CALL FOR PAPERS

Entralogos: Romance Studies Graduate Conference 2007
Feb. 9-10, 2007
Cornell University

Enamored, Romanized, Romanced: Spells of "Romance"

UPDATE: Confirmed keynote: Sterling Professor of French Howard Bloch
(Yale) will be speaking on French literature. Other keynotes pending.

DESCRIPTION:
What does romance conjure? How is it conjured? The word "romance" has been
used to describe an ever-increasing range of conditions, ideas, and
actions throughout its discontinuous but persistent historical
appearances. Such diversity points to language as a dynamic and reflective
ground in which meaning develops continuously. Entralogos 2007 will be an
occasion to consider this versatile signifier and its power to transform
the state of reality. From the Roman Empire's multiple legacies to the
Romanesque, Romanticism, and roman, romanzo, romance in narrative,
"romance" unfolds its affective force in a sensual, contagious gesture
that underlies its expression of violence, sentiment, desire, coercion,
lyricism, and rebellion. The magnitude of the events associated with it
demands the awareness that assembling or pronouncing a word in a specific
way entails the risk of altering the factual. "Romance" has imposed
particular, complex experiences and notions (to mention only a few) of
reading and writing, of the composition of the inhabited world (the Roman
Empire's oikoumene, which introduced differences between East and West
that today still foster senses of identity), and of truth, faith, and
fiction; it intertwines emotion and beauty, as it does justice and
property. Its many irreducible transfigurations resist the closure of
linguistic lineage, time period, and creative form or genre by instead
traversing them disruptively.

We are interested in looking at romance from a perspective that cannot be
exhausted within the margins of romance languages and literatures.
Therefore, we welcome work from a variety of theoretical postures, time
periods, disciplines, departments, or movements.

Topics could include (but are not limited to):

* iterations of the amorous in literature, psychoanalysis, music, and
painting;
* analysis of gender roles through romantic love and literary language;
* emotions associated with "romance" (desire, melancholy, nostalgia);
* Romanticism in music;
* melodrama;
* passion, revolution, violence, and borders;
* encounters among romance languages and between romance and non-romance
languages;
* the influence of the Roman, Romantic, and Romanesque spirits on ideas,
practices, and events;
* impositions of universality by religion and law;
* consequences of imperialism on territorial practices, language,
literature, art, the university, and politics;
* convergences and divergences between Romanticism and Classicism;
* Romantic Orientalism;
* translation to and from romance languages;
* the development of genre within literature in the vernacular;
* and representations of the world through official languages and
discourses and clandestine ones.

Please submit an anonymous abstract of no more than 250 words by December
15, 2006 to Bill Viestenz at wrv3_at_cornell.edu. Abstracts must include an
attached cover letter indicating the title, author's name, affiliation,
address, telephone number, and e-mail address. All papers and abstracts
must be in English. Submissions are accepted from graduate students only.
Interdisciplinary approaches encouraged. We look forward to your
submissions.

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Received on Fri Dec 15 2006 - 20:16:47 EST