Vitoria-Gasteiz, Faculty of Arts, UPV/EHU, Spain ,January 15-17, 2025
The concept of transition – characterized as a historical moment with a beginning and an end, encompassing a defined and significant period – awaits systematic reflection, according to Cristina Moreiras-Menor (2011). Although Richard (2001) points out that transition, as a proper noun, represents a temporal rationale, this term is generally understood as the shift between two times, a before and an after, presented linearly and laden with transformations. A transition is an evanescent stage that precedes another that emerges with remarkable power. This evanescent stage feels like an abyss that represents the ruin of a past and the emergence of an unwritten future.
We focus on the historical collapse that the transition entails, the landscape of change from one historical moment to another, and how that change is mirrored in literary and cultural documents. We specifically examine literary documents that contemplate the end of an era and explore the transition towards a new phase that accompanies this end. This transition is often portrayed as either innovative or as the dismantling of the preceding period. This time of transition – of change, uncertainty, and contradiction – is a time to confront the inherited legacy and transform it into something different, into a promise that implies several future directions. As Derrida (1995) suggests, a legacy is never univocal and natural; instead, it challenges interpretation by presenting itself as a secret to unveil. Thus, we are particularly interested in interpreting, deciphering, and reinterpreting that legacy on its emotional, subjective, political and ideological levels.
We understand transitions as a time of change in the historical trajectory – this trajectory can be collective and individual, vital, or literary – and as a stage in which new knowledge, new epistemologies, and new ways of understanding life and society are formulated. This separation between the past and the future opens a space for emerging discourses, new imaginaries, new expressions of experience and new individual and social identities. Besides, it affects all traditions. Precisely for these reasons, the members of the research group “IdeoLit: Literature as a historical document” have organized this conference, which is aimed at all those researchers who study the concept of transition in literature from the classical times to the present day.
- Personal/Individual Transitions:
- Growth, coming of age or Bildungsroman
- Gender transition (trans realities)
- Childhood, adolescence, maturity, old age, relationship with death (our own or someone else's death and its effect on the individual
- Change/awareness
- Collective transitions:
- Political transition: regime changes and their implications in different fields
- Social transition: revolutions, social movements, and other social transitions.
- Changes in the emotional, family and community sphere
- Ecology: structural changes to face climate disaster, collapse, degrowth or energy transition, among other aspects.
- Transitional process of societies going through collective trauma
- Technological transition: AI, posthumanism
- Literary transitions:
- Generic or formal transition: exhaustion or appearance of literary genres, in new forms
- Aesthetic transition: changes in aesthetic currents, ruptures
- Thematic transition: in relation to the historical context, the appearance of new themes that represent that moment of transition
- Comparatist transition: opening of new lines, new perspectives that break with the past
Bibliography:
Derrida, Jacques (1995): Espectros de Marx: el Estado de la deuda, el trabajo del duelo y la nueva internacional, Madrid: Trotta.
Jameson, Fredric (2000): Las semillas del tiempo, Madrid: Trotta.
Moreiras-Menor, Cristina (2011): La estela del tiempo. Imagen e historicidad en el cine español contemporáneo, Madrid-Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana-Vervuert.
Rancière, Jacques (2006): Política, policía, democracia, Santiago de Chile: LOM.
Resina, Joan Ramon (ed.) (2000): Disremembering the Dictatorship: The Politics of Memory in the Spanish Transition to Democracy, Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Richard, Nelly y Alberto Moreiras (eds.) (2001): Pensar en la posdictadura, Santiago de Chile: Cuarto Propio.
Ricoeur, Paul (1980): “Narrative Time”, Critical Inquiry 7, 1 (On Narrative), autumn, pp. 169-190.
Subirats, Eduardo (2002): Intransiciones. Crítica de la cultura española, Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva.
Vilarós, Teresa M. (1998): El mono del desencanto. Una crítica cultural de la transición española (1975-1993), Madrid: Siglo XXI.
SUBMISSION OF PROPOSALS
Proposals must include the following information for ALL authors: name and surname, organization or institution, email, the title of the proposal, a 15-20 line abstract, and biographical information (maximum: 10 lines).
Proposals can be sent to the following email address in Word (or compatible) format until May 31: congresotransicion.ideolit@ehu.es
The organizing committee's decision will be notified by July 15.
Proposals will be accepted in Spanish, Basque, English, French or German. Each speaker will have 20 minutes for their presentation, followed by a brief Q&A session. All presentations must be made in person.
Main Organizers:
- M. Carmen Encinas Reguero (University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU)
- Garbiñe Iztueta Goizueta (University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU)
- Natalia Vara Ferrero (University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU)
