Concordia University =96 Department of English =96 Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Fifth Annual Graduate Colloquium

*Monsterisms *

* *

March 23rd-24th, 2007

As Enlightenment expression was giving way to Romanticism, Francisco Goya
wrote, "The sleep of reason produces monsters." His English contemporary
Mary Shelley offered a refutation in a monster born of Reason wide-awake.
The figure of the monster has long haunted literature; from the serpent in
the garden to Blake's Tyger in the night, from Hobbes's Leviathan to
Melville's Moby Dick,* *from Ovid's Metamorphoses to Kafka's Metamorphosis*=
,
* we have been fascinated by what may lurk behind our fragile visions of
ourselves.

 The 5th Annual Concordia University Graduate Colloquium will* *explore how
the beastly affects our picture of the human, threatening to turn the Angel
of the House into the monster in the attic. Considering a broad range of
frightful subjects, from abominations of science to supernatural horrors, w=
e
ask: to what degree are we the products of our nightmares? This two-day
conference seeks papers that examine the creation, mutation, repression,
expression, mythologizing, fabulation, exorcism, primordial belief in or
stubborn rejection of the Monstrous. We welcome papers on a diverse range o=
f
topics, among them the following:

   - The Grotesque **
   - The Nightmare
   - Representations of Alterity
   - Travel and Exploration Writing
   - Early Modern Encounters with First Nations Peoples
   - Homosexuality as Monstrous, Radically Outside
   - Woman as Monster
   - Sci-Fi Writing, Cyborg Theorizations
   - Biblical/Mythological Beasts
   - The Non-Human and Super-Human in Epic Literature
   - Graphic Representations in Literature or other media
   - Apparitions, Spectres in Gothic Writing
   - The Spectral, the Trace, the Gift to which one cannot respond in
   contemporary theory
   - The Unknown/Unknowable
   - Monstrous Metamorphoses
   - The Human Monster: Madness, Murder, Rape, and Pedophilia
   - Monstrosities of Form

Please send a 200-300 word abstract by Friday, January 5, 2007:

By email: colloquiumconcordia_at_gmail.com

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Received on Wed Nov 08 2006 - 12:14:31 EST