Comp Lit Graduate Student Conference - Call for Papers!
"Foreclosure and Forgiveness: Tracing Debt in Literature and Culture"
Thurs. 29 - Sat.31 of March 2007

Call for Papers

Debt is a central concept of social and cultural life and a defining characteristic of
contemporary experience. Its
prevalence raises the question of what happens when debt itself undergoes inflation: does
debt lose its
meaning when so much is owed? This conference seeks to critically engage with the ubiquity
of debt in a variety
of disciplines and to explore the transactional basis of social and cultural exchange. A
conspicuous presence
from Plato's Republic to the current state of international relations, debt is equally salient in
literary,
psychoanalytic, philosophical, and political discourses. Debt is, to invoke Roland Barthes, a
free-floating
signifier appropriate for the age of the floating exchange rate, a topos of judgment that is
translatable into any
discursive field. This conference will map the costs of foreclosure and the value of
forgiveness in an effort to think relationships beyond rhetorical recourse to the "balance of
payments."

Proposals may address, but are not restricted to, the following topics:
- Influence, tradition, and intellectual debt
- Debt and civic participation
- Translation and debt
- Debt and the gift
- Responsibility, restitution, reconciliation, revenge
- Debt as a category of relation to an other
- Debt and the national imaginary
- Remembering, memorializing, and monumentalizing debt
- Debt and inheritance
- Exchange, interest, and accumulation
- Debt and class
- The ethics of the loan
- Debt and historiography
- Queering debt
- Licensing, permission, and intellectual property
- Debt and the State/the State of the Debt
- Monitoring debt: justice and forgiveness
- Debt and the (academic) institution

Papers should be 20 minutes long. Please send abstracts (300 words) with full name, paper
title, and institution
(use "Tracing Debt" in the subject line) to tracingdebt_at_gmail.com by December 31, 2006.
Selected participants will be notified by February 2, 2007.

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Received on Sat Dec 09 2006 - 17:47:44 EST