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Call for Abstracts: Death and Representation A one-day conference sponsored by the Department of English, University of Rochester, March 26, 2010 Keynote Speaker: Dana Luciano, Georgetown University, winner of the MLA first-book prize for /Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America/ As Derrida has long since pointed out, in Western thought writing is seen as a dead thing: a being whose soul is absent, a corpse. Yet this very dead thing immortalizes both the things it represents and the authors for whom it stands as a metonym. Writing--and indeed representation itself--crosses the boundaries between death and life, absence and presence, loss and memory, time and eternity. The Department of English at the University of Rochester invites submissions for twenty-minute papers to be given at "Death and Representation," a one-day conference that will explore how representational forms-uncanny things of death and life-confront their own ghosts in representing death itself. To encourage the recognition of unexpected affinities, we welcome papers from scholars working in any historical period and on any genre or mode (poetic, narrative, dramatic, cinematic, digital, etc). Possible topics include: the corpse and the figure; tragedy, death, and closure; death and race, gender, class, or disability; memory, memorials, and the literary; death and the anti-social thesis in queer theory; representing funeral practices; mourning and ideation; representations of death and the construction of national identities; rottenness, decay, and the aesthetic; death and humor; necrophilia; suicide notes and autobiography; death on film and video: documentary indexicality and ethics, cinematic violence, etc.; representing the undead (zombies, vampires). Please submit 500-word abstracts and cv to: Genevieve Guenther, [log in to unmask] Jason Middleton, [log in to unmask] Deadline for Proposals: November 15, 2009