cfp.english.upenn.edu

To celebrate the centennial of Ameen Rihani’s Book of Khalid, the Department of English, Translation and Education at Notre Dame University – Lebanon, invites scholars to the Second International Conference on Lebanese-American Literary Figures, titled “Ameen Rihani’s Arab-American Legacy: From Romanticism to Postmodernism.” Rihani’s travelogues, correspondence, poetic, and prose works, especially The Book of Khalid, testify to his deep sense of Romanticism and Modernism. His eagerness to launch a cultural, political, economic, social, and spiritual revolution, one which would question Western and Eastern traditional norms and propose new systems of thought, is an expression of his universality.

Suitable topics for twenty-minute presentations related to Ameen Rihani’s poetic and prose works, which exhibit Rihani’s originality as a Romantic, Modernist and Postmodernist precursor, may include but are not limited to the following themes:

The Romantic Dimensions of Rihani’s Works:
Rihani’s Romantic concepts of Self and Other
Rihani’s Romantic concepts of God, Nature, and the Human
Rihani’s concept of Universal Love and the Universal Great City
Rihani’s Khalid and Baha’ism, Sufism, and Romanticism
Rihani’s Romantic utopian and cosmic visions
Rihani’s Romantic Quest
Rihani’s questioning of prevailing traditional cultural, political, economic, and social norms
Rihani and British and American Romantic figures

The Modernist / Postmodernist Dimensions of Rihani’s Works:
Rihani and Modernism
Rihani and Colonialism/Post-Colonialism
Rihani’s gender issues
Rihani and ethnicity
Rihani and Postmodernism
Post-Structuralist elements in Rihani's works
Rihani's relevance to Arab-American politics/Pan-Arabism
Rihani and the secular tradition
Rihani’s influence on modern and contemporary Arab/Arab-American writers

The Transnational / Transcultural Dimensions of Rihani’s Works:
The local, cosmopolitan and global in Rihani
Rihani as “a citizen of two worlds”
Rihani and the de-territorialization of language
The Orientalist / Occidentalist Rihani
Rihani and the Anglo-Arab Diaspora

http://www.ndu.edu.lb/academics/fhum/Rihani/index.htm

Presentation and panel proposal abstracts (200-300 words), along with a brief CV and institutional details, should be submitted by 31 December 2010, to Naji Oueijan, noueijan@ndu.edu.lb, and Colette Guldimann, cguldimann@ndu.edu.lb.