UPDATE: the CFP due date for the NYU Comparative Literature graduate student conference ("Foreclosure and Forgiveness: Tracing Debt in Literature and Culture," 2007) has been moved to January 10, 2007. Please send all abstracts to tracingdebt-at-gmail.com; use "Tracing Debt" in the subject line.

Foreclosure and Forgiveness: Tracing Debt in Literature and Culture

A Graduate Student Conference
Sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature
New York University
March Thurs. 29 - Sat.31, 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.
To invoke Roland Barthes, debt is 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 January 10, 2007. Selected participants will be notified by February 2, 2007.

homepages.nyu.edu/~mat373

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Received on Sat Jan 06 2007 - 17:58:38 EST