CFP: THE DECAYING SENSE OF LEVIATHAN:
A CRITICALLY CREATIVE CONFERENCE
Département d'études anglaises—Université de Montréal—Québec, Canada
March 16-18, 2007

Thomas Hobbes, in his classic text Leviathan, characterises the formation of political government as a function of human creativity rooted in the "decaying sense"—the imagination's mental alteration of its memories of the natural world. In an attempt to likewise reunite the creative and the critical work that defines our field, the Département d'études anglaises of Université de Montréal seeks participants for its graduate student conference to be held March 16-18, 2007. In this expansive spirit, our theme broadly interprets leviathan as any large, overarching, and prescriptive entity or system of thought within the realms of politics, society, culture, international relations, language, methods of reading or of writing, the modern Enlightenment project, religious systems, nationalisms, traditional categories of identity, and power structures that favour the status quo. The decaying sense corresponds to the degeneration of such paradigms, the interaction of the creative arts!
  with politics, the function of imagination, deconstruction, the "postness" of postcolonialism and postmodernism, the transgression of genre, the politics of difference, and the function or lack of sense within war or the globalisation perpetrated by modern empires. All participants are encouraged to freely interpret, apply, and integrate the conference's unifying themes in as organic and tangential a manner as possible.

In exploring these notions, this conference will embody a double approach. First, a limited number of critical panels will present fifteen minute papers on, but not limited to, the above concerns. Second, three creative writing workshops, composed of eight students each, will be facilitated by eminent professional writers: Montreal experimental cross-genre novelist Gail Scott, San Francisco Bay area visual poet and poetics journal editor Yedda Morrison, and British Columbian poet, editor and critic Fred Wah, who will also deliver our keynote address.

Those wishing to present papers must send a 200 word abstract, and those wishing to be in one of the creative writing workshops must send three pages of prose, poetry, or cross-genre text representative of the material that they want to workshop. Further instructions and short biographies of the workshop leaders are posted at our graduate student website, www.geocities.com/egssmontreal. Students may participate in either the critical or creative aspect of the conference or in both, though those in workshops from outside the department will be asked to pay a fee of $20. The conference will conclude with an "oral anthology" in which the creative writing students will present one page of their finished text, and which will possibly be published in a special edition of our departmental newsletter. All submissions must be accepted by email at udemleviathan_at_yahoo.ca by Friday, January 15, 2007.

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Received on Sun Nov 19 2006 - 18:51:36 EST