CFP: Figurations of Death (9/24; ACLA, 2/25-2/27)

From: Jared Stark (jared.stark@nyu.edu)
Date: Fri Sep 10 1999 - 14:49:09 EDT


For the ACLA conference at Yale, 2/25-2/27, on the theme
"INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES: IN THE MIDDLE, ACROSS, OR IN BETWEEN?" we
have proposed the following seminar. More information on the conference
can be found at "http://www.yale.edu/complit/acla2000.htm".

Seminar topic:

Death Masks: Figurations of Death in and out of Literature

The seminar seeks to investigate political, ethical, psychoanalytical,
philosophical, artistic, cinematic and other uses, representations and
figures of death and dying. We are particularly interested in the
appearance of figures of death and survival in literary and cultural
discourse. How, for instance, are images of death deployed to perform
cultural analysis in such diverse areas as sociology, anthropology, the
law, discourses of technology, historiography, and other disciplines?
How are discourses of death used to define and negotiate personal and
collective identity? Areas of interest might include, but are certainly
not limited to, the following:

o The death of (literature, philosophy, reading, history, man,
psychoanalysis, etc.)
o The politics of death (e.g., contested corpses, gravesites, funeral
rites, private and public mourning, canonization and martyrdom, the
politics of "assisted suicide" and capital punishment, death and
nationalism, etc.)
o Discourses of the spectral: haunted cultures, languages, histories.
o Representation and/as death: death and narrative closure, photography
as death, etc.
o Death and the market (the "value" of death in art and literature,
death and commodity fetishism, etc.)
o The relationship of recent "histories of death" to literary and
cultural criticism
o Figures and representations of the Holocaust
o Mourning in cultural discourses
o Death and technology

Please send one-page proposals, or address inquiries, to:

Alessia Ricciardi, Department of French and Italian, Northwestern
University, 1859 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 66208; a-ricciardi@nwu.edu

and/or

Jared Stark, Draper Program, New York University, 14 University Place,
New York, NY 10003; fax 212-995-4691; jared.stark@nyu.edu.

E-mail submissions are encouraged.

Submission deadline: September 24. Unless otherwise requested, we will
forward any proposals we are not able to accommodate to the conference
organizers for independent consideration.

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