Maryland Graduate Forum: History as Text, Text as History
   
Conference: February 23rd & February 24th
Deadline for abstract submission: December 15th,2006
email contact: mgsforum_at_gmail.com

   We are very pleased and honored to announce that our
   keynote speaker will be Dr Tom Bishop (NYU), Gould
   Professor of French Literature and director of the
   Center for French Civilization and Culture.

   At the forefront of literary and cultural
   scholarship today stands the reevaluation of texts,
   which challenges their role as apolitical aesthetic
   works and redefines them as products of their
   representative cultures capable of reciprocally
   influencing their society. We have selected the
   topic “History as Text, Text as History” with
   the intention of exploring this dynamic relationship
   of History and Literature.
   Furthermore, we do not limit our understanding of
   the concept of “text” to written documents, but
   instead will extend the notion of text to include
   architecture, various media of speech, films, music,
   official documents and dialects. We expect to
   organize panels focusing on the following topics:
   â€œLiterature as Culture,” “The Visuals Arts as
   Text,” “Beyond the Facts: The Influence of
   Contemporary Discourses on the Recording of
   History,” and “Language Learning through
   Culture.”

   The graduate students of the SLLC at the University
   of Maryland cordially invite the submission of
   papers from all disciplines that examine these
   different topics using the following questions as
   possible guidelines:

   â€¢ Cultural influence in linguistic developments:
   How does this affect second language acquisition?
   What are the implications for anglophone,
   francophone, germanophone, hispanophone, Japanese,
   lusophone, russophone, and other speakers?

   â€¢ Can one’s native culture influence his/her
   acquisition of a second language? How?

   â€¢ Evolution in theoretical developments:
   romanticism to realism; modern (surrealism,
   existentialism, industrialism) to post-modern
   (post-colonialism; globalization; orientalism;
   post-industrialism); structuralism to
   post-structuralism; feminism to post-feminism; How
   are these theoretical developments defined in a
   text?

   â€¢ Author interpretation of societal influences in
   a text (social, economic, scientific, political,
   etc)?

   â€¢ How does one interpret various forms of the
   visual arts as a text? What is the relationship
   between literature, culture and other forms of art
   (architecture, film, painting, sculpture)? Is the
   adaptation of a literary text, such as a film
   adaptation, effected by the cultural context in
   which it is produced?

   â€¢ How can one better understand gender relations
   (history vs. herstory) of a time by “reading” a
   text (that is listening to a musical score, looking
   at a sculpture, watching a film, reading a novel
   etc)?

   These guidelines are meant to generate ideas and are
   suggestive rather than exhaustive. Proposals with a
   literary, historical, comparative, linguistic,
   language acquisition and interdisciplinary approach
   as well as from any time period are welcome. Please
   send a 150-word abstract in English by email
   attachment (Word preferred) before December 15, 2006
   and any inquiries to the following address:
   mgsforum_at_gmail.com.

   Please address all inquiries and submissions to:
   Christina Wall
   3215 Jiménez Hall
   University of Maryland
   College Park, MD 20742
   Important dates:
   Submission deadline: December, 15th
   Acceptance notices: January 15th
   Conference: February 23rd and 24th

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Received on Sun Nov 12 2006 - 23:45:53 EST