cfp.english.upenn.edu

[CFP to follow:]

Just announced:

Michael Naas, Professor and Chair, Department of Philosophy, DePaul University and Ph.D., Stony Brook University, will deliver the 2013 Kahana Memorial Lecture:

"Turning Home: Literature, Philosophy, and the Reinvention of the Wheel": In his final seminar of 2002-2003, recently published under the title _The Beast and the Sovereign_ (volume 2), Jacques Derrida reads together two texts that, while enormously different in terms of time, language, and genre, both turn around questions of finitude, solitude, nostalgia, and, especially, the possibility or impossibility of homecoming: Daniel Defoe’s _Robinson Crusoe_ and Martin Heidegger’s seminar of 1929-30, published as _The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics_. Through this unexpected choice of texts, Derrida is able to interrogate, as I will show, not only the relationship between philosophy and literature but the way in which the circular figure of homecoming, the circular movement away from and then back toward a point of origin, becomes the very figure or movement of identity itself in Western philosophy and literature. I will thus argue that Derrida’s reading of Heidegger and Defoe in this final seminar has profound implications for our thinking of the future of literature and philosophy and for our attempt to reread, return to, and reappropriate what we believe to be our tradition.

The annual keynote address at the Stony Brook English Graduate Conference is supported by the Anne P. Kahana Memorial Fund. Pat Kahana was an outstanding Ph.D. student in the English Department at Stony Brook whose dissertation, _Illness, Health, and the Romantic Subject: An Intergeneric Study_ was published, and her degree awarded, after her untimely death in 1991.

Coming Home

The 25th Annual English Graduate Conference at Stony Brook University

February 9, 2013
Stony Brook Manhattan,
New York City

Now in its twenty-fifth year, Stony Brook University's English Graduate Conference is currently accepting paper proposals addressing the question of what it means to come home. What is a home, and what does the idea of being "at home" signify? What are the potential problems or benefits of being removed from home?

Possible areas of inquiry may include, but are not limited to, the following themes:

- Coming home and/or not coming home
- Exile and refuge
- Hetero-normativity and queering the home
- Migration, transmigration, and diaspora
- Domesticity and gender
- Public and private spheres
- Travel
- National, ethnic, and/or cultural identities
- The home as architectural, spiritual, geographic, or other type of space

Inter- and cross-disciplinary approaches are welcome. Single paper abstracts should be no more than 250 words. The submission of entire 3-paper panels is also encouraged; these proposals should include an abstract for each paper as well as a <250-word description of the panel's objective. Please also include, with all proposals, full name and contact information, and institutional affiliation, for all applicants.

Please submit proposals to:
stonybrookenglishgradcon@gmail.com
by Friday, December 21, 2012
More info: www.sbuenglishgradcon.com