Second Call for Papers - (extended deadline for proposals 31st March)
B.A.R.S. postgrad conference: Silence and Romanticism
29th June 1999
University of Durham, UK
After the success of this year's inaugural conference in Liverpool, the
1999 BARS Postgraduate conference will take place in Durham, England.
This year's conference will focus on the topic of silence in the
literature of the Romantic period, though papers on connected topics
antecedent and subsequent to this period will also be considered.
N.B. Below these possible topics is a framework for discussion. Feel
free
to use it if you wish but don't feel bound by it:
Possible topics include:
*texts about mutism
*New Historicism - arbitrariness embodied or horizons broadened?
*statuary and literature
*God is dead? The still, small voice in literature
*the sublime
*psychoanalysis and sublimation
*moments of silence
*pregnant pauses? Silence, feminism and creativity
*silence and nature
*silences in the canon
'The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason on madness,
could be established only on the basis of such a silence. I have not
tried to write the history of that language but, rather, the archaeology
of that silence.' (Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilisation)
A survey of recent scholarship suggests that studies based around the
'margins' of literature are topical and studies such as Foucault's have
given rise to numerous approaches which can be united under the term
'ex-otic' - 'outside being.' These studies can be developed in two
discernible ways, both however being something outside of 'normal'
discourse. The first approach involves a particular emphasis on society
and politics and is, in the wake of New Historicism, the most prevalent
today: the focus on the voices of the repressed or on those who did not
have a 'voice' in the dominant discourse or have not been included in
the
canon. This approach tends to define itself against an 'other being' and
is as such exotic.
The second way involves a more specifically Romantic concern, namely a
reaction to a particularly narrow conception of reason bequeathed by the
Enlightenment. To some extent it involves a rejection of the logical
positivist claim of our century that 'anything that cannot be tested
empirically is meaningless' - a statement which can be rejected as
meaningless based on its own criteria! Romantic explorations of the
limits of language and meaningfulness involve literary devices such as
irony, in its romantic form not so much suggesting a subtext as a
metatext, and hyperbole and generic forms of writing such as fragments.
The approach here would perhaps not be seen as defining against or
defying
an other, but claiming that the original limits of the definition were
too
narrow. Here we would more properly speak of the 'extra-otic' - 'over
and
above being.' The traditional categories of the sublime and the
transcendent are commonly associated with these forms, though there has
been a move in recent years to try and associate a 'feminine sublime' to
it, both in male and female writers. This appears a conflation of the
first with the second sense, to be placing a limit on what is by
definition beyond limitation. Do these approaches then try and make the
ex-otic into the extra-otic, or vice versa? Do such approaches
implicitly
adopt what is posited as a masculine definition (the sublime) in
defining
the exotic? Can an extra-otic concept such as sublimity be gendered?
Why
has it been perceived to be gendered and how does this effect the
teaching
and reading of literature?
Papers should be 20 minutes in length. Please send abstracts of up to
300
words by 31st of March to:
F.L. Price/ S.J. Masson
Department of English Literary Studies
University of Durham
Elvet Riverside, New Elvet
Durham
E-MAIL: [log in to unmask]; [log in to unmask]
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