Updates: CFP, Deadlines for proposals and registration

CFP: Deadline for proposals in January 16, 2006 (however, late submissions
may be accepted for consideration up to Friday January 20, 2006).  

The University of Victoria's 7th Annual English Graduate Students Conference
invites proposals for this year's conference, entitled "Identity Works:
Order and Diversity in Literary Studies," to be held at the University of
Victoria from March 3rd to 4th, 2006.

What does it mean to talk about identity in literature and literary
studies?  This year's conference attempts to interrogate constructions,
definitions, categories, and fictions of identity as they are used in
literary studies. 

How does identity cope with order and/or diversity?  How does identity
imagine notions of multiplicity?  To what extent does identity rely on
exclusion: can identity be realized in a pluralistic society?  We hope to
stimulate a discussion that challenges understandings of identity, and
creates a space to elaborate and explore questions of identity as they arise
in literary studies and in the world around us.

We encourage submissions that consider identity within a diverse range of
literary texts, as well as papers concerned with theoretical implications of
identity.  Specifications for submission: 200-400 word proposals for twenty
minute papers, with a 50 word abstract to be included in the conference
program.   

Possible areas of inquiry include, but are not limited to:

How can discourses of identity in literature and literary studies impact on
broader social and political struggles?
In what ways are we constrained/confined by identity?
How does the language of identity interact with our notions of
discrimination?
Can one distinguish ethical from unethical uses of identity?
What is the function of identity a pluralistic society?
How has "Americanization" affected Canadian identity?
Does identity presuppose unity? 
How is identity formed/accumulated/acquired?
How is identity influenced by technology? 
How can discourses of gender re-imagine identity?
How can minority discourses of identity challenge a hegemonic vision?

Keynote speaker Walter Benn Michaels will be delivering two papers that
focus on the integration of identity, race and class and the tensions
therein.  His discussion evolves from a larger and ongoing argument
developed most recently in "Shape of the Signifier" (2004), that liberalism
and conservatism are both committed to the language of identity in the U.S.
(perhaps more extensively than elsewhere). 

Please attach a separate cover letter with name, address, telephone number,
email address and affiliated institutions.  Deadline for proposals is
January 16, 2006.  Send completed abstracts to Caley Ehnes, Conference
Manager: cehnes_at_uvic.ca.  For further information, including how to register
(the deadline is February 10), and a list of accommodations, please go to
our website http://web.uvic.ca/~englconf/.

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Received on Tue Jan 10 2006 - 10:12:19 EST