CFP: Dream Writing (UK) (4/20/05; 10/15/05-10/16/05)

Dream writing

A two-day conference
October 15-6, 2005
The University of Kent, United Kingdom

We live alongside our dreams, even if it is not to our liking. Not only are
dreams recurrent themes in literary and visual representations, but theories of
dreams and dreaming permeate all humanities disciplines. The dream is a potent
critical tool; we suggest ‘dream’ could be the name of a new genre,
like ‘film’. We are surprisingly uncritical of our appropriation of dreams,
which are too often taken to mean something else – symbols, manifestations of
our psyche, or as a literary or rhetorical device through which truth,
otherwise suppressed, slips into the open. This interdisciplinary conference
wishes to shed fresh light on our relationship with dream and the mysteries of
its allure, in order to redefine our approach to dreams. We will explore how,
when, and why dreams come to us within the academic disciplines (or do we
resort to dreams?). We wish to read dreams alongside and against
psychoanalysis, and to ask to what extent ‘dreams write’, how much the texts we
read and produce in our daily life are informed by dreams, or by our
understanding of what dreams are.

We seek to bring together different disciplines, practices and genres through
the theme of dream writing. Papers are thus sought across the humanities
(literature, art, film, history, philosophy, anthropology, creative writing,
etc), from specialists and non-specialists of dream theories. We welcome unique
approaches to all aspects of dreams and dream writing, pointing to new ways of
dreaming through reading / writing / conceptualising dreams.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to :

 - Dreams and writing
 - Dreams and language
 - Dreams and psychoanalysis
 - Interpretation of dreams
 - The politics and ideologies of dreaming
 - Translation theories and dreams
 - Dreams and intertextuality
 - Dreaming in the different epistemes – the Middle Age, Renaissance, pre-
Freudian, non-European dreams etc, their dream theories, and/or their place in
our contemporary ways of dreaming. Philosophy of dreams, history of dreaming
 - Race and dreams: colonial and anthropological dreams, fantasy and dreams as
the Other. Postcolonial uses of the dream space, e.g. dreams as the site of
identities/ ethnicities
 - Arts and dreaming: films, photography, sculpture, music etc.
 - Architectural dreams
 - Alternative spaces of dreaming: computer games, drugs and hallucination,
utopias, travels, daydreaming, etc.
 - Geography of dreams, dreamland
 - Nightmares, fear, panic, sanity
 - Political dreams, ethical dreams
 - Dreams and consumerism
 - Dreams and memory
 - Censorship and boundaries. Dream as a genre
 - Dream and literature, dream journals, autobiography, poems, etc.
 - Dreams and religion: theology; dreaming with God(s), God as a dream.
 - Sexuality and dreams; gendered dreams
 - Voices in dreams. Bodies or materiality of dreams
 - Dream universities

Please send an abstract to Kaori Nagai (K.Nagai_at_kent.ac.uk) by 20 April 2005.

For further details and enquiries, please contact :

Dr. Kaori Nagai / Dr. Sarah Wood
School of English
The University of Kent
Canterbury, Kent
CT2 7NZ, UK
e-mail : K.Nagai_at_kent.ac.uk

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Received on Tue Dec 07 2004 - 09:55:46 EST