CFP: Poetics and History (5/1/05; MMLA, 11/10/05-11/13/05)

Call for Papers: "Poetics and History"
Midwestern Modern Language Association Meeting ("History, Memory, and
Exile")
Milwaukee, WI
November 10th-13th, 2005

Given a generation of epistemological questions literary theory, and the
so-called “linguistic turn,” have raised about history, and after the
new history and the new historicism, how can literary scholars
productively engage questions of the past? We are all familiar with the
imperative to historicize, ideas about the limits of representation, an
the vicissitudes of memory, but what emerges when one attempts to
/think/ history?

Proposals are invited for papers that approach the complexities of “the
past” by re-thinking the interrelation of aesthetics and history. By
what processes—rhetorical and aesthetic—is the past translated into what
counts as history? How have these processes evolved within modernity?
How should we consider the very /idea/ of history thru its necessarily
poetic dimensions? How do we come to know the past through the aesthetic
judgments? What are the ethical dimensions of this understanding of
history? How have theoretical developments in the Humanities created a
productive tension with our sense of history?

Papers from all disciplines, addressing the meaning of testimony and
memory for history, literary narrative and its manifestations of
history, artistic strategies for apprehending the past, and
investigations of the various theoretical approaches to historical
thought, are welcome. Please submit a 250-word abstract by May 1, 2005 to:

Daniel Listoe
Departments of English and Hebrew Studies
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
dlistoe_at_sbcglobal.net

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Received on Mon Apr 11 2005 - 20:34:24 EDT