Worlding the Text: Crosscurrents in Literary Studies

 The Graduate English Students' Association in the University of
Virginia's Department of English would like to invite submissions to
our annual conference, to be held from March 31st to April 1st, 2006.

 This conference invites papers that examine literary studies and its
relationship to 'the world' and multiple acts of 'worlding.' All texts
represent a world, in the strict sense of aesthetic mimesis. Some
papers might address this first sense of worlding: how literary texts
reflect their world of production and reception, and in doing so bring
worlds into being, be they aesthetic, textual, historical, economic,
political, cultural, or psychological. What then is the relationship
between the 'world' projected in the text and that which it inhabits?
In what ways does a text reconstitute or reconfigure its world of
production, reception, and imagined possibility?

 But we are especially concerned with recent cross-currents in
literary studies – including changes in postcolonial, transnational,
transatlantic, cross-cultural, and globalization studies. How have new
developments in these fields changed the terms, debates, analyses, and
objects of Anglophone (or other) literatures from all periods and
cultural traditions? How do textual worldings redefine notions of
identity, subjectivity, belonging (local, regional, national, global)
and literary history itself? How do we respond to the 'globalizing' of
literary studies? And given this new direction, what risks and
possibilities are at stake?

 Possible topics include but are not limited to:
 Mimesis, representation, subjectivity, and temporality
 Historiography
 Textual production and reception
 Genre studies (their limits, borders, and expansion)
 Mappings and border crossings
 Cross-cultural encounter
 The Human, Human Rights, and New Humanisms
 Colonialism/postcolonialism
 Cosmopolitanism
 Representations of Racial and Cultural Difference
 Transatlanticism and the Black Atlantic
 Transnationality
 Globalization

 We are also pleased to announce our two distinguished keynote
speakers, who will be addressing these and other questions: Kwame
Anthony Appiah (Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of
Philosophy at Princeton Univerity) and Wai Chee Dimock (Lampson
Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University).

 Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words (or panel proposals
of no more than 700 words, including descriptions of individual
papers), making note of planned A/V needs, to
uvagesaconf2006_at_gmail.com no later than March 5th , 2006. (No
attachments, please.) Please address any other inquiries to the same
address.

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Received on Thu Feb 02 2006 - 14:30:41 EST