CFP: "Those Images That Yet/Fresh Images Beget": Intertextuality in Irish Literature (Australia) (12/15/05; IASIL, 7/2

full name / name of organization: 
patrick lonergan

IASIL 2006 - First Call for Papers.
Reply to irish_at_unsw.edu.au
http://www.iasil.org/sydney

Proposals are warmly invited on the general conference theme: exploring
'intertextuality' in all its forms in Irish literature and culture. Please
submit a title and 200 word abstract to irish_at_unsw.edu.au by 15th December,
2005. Papers should not exceed 20 minutes duration.

IASIL 2006 - "Those images that yet/ Fresh images beget" (W.B. Yeats
'Byzantium')
University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
Thursday 20 July to Sunday 23 July 2006

In writing The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland, Edna
Longley says that she found she was often 'tracing a textual web', and that
the term 'intertextuality' applied to what she was investigating 'not as a
theoretical dead letter, but as a creative dynamic working upon mechanisms
of tradition and cultural definitions alike'.

This conference is devoted to exploring 'intertextuality' in all its forms
in Irish literature and culture from earliest times to the present.

The creative dynamic that Edna Longley detects is of course even at work in
her own formulation with its echoes of Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual
Talent", Barthes' "The Death of the Author", and Yeats's "Easter 1916".

And it seems equally true of critic as of creator, though Wilde has
brilliantly collapsed that distinction.

In terms of creativity W.B. Yeats celebrates a 'self-affrighting',
'self-delighting' process by which art generates art-'Those images that
yet/Fresh images beget'.

Others use different metaphors. W.H. Auden writes of his awareness of
'ghostly presences'; Harold Bloom of 'the anxiety of influence'; Richard
Ellmann of 'eminent domain'; M.H. Abrams of exploring 'serviceable
analogues, whose properties were, by metaphorical transfer, predicated of a
work of art'; Edna Longley of a 'dispersed collectivity' that is the domain
of 'intertextual antagonism'; Seamus Heaney of 'overhearing'; and T.S. Eliot
of his belief that 'between the true artists of any one time there is S an
unconscious community'.

Not that such 'influences', 'exchanges', 'transactions', 'borrowings' or
'intertextualities'-or whatever one wants to call them-are always as benign
as inferred by 'community' or as organic as implied by begetting. They might
contaminate, distort, or perhaps render stereotypical.

But if such processes are as powerful and as pervasive as writers and
critics claim, shouldn't we enquire into how they function? and shouldn't we
ask what are the implications for Irish Studies-particularly about the ways
we research and teach?

IASIL 2006, which will meet in Sydney from Thursday 20 July to Sunday 23
July inclusive, has committed itself to exploring, explicating and enjoying
the 'textual web' that is Irish Studies.

Anyone wishing to deliver a paper at the IASIL conference must be a member
of the Association for 2006. Details are on http://www.iasil.org/membership/

Conference website: http://www.iasil.org/sydney/

***********************************************
Dr Patrick Lonergan
Room 514, English Department,
National University of Ireland, Galway,
Co Galway
Ireland.

patrick.lonergan_at_ireland.com
webmaster_at_iasil.org
reviews_at_irishtheatremagazine.ie

http://www.nuigalway.ie/enl/
http://www.iasil.org/
http://www.irishtheatremagazine.ie/

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Received on Wed Sep 21 2005 - 11:41:24 EDT

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