Call For Abstracts:
In a follow-up on its successful international conference on “De-centring English Studies: Studying Literature in the Global South”, held in January 2017 (keynoted by Prof. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, New York University), the P.G. Department of English, Utkal University has decided to announce its second international conference, in which the focus will be on the discourse of criticism as it exists in its dialectical relationship with literary and visual culture. The dates of the conference are 23-24 January 2018. The concept note is as follows:
Concept Note:
A great many conferences and symposia are held on literature, on the various contemporary extensions in which literary and visual culture exist today, namely Comparative Literature, World Literature, Minority Literature, Digital Humanities and so on. There are, however, very few conferences in which the crucial mediating role of criticism is explored and debated, despite the significant reversal in the literature-criticism relationship in the later decades of the last century. Jonathan Culler alerted us to this reversal in a pithy formulation when he said: “Earlier the history of criticism was a part of the history of literature, but now it is the history of criticism which provides the framework for reading and understanding literature.”
The shift that Culler has described has no doubt given criticism a certain undeniable pre-eminence in literary culture. In the academic setting, however, and especially in the Indian context, this shift seems to have led to a ‘critical supermarket’ (Fredric Jameson) of styles, an eclecticism of approaches to literature. The pre-eminence of literature and the self-evidence of literary value are still unchallenged. The globalization of culture, under the influence of neoliberal economic policies, has become another name for the commodification of culture. This coupled with the largely uncritical, chauvinistic and anti-rational climate we are living in, not just in India but in the ‘developed’ part of the world, makes it obligatory for us to pose afresh the question about ‘the function of criticism at the present time. ’
While this expression echoes Matthew Arnold, the function in question is a hermeneutic one, voiced with considerable urgency by Oscar Wilde at the turn of the last century. Wilde said that the highest critical function was ‘to reveal in the Work of Art what the author had not put there.’ This sort of criticism is hermeneutics at its best and involves reading the text against its grain. Hermeneutics is the need of the hour. And in this context it is important to recall another figure from the later decades of the twentieth century, Pierre Macherey, who, though not much talked about now, made the best possible case for a political hermeneutics with his statement: ‘the task of criticism is to know the work as it cannot know itself.’
The conference, building on this case for a demystifying hermeneutics – Macherey’s project was to demystify literature, will explore the ways in which the critique of literary and cultural artefacts and discourses reveals/constitutes something that the authors or the instigators did not consciously put there. This kind of hermeneutic act that results in the production of an interpretation is intimately connected to the context in which it is produced. Drawing on literary, cultural and visual corpuses from around the world, but with a particular focus on India, this conference will seek to reveal the ‘not-said’ of texts, the secret principle which ties ‘symbolic acts’ to the racial, sexual, political and economic unconscious.
Themes
Within the overall framework of the secular and political function of the critical act, the conference will engage with and explore the following issues:
- The politics of literary representation
- Literary study as an exercise in ‘radical semiotics’ or the tracing of ‘politics’ in the ‘letter’ of the text
- Translation as an act of interpretation and (re)writing
- Revisiting the aesthetics and politics debates in Europe in the 1930s
- Revisiting the Marxism and Scrutiny debate in England in the 1930s
- The realist canon of Indian literature as radical intervention
- Literary radicalism in India in the 1940s
- The role of criticism when confronted with an explicitly political discourse (feminist, dalit, minority texts etc.)
- The ‘universals’ of radical criticism and the ‘particulars’ of place or locality
- Class, gender, race and sexuality: commonalities or forces pulling in different directions?
- ‘Universalism’ versus ‘nationalism’ and/or ‘nativism’
- History and politics: the ‘untranscendable horizon’ of all literature?
- The politics of modernist or exilic literature or the memoir
- The politics of postmodernism
- Political readings of culture (postcolonialism, Marxism, feminism etc.)
The conference invites papers exploring one or more of the issues listed above in relation to literary, cultural and cinematic texts of the last two hundred years. Critical and metacritical readings of critics, seminal critical concepts and texts from the West as well as from India will be on the agenda. Papers seeking to engage with Indian aesthetics from a political standpoint are welcome.
Important Dates
Call for Papers – Guidelines
- Registration is compulsory for participation and presentation of the papers.
- Participants are requested to send their original and unpublished papers, strictly following the MLA Style Book-7th Edition for preparing their papers.
- Only selected papers are eligible for presentation and publication.
- In case of the co-authored papers, both authors have to register and at least one of them should be present in the conference.
- Participants have to make their own arrangements for their travel, stay and board.
- The abstracts written in 250-300 words with a paper title in the prescribed format (format-for-abstract) should reach the following email ID-iccenglish.utkal@gmail.com
- Each participant will have 15 minutes presentation time.
- The word limit for the completed paper is 2500-3000.
Registration Fee
- Paper Presenters (India) : INR 1700/-
- Foreign Participants/Paper Presenters : USD 100
- For Utkal University Scholars: INR 1000/-
- Students of the Department : INR 200/-
Keynote Speaker:
Dr. Robert Clark
Former Professor of English and American Literature
University of East Anglia, U.K.
Proposed Title of Talk: “Jane Austen and the Transformation of Capital”
Plenary Speakers:
Dr. Ellen Handler Spitz
Prof. Harish Trivedi
Prof. Paul St-Pierre
Dr. Mauricio D Aguilera Linde
Venue/Contact
PG Department of English
Utkal University, Vani Vihar-751004
Phone No- 0674- 2567542
Conference Director:
Prof. Himansu S Mohapatra
Cell phone- +91 9437404431
For more details:
https://politicsandlettersconference.wordpress.com/
