picture that requires several elements: the Act of transference, conveyance, or carriage itself; the Agent of this action (the carrier); the Subject or Object of this action (the carried); and the Medium or Threshold across which this act occurs, succeeds, or fails. How might consideration of “translations,” “temporalities,” and “trajectories” aid in investigating these interactive elements? How might this assemblage of concepts help us plot our own courses and our own researches of and across time, languages, texts, nations, races, genders, and lives? What might we discover, invent, and/or carry along our way? We invite graduate students to submit paper or panel proposals that seek to pursue these (or related) questions. In addition, we encourage submissions from a variety of fields—history, film, cultural studies, philosophy, literature, political science, rhetoric/composition, languages, visual studies, and creative writing (though not limited to these fields).

Possible topics and areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Etymological or other comparative language studies
• Definitions of or challenges to literary, philosophical, and/or historical periodizations or canonizations
• Politics or aesthetics of representation (states of emergency, simulacra, mimesis, etc.)
• Development of and within a writer or thinker’s oeuvre
• Philosophies of the trace (Levinas, Derrida, etc.)
• Difficulties of biography and/or memoir-writing
• Authorial intention and/or textual meaning
• Science fiction and/or time travel narratives
• Literacy studies
• Archival research (as a literal going-out and bringing-back)
• Rhetorics of/and reproduction
• Competing translations of various texts
• Philosophies of temporality (Bergson, Heidegger, Deleuze, etc.)
• Hegemony, ideology, and power relations
• Film and/or adaptation studies
• Colonialism, postcolonialism, nationalism
• War, migration, displacement, dispersion, diaspora

Submit abstracts of 250 words (for individual proposals) or 400 words (for panel proposals) to uriconference2010@gmail.com by February 15, 2010. Please include your full name, contact information, and institutional affiliation.

Individual presentations should be no longer than 15 minutes.