Things/Matter
The Object and Its Representation in Literature and Art

28th Annual Rice University Graduate Symposium, March 24-25, 2006; Rice
University, Houston, Texas

Keynote Speaker

Professor Susan Staves's scholarly interests center on English literature and
history in the Restoration and eighteenth century, particularly on questions of
how ideologies are variously created and represented in texts ranging from
comedies to judicial opinions. She is the author of Married Woman's Separate
Property in England, 1660-1833 (1990) and coeditor and contributor of Early
Modern Conceptions of Property (1995). Her Literary History of Women's Writing
in Britain, 1660-1789 is forthcoming.

Call for Papers

In recent years, the study of material culture has become an increasingly broad
area of academic interest, involving a variety of disciplines and
methodologies. With this year's Rice University Graduate Symposium, we hope to
foster interdisciplinary dialogue among emerging scholars, answering such
questions raised by the field as the following:

What practical and symbolic roles do objects play within their cultural
contexts? How do objects gather new meaning when represented in a new medium?
How do such representations of objects in literature and art influence culture
in return? And how might the material forms of literary texts or works of art
assert themselves?

We invite graduate students from a variety of disciplines, including but not
limited to English and other literatures, history, economics, art history, and
anthropology, to submit papers examining the relationship between an object or
its representation and its literary, cultural, or historical contexts.
Individual and panel submissions are welcome. Please send abstracts of 200
words or less. Presentations should be no more than 15 minutes in length. Our
submission deadline is February 3, 2006. Final copies of accepted papers
should be submitted for advance circulation by March 10, 2006.

Possible Topics:

• The relationship of the object to the body and/or gender.
• The object as fetish.
• The material book as object and its instantiation in written text.
• The circulation of objects on either a local or global scale.
• Consumer culture in its contemporary and historical manifestations.

Send submissions or questions to Elizabeth Womack at ecwomack_at_rice.edu or
Eun-Young Koh at eunykoh_at_rice.edu.

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Received on Mon Dec 05 2005 - 13:14:48 EST