Call for papers
NEMLA April 7-8, 2000
Buffalo, New York
The Desiring Body in Contemporary Women's Fiction
Contemporaneity suggests, perhaps, a plethora of strategies in the work of
women writers to convey eros. Winterson, exemplary in this regard, has been
praised for "inciting readers to imagine a world in which desire has been
dislodged from . . . regulatory regimes". But cancer, a romantic fading
away, still carried Winterson's pale and perfect Louise out of Written on
the Body. Thus, does Winterson's writing exemplify the triumph of desire
over the limits of the body through ungendered sexuality, or does this
writing absorb even the shadow that a body throws into the rubric, still, of
romantic love? Dorothy Allison's faith in the representation of sexual
aggressivity in women promises equal opportunity realism for desiring
bodies, deeply gendered. Margaret Atwood, meanwhile, offers fantasies of
meta-violence, and thereby suggests that any logic based on the body's
subsequence to desire at least threatens, if not *is*, misogyny. This
panel will focus on the representation (and the post-representation,
non-representation, anti-representation) of the body as it desires in the
work of contemporary women writers, and will ask after how desiring bodies
are "present" in their works.
The panelists are invited to consider the following questions:
--How is bodily experience to be communicated at all via the indirect means
of words?
--What is the relationship between a text and its context (political,
economic, ethical, institutional, etc.)? Is the representation of eros
always subject to the socio-political?
--How do other categories of representation, like class and race, subsume
eros and to what affect? Does desire subsume other categories, like age and
profession, and to what affect?
--How is the translation of supposedly fundamental human drives --
emotional, spiritual, intellectual, physical -- into literary bodies
subversive and/or complicit in extraliterary subjugations of "real" female
bodies?
--Does subversion of representation/realism free desire? Can desire, though
it presumes a body, resist "presence"?
Send one-page abstracts by Sept. 15 to:
Gina Camodeca
English Department
D'Youville College
320 Porter Ave.
Buffalo, NY 14201
email: camodeca@dyc.edu
===============================================
From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List
CFP@english.upenn.edu
Full Information at
http://www.english.upenn.edu/CFP/
or write Erika Lin: elin@english.upenn.edu
===============================================
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Feb 09 2000 - 13:50:34 EST