DEADLINE EXTENSION: The deadline for submissions for "Literature and
Democracy" has been extended to January 7, 2002
Emory University
Atlanta, GA
February 22-24
Major Invited Speakers:
Peggy Kamuf, University of Southern California
Thomas Keenan, Bard College
"There can be no literature without democracy and no democracy without
literature."
Jacques Derrida, Passions
Following on the "Violence and Representation" and "Literature on Trial"
conferences held at Emory University in recent years, this conference will
address the relationship between literature and democracy. Prompted by
Derrida's statement, we would like to open these terms to a thinking of
literature beyond the work of art and of democracy as more than simply a
form of government.
Can there be literature without democracy? What is the place of
literature, the literary, and literacy within democracy? How are we to
understand democracy in its function as a condition of possibility of
literature? Can there be democracy without literature? In what way is
democracy conditioned by the literary, by an instability of referential
meaning, that would more commonly be seen to threaten it or call it into
question? For a democracy to be a democracy, must it always be "to come,"
must it welcome the very discourse that destabilizes it?
We invite papers that engage these questions or issues related to them.
Paper topics might include:
- the discourse of human rights and its critiques
- reading revolutionary and founding texts as literature
- literature and the creation / dissolution of the nation state
- representations / critiques of democracy in literature
- the rhetoric of political speeches and supreme court decisions
- identity politics and the literature of traditionally democratic nations
and cultures
- role of mass media and technology in creating, sustaining, or corrupting
democracies
- literature and totalitarianism
- ideology and terror
- psychoanalysis and democracy
- free speech and the limits of democracy
- citizens and subjects in the modern democratic state
- democracy, education, and the future of literary studies
Specifics: Please submit a cover letter and a 300 word abstract for a
twenty minute presentation by January 7, 2002. Send to:
Literature and Democracy
Program in Comparative Literature
Emory University
Atlanta, GA 30322
By email, please send abstracts to: bmcgrat@Learnlink.Emory.Edu
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