[New-Poetry] the urge to know and the need to deny

[Anny Ballardini]

*CALL FOR PAPERS

**BETWEEN THE "URGE TO KNOW" AND THE "NEED TO DENY": ETHICS AND TRAUMA IN
CONTEMPORARY NARRATIVE IN ENGLISH

*Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana
Universidad de Zaragoza
Jaca, Huesca (Spain)
*March 25-28, 2009
*
NEW DEADLINE: February, 2 2009

Keynote Speakers:
Meena Alexander, creative writer and academic (India, USA)
Merlinda Bobis, creative writer and academic (Philippines,
Australia)
Gert Buelens, Director of the Centre of Literature and Trauma (Ghent
University)
Laurie Vickroy, trauma critic (USA)
Jean-Michael Ganteau, ethics critic (France)

Trauma has become a central trope in the cultural imagination of the late
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and critics across ideological
spectrums seem to agree that we are now living in an "age of trauma." Being
an important sub-strand of the so-called 'Ethical Criticism,' Trauma Studies
emerged as a critical trend in the 1990s through the voices of trauma
theorists such as Cathy Caruth, Dominick LaCapra, Shoshana Felman and
Geoffrey Harpham, among others. This new interest was the result of the
effects of the two World Wars and other armed conflicts, the clash of
civilisations, the processes of decolonisation and globalisation, and the
alienation of affections triggered off by the new technologies and the
consumer society. The Holocaust has become the paradigm of traumatic
experience, and the terrorist attacks by religious fundamentalists on the
population of New York (11 September 2001), Madrid (11 March 2004), and
London (7 July 2005), have introduced the vocabulary of trauma in our
general speech. However, trauma theory has also focused on a literature that
points to History as the determining factor in causing interracial traumas
or postcolonial conflicts.

In the struggle that trauma creates between the "urge to know" and the "need
to deny," we welcome contributions that will explore the theoretical,
heuristic and hermeneutic articulations of trauma in contemporary narrative
in English.

Suggested topics to explore include, but are not limited to:

* The representation of historical and/or personal trauma in contemporary
narrative in English.
* The study of formal innovations devised by contemporary writers in order
to represent both collective and individual traumas.
* The connections between the representations of historical traumas and
personal traumas, of fiction and testimony.
* Trauma and literary genres, politics, gender, postcolonial studies and
indigenous peoples' studies.
* Representations of trauma in the arts.

A copy of the completed paper (max. 2,500 words, aprox. 9 double-spaced
pages, including notes and works cited) following the MLA Handbook for
Writers of Research Papers, together with a 100-150 word abstract should be
e-mailed to both organisers. Author information is to be sent in a separate
document (including name, filiation, contact address and paper title).

New deadline for submissions: February 2nd, 2009.

M. Dolores Herrero
Sonia Baelo-Allué
Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana
Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
50009 Zaragoza, Spain

Updates will appear on the conference web site:
http://cne.literatureresearch.net/conference/

-- 
Anny Ballardini
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html
I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing
star!
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