CFP: Cultural Paradigms and Historical Memory (9/15/04; NEMLA, 3/31/05-4/2/05)

CALL FOR PAPERS

'The Waning of History', 'the Return of the Repressed': Cultural Paradigms
and Historical Memory

Does 'the real' of history escape us in our virtual worlds, as critics such
as Baudrillard and Jameson claim, or do our virtual worlds reproduce what
they repress, namely 'the real' in a distorted, but retrievable form, as
Freudian thinkers would tend to think? We are looking for contributions
exploring literary or filmic works that negotiate the relationship between
history and historical memory, addressing the creation of virtual worlds
and the manipulation of cultural production, its successes and backlashes,
the relationship of immaterial and material culture, or investigating
alternative concepts of how cultural production translates historical
experience into the present.

Please send abstracts by September 15 to evelyn.preuss_at_yale.edu.

At the end of the twentieth century, cultural theorists of both the left
and the right shared a sense that history had lost its cultural
significance. While Francis Fukuyama, for instance, argued that liberal
democracy represented an endpoint in the ideological development of
mankind, ending history as we know it, Frederic Jameson contended that the
postmodern era devalued history through depthlessness and the fragmentation
of time into perceptual presents. These theses call for critical inquiry:
if Western ideologies deny history to such an extent that their vision of
the future crystallizes in an eternal present, if pop history, pastiche and
image culture 'empty out history', what are these cultural phenomena a
token of? Of our desire to eliminate history, to appropriate it, to consume
it? Here, the theorists of postmodernity clash with psychoanalytic concepts
of memory and history. Does 'the real' escape us in our virtual worlds, as
critics such as Baudrillard and Jameson claim, or do our virtual worlds
reproduce what they repress, namely 'the real' in a distorted, but
retrievable form, as Freudian thinkers would tend to think? To what extent
is the virtual indeed virtual and not 'real' and what are the implications
for our experience of time and our relationship to history? What role does
metaphorical language play in representations of history and to what extent
has history itself become a metaphor?

The proposed panel takes up the discussion generated by the "Umkehrung,
Verkehrung, Wende: Turning Points in German Culture" panels at the 2004
NEMLA Convention, which had raised questions regarding the concept of time
and its relation to experience in the twentieth century, the politics
implied in a historical versus a spatial definition of national identity
and the historical understanding (dis)engendered by comic and pastiche
modes of dealing with the past. "'The Waning of History', 'the Return of
the Repressed'" intends to focus this discussion by juxtaposing the two
prevalent, but antithetical concepts of history at the end of the twentieth
century, anticipating and seeking to formulate new theoretical approaches.

We are looking for contributions exploring works that negotiate the
relationship between history and historical memory, addressing the creation
of virtual worlds and the manipulation of cultural production, its
successes and backlashes, the relationship of immaterial and material
culture, or investigating alternative concepts of how cultural production
translates historical experience into the present.

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Received on Wed Sep 08 2004 - 16:47:21 EDT