Dear Colleagues:

I am organizing a special session on “Trauma, Text, and Image” for the conference entitled, “Text and Image: The Language of Images” hosted by Central Connecticut State University next March 29-30. The conference will theorize the complex interaction between texts and images in fields as diverse as literature, art, philosophy, history, drama, sociology, tourism, cartography, graphic design, and the media.

The panel on Trauma, Text, and Image asks how the relationship between texts and images can speak, represent, or otherwise articulate traumatic experiences â€" whether global or local, historical or personal â€" or how representations of traumatic experiences necessarily complicate or interfere with our understanding of this interaction. Possible topics include Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, particularly its reliance on photographic images, or even blank spaces, to convey the perspective of a young child following the death of his father in the 9-11 terrorist attacks, or Art Spiegelman’s Maus series and its use of comix conventions to tell the story of the Holocaust.

Papers should address such topics as history, memory, trauma, and nostalgia, but also consider such formal issues as the disruptive potential of iconotexts, ekphrasis, self-referentiality, and the conventions of the graphic novel.

Please send a 250-word abstract and a short biography as a Word attachment by Monday, October 30 2006 to Aimee Pozorski at pozorskia_at_ccsu.edu. All submissions for this panel will be acknowledged and decisions will be made by November 1.

The conference will take place on the campus of Central Connecticut State University, located near Hartford CT, which boasts easy access to New York City, Boston, and Providence.

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Received on Thu Oct 05 2006 - 01:16:36 EDT