1st Global Conference
Music And…Death

Saturday 2nd December 2017 – Sunday 3rd December 2017
Vienna, Austria

Call for Local Stories for the 7th Issue of Localities

Call for Reviewers for the 7th Issue of Localities

This panel focuses on medieval conceptions of time, history, and memory. As literary historians, we frequently encounter the challenges of periodization: how to establish the autonomous significance of the Middle Ages, as well as think beyond the limits of stage-oriented historiography. Yet how did medieval chroniclers, poets, artists, and travellers view the historical process and their place within it? What “pasts” did they recover, and what forms of representation were used to remember, rehearse or reimagine them? Are there distinctions drawn between history and memory—between notionally universal, stable, and textual forms of record, and personal, bodily, and mutable ones?

In Moby-Dick, Ahab, the monomaniacal captain of the Pequod, famously iterates the following lines: “Hark ye yet again,—the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!” In this instance, Ahab might be seen as possessed by what John Dewey called philosophy’s endless “quest for certainty.” Thus, Ahab’s monomaniacal discourse can be said to turn on the appearance/reality distinction—a dichotomy germane to Western metaphysics since Plato.

Donald Trump's election as President of the United States on an openly anti-immigrant, and indeed anti-Mexican, platform constitutes a challenge for the field of border studies: What is border culture when the leader of the most powerful country in the world insists on closing the border? This panel aims to map the current state of the discourse(s) on and from the U.S.-Mexico border, including literature, film, journalism, and music. Papers in English and Spanish will be considered. 

Abstracts for papers are requsted for the panel "Global Wars, Local Traumas" at the 49th NeMLA Annual Convention (April 12-15, 2018) Pittsburgh, PA, USA.

Panel Title: Global Wars, Local Traumas