cfp.english.upenn.edu

The Right to Vote and the Writing of Voice

The word kol in Hebrew means "voice" as well as "vote", thus implying kol as having the potential for political power. In our seminar we wish to examine the interplay of power and the use of voice/vote: voices creating or deconstructing identities, voices heard or unheard in the literary piece, granted or disowned voices. Who has the right to speak in Hebrew literature? What are the literary means enabling the freedom of speech? How does this relationship of power and voice come into play in the literary piece? What are the places of the muffled, choked voice? What are the places of the loud, screaming voice? How does canonization tune/orchestrate the different voices within literature?

We would like to focus on the usage of voice: echoes, animal sounds, silence, ventriloquism and mimicry. We invite papers that use textual approach to the literary works, as well as papers that theorize the voice, its origins and its powers, through trauma studies, postcolonialism, psychoanalysis and translation studies. We welcome papers from the field of literature, as well as from other disciplines, which address and critically explore literary and other representations of voices-votes in the literary piece and beyond.

This seminar is a part of the AIS annual conference, taking place in Brandeis University, in June 13-15, 2011.

Please e-mail short abstracts to
yali.dekel@nyu.edu or eran.tzelgov@nyu.edu
,by December 10.