cfp.english.upenn.edu

Hellenic Association for the Study of English (HASE8) 8th International Conference "The Letter of the Law": Law Matters in Language and Literature 5-8 May 2011. University of Athens, Greece.

Contributions are sought for a panel that will explore and analyse the narrative and dramatic attributes/uses of the trial and the courtroom in literary texts that are concerned with law and justice in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Papers in this panel will explore the literary appeal of the criminal trial considered as a narrative and dramatic structure capable of bringing a spectrum of versions and stories into view and into play. Papers might address the question of whether literature can offer a wider understanding of reality in comparison to the narrow interpretation that, ostensibly, the law allows.
This panel seeks papers that consider a variety of perspectives and approaches:
- the courtroom as democratic institution/stronghold of power
- the courtroom as public space and the trial as a public process
- theoretical approaches to the literary trial and courtroom
- the trial as an alternative forum for authorising transgressive or marginalised experiences and meanings
- story-telling and competing stories
- the metaphor of the chain of circumstance
- the play within the play
- the trial as a discourse of power
- the use of the trial to engage large cultural issues
- the trial scene as a microcosm of the complex events in the novel
- the trial as a dramatic reenactment of events
- literature vying with the law for the representation of reality

If you are interested in participating, please send a 300-word abstract of your proposed paper, together with a brief CV to Janet Stobbs, CEU Cardenal Herrera University, Spain (emails: stobb.el@uch.ceu.es janet_stobbs@hotmail.com) by 12 September 2010.

The completed panel will be submitted to the HASE conference organisers for consideration on 1 October 2010. Conference details and the complete call for papers for the HASE 2011 conference are posted at: http://conferences.enl.uoa.gr/HASE8/