CFP: Trauma and National Literatures (3/22/05; MLA '05)

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CFP: TRAUMA AND NATIONAL LITERATURES

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20-minute presentations are solicited for a proposed special
session for the 2005 MLA Convention, 27-30 December 2005 in
Washington DC.

What are the relationships among national identity,
historical trauma, and literature?

The field of trauma studies has often sought to address
histories of violence, oppression and genocide (particularly
those of the 20th century and the present) by reading
literature (particularly European modernist literature) in a
manner revealing the unquiet, repetitious insistence
of those traumas in the aesthetic realm. This panel seeks to
examine the often-unarticulated sources of this ethical turn
in criticism. Panelists may address individual works and/or
authors, canons, theoretical and disciplinary issues, or some
combination. Possible topics may include:

--What relationship does contemporary trauma studies have
with earlier efforts to articulate history, culture, and
literature?

--Do particular national-literary traditions, or particular
historical events, seem more or less amenable to trauma
theory? In particular, do postcolonial and non-European
literatures present challenges to the theory?

--What place should trauma studies have in the literary
disciplines, in the humanities, or in the academy at large?

--Does our desire to read trauma in literature represent an
effort at a public and collective public working-through of
particular traumas? Or does it represent the impossible
desire for an end to trauma itself?

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This topic has not been approved for the convention. Further
information on the MLA's policies and procedures is available
at www.mla.org. Potential panelists should particularly note
an April 7 deadline for membership in the organization.

250-word abstracts should be sent to stringdr_at_jmu.edu by
March 22. Please paste your text into the body of the
message, rather than using an attachment. All submissions
will be acknowledged. Those who have already sent proposals
do not need to resend.

D. Stringer
English Department MSC 1801
James Madison University
Harrisonburg, VA 22807
(540) 568-6170

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Received on Wed Mar 02 2005 - 10:18:53 EST