cfp.english.upenn.edu

The Division of English at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, in association with the Centre for Liberal Arts and Social Sciences [CLASS], is organizing a one-day international postgraduate conference on the subject of “rupture” in literature on 6 June 2011.

Keynote Speaker:
Dr Shirley Chew, who will be speaking on “'It is a rupture that you may … heal': The Way of Stories”, is Emeritus Professor of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literature at the University of Leeds and Visiting Professor at Nanyang Technological University. She is co-editor of Unbecoming Daughters of the Empire (1993), Translating Life: Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics (1999), Re-constructing The Book: Literary Texts in Transmission (2001), and The Concise Blackwell Companion to Postcolonial Literature (2009). Recent publications include essays on Kipling and Ondaatje (2010) and Olive Senior (2011). She is the founding editor of Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings.

Call for Papers:
This conference aims to explore critically the notion of “rupture” in literary studies. While the geographies and politics of “space” and “place” have attracted much discussion, this conference seeks to focus upon the idea and act of rupture-- narratological, psychological, theoretical, cultural -- and the concomitant issues of unsettlement and disjuncture.

We welcome papers exploring any range of connotations and ramifications of “rupture” in texts and on areas including but not limited to:
- Aesthetics, ethics, theoretical/literary philosophical models and movements.
- Narrative, genre, textual, visual studies.
- Identities, subjectivities, bodies, gender, sexuality.
- Family, religion, history, folk lore, mythology.
- Diaspora and postcolonial studies, marginal and regional literatures.
- Travel, settlement, resettlement; nature-writing, eco-criticism.

Abstracts of 250 words for 20 minute-papers or 500 words for 60 minute-panels (of three speakers) with brief biographical notes should be sent to ruptureCFP@ntu.edu.sg no later than 1 Feb 2011. Please include your full name and institutional affiliation in your email. Notifications will be sent out by 1 March 2011 (or earlier, for those who need official letters of invitation to seek funding from their home institutions). Details about registration costs, travel grants, and accommodation will be available on the conference website soon.