2002 NYU Comparative Literature Graduate Student Colloquium
The Speakable, the Unspeakable, and the Politics of
Listening: The Ethics of Confronting the Real
Traumatic events might be understood as the intrusion
of the infinite, and often horrifying, possibilities of the real into our once seemingly certain grasp of reality. The response to trauma is an ethical one:
confronted with the dissolution of our previous ideas we must choose a new set of concepts, effectively deciding how we wish to relate to the world. For this reason our response is creative, and potentially liberatory, though this moment of liberation is utterly tied to the degree to which we wish to embrace or repress the new realm of reality that has been unveiled.
Taking this moment to be both traumatic and potentially liberating, this conference wishes to examine both
the path and the impediments to this liberatory
thinking transhistorically and across disciplines, by posing the question of where speech, silence, and merely
listening stand in terms of the ethics of confronting
the real. Topics may include (but are not limited to):
-Questioning the place of literature in times of crisis
-Geopolitics of imperialism
-The reinforcement and dissolution of the nation-state
-Challenging relativism and the construction of
difference
-Normalization and universalization in shifting
constructions of race, gender, and ethnicity
-Elisions, omissions and the question of dissent
-Interrogating the reinscription of the figure of the
hero
-Aesthetics and politics of violence
-Imperial power and mappings of the world
-Nation-less bodies
-Muted voices
-Personal monuments in public spaces and other
fetishizations of tragedy
-The unspoken in cultural and literary representations
of horror
This colloquium, hosted by the Graduate Student Committee of the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University, will use a panel format. We encourage all that are interested to submit a proposal for a fifteen-minute presentation. Abstracts (and questions) can be sent electronically to kmcmorris@aol.com by March 25, 2002. The colloquium will take place on April 26, 2002.
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or write Erika Lin: elin@english.upenn.edu
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