Autor: GKS

International Conference, University of Graz (Austria), June 2 – 4, 2016

Organizers: Stefan Brandt, Susanne Hamscha, Ulla Kriebernegg, Simon Daniel Whybrew

In Canadian Studies, the complex concept of ‘liminality’ has been used in a variety of ways. There is an abundance of scholarship and research dealing with the stage ‘betwixt and between,’ as Victor Turner most famously defined it (1964). This conference aims at re-mapping the field, focusing on liminality and the liminal within Canada.

The terms ‘liminal’ and ‘liminality’ refer to multiple levels of meaning. Originally developed by cultural anthropologist Arnold van Gennep in his seminal studies on rites of passage in 1909, and re-discovered by Victor Turner in the 1960s, the spatial metaphor of ‘liminality’ has particularly since the ‘Spatial Turn’ become a keyword in contemporary cultural theory to refer to processes of identity negotiation connected to experiences of transition. It has been used in connection with terms such as ‘border,’ ‘frontier,’ and ‘threshold,’ and in opposition to the equally metaphorical concept of ‘marginality.’ While marginality connotes ‘periphery,’ and thus mainly focuses on exclusion from and by dominant discourses, liminality is concerned with the space of the borderline itself, with feelings of ambiguity and ambivalence.

Liminality can be experienced as challenging, uncomfortable, threatening, and disruptive, but also as subversive and powerful, as a stage facilitating creativity and change. In the context of (Anglo-) Canadian Studies, liminality has been employed to discuss geographical frontiers such as the Niagara Falls, the St. Laurence River, the Rocky Mountains, the Canadian Prairies, British Columbia, Quebec, and the Arctic, as well as symbolic frontiers including migration, French-English relations, encounters between First Nations and settlers, and Northrop Frye’s ‘garrison mentality.’ Liminality has also been examined as an aesthetic concept in its relation to the sublime and the uncanny.

As a theoretical concept, liminality can be of help for an analysis of the constructedness of Canada’s collective identity/identities as well as of individual processes of identification and change. These observations lead us to the following questions: How has the Canadian cultural imaginary fashioned itself with regard to the ‘boundariness’ of its social and identificatory practices? Which role do symbolic ‘frontiers’ play in Canadian discourses of self-representation (with respect to inner-Canadian border areas, but also in comparison to the U.S. American frontier)? How do ethnic, sexual, and other minorities position themselves in this nexus of liminal identities?

This conference aims at bringing together scholars who wish to engage in a discussion of Canadian liminal spaces and places, of fragmented and contradictory social, cultural, and political practices, of real and imagined borders, contact zones, thresholds, and transitions in Anglo-Canadian literature and culture. Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Geographical and imagined borders
• Spatial and temporal liminalities
• Canadian ‘frontiers’
• The relationship between anglophone and francophone Canada
• The Canadian North
• Cultural theory and the limits of postmodernism (e.g. Derrida’s ‘limitrophy’)
• The aesthetics and poetics of liminality
• The liminal and the subliminal
• Genre, media, and intertextuality
• Cultural encounters and First Nations
• Queer cultural spaces
• Transgender and intersex identities
• Embodiments and dis/abilities
• Hybridity, multiculturalism, and transnationalism
• The figure of the trickster
• Aspects of intersectionality, transgression, and normativity
• Old age as a liminal stage
• Liminality and the end of life

Proposals of no more than 300 words, together with the name, institutional affiliation and a bio blurb (max. 150 words) should be sent to this e-mail address.. The closing date for submissions is Sunday, January 10, 2016.

Impressum:

Department of American Studies
University of Graz
Attemsgasse 25/II
8010 Graz
Austria
Tel. +43 (0)316 380 2465
Fax. +43 (0) 316 380 9768
http://amerikanistik.uni-graz.at/en/

C.IAS
Center of Inter-American Studies
Merangasse 18/II
8010 Graz
Austria
Tel. +43 (0)316 380 8213
Fax. +43 (0)316 380 9767
https://interamerikanistik.uni-graz.at/en/cias/

 

 

 

 

 

Maladies of the Soul, Emotion, Affect:
Indigenous, Canadian, and Québécois Writings in the Crossfire of a New Turn

Banff Centre, 22-25 September 2016

 A Conference Organized by the Canadian Literature Centre at the University of Alberta and the Canadian Studies Centre at the University of Innsbruck

Organizing Committee: Marie Carriére (Director, Canadian Literature Center, University of Alberta), Kit Dobson (Associate Professor of English, Mount Royal University), Ursula Moser (Director, Canadian Studies Centre, University of Innsbruck)

Confirmed Keynotes

1. Smaro Kamboureli, University of Toronto
2. Daniel Laforest, University of Alberta
3. TBA

Round-Table of Invited Authors

According to D. Bachmann-Medick, a scientific turn is not synonymous with the radical reorientation of a single discipline but basically provides a new pluri- and transdisciplinary perspective complementing and reinforcing already existing approaches. A new turn does not supplant another but becomes part of a dynamic process of competing forces, which eventually may give rise to new categories of analysis and concepts. Studying both the general implications and the positive effects and deficits of such a turn is particularly rewarding when it comes to comparing different academic traditions and – as is the case with this transatlantic and transdisciplinary conference – different literary productions written in different languages.

In the wake of the conference “Crisis and Beyond,” held at the University of Innsbruck in 2015, “Maladies of the Soul, Emotion, Affect” not only responds to recent attention to affect, or the “affective turn” dubbed by Patricia Clough, but also investigates the impact of previous forms of research both on emotions and cognition on the study of Indigenous, Canadian and Québécois writings in English and French. If empathy and agency have evolved as new guiding principles in some fields of literary analysis, their roots can be found in such classical disciplines as poetics, rhetoric, or hermeneutics (Th. Anz), and also in the focus on agency advocated by the Constance school of reception theory. While selecting contemporary Indigenous, Canadian and Québécois writings in English and French as a body of investigation, the participants are encouraged to explore the emotional and affective implications of the process of literary communication, including both conceptual and empirical research and covering the following aspects:

• the emotional and affective habitus of the producer (the “real” author), her / his intentional or non-intentional use of techniques of emotionalisation, her / his definition of a specific poetics, and their possible impact on the text
• the emotional and affective response of the “real” reader to these techniques
• the text as a vehicle of emotions or affects which names, discusses or presents them as parts of the mental habitus of the protagonists (Th. Anz); the aesthetic question of how such processes are evoked (use of metaphors, inscription of the body, syntax of the unspeakable, etc.).

The focus on contemporary literature necessarily confronts us with S. Žižek’s assessment of the 21^st century as the “apocalyptic zero point” and S. Ahmed’s, L. Berlant’s and others’ warnings of the West’s “cruel” attachments to neoliberal optimism. S. Ngai identifies “ugly feelings” while M.C. Nussbaum addresses the ethics of care as an affective, and alternative, form of knowledge, agency, and democracy (J. Tronto).

• And so what are the affects and emotions that index the particularity of our literary moment or our moment of crisis?
• How does intimacy or privacy respond to publicness?
• What is today’s equivalent of Romantic ennui and melancholy?
• Do situations of exile and migration enhance the new “maladies of the soul” (J. Kristeva)?
• Do authors ask questions of liveliness and animacy (M.Y. Chen)?
• Which lives today are considered worth living and are recognized as such (J. Butler)?
• How might Indigenous literary and critical interventions undo the very categorizations and labels suggested by this call for papers and enable us to tell different stories (D.H. Justice)?

These and other lines of critical inquiry – on the basis of the above-mentioned emotional and affective implications of literary communication – are designed to allow participants to approach affect, emotion, and the new maladies of the soul of this 21^st century, a task which will advance terminological, methodological, and theoretical knowledge both in the fields of affect and emotion and of text analysis.

In the treatment of this description, the organizers encourage comparative, multidisciplinary, and interdisciplinary perspectives and methodologies. They invite proposals of traditional 20-minute papers as well as other forms of presentation such as short 10-minute position papers, round-tables, or pecha kucha presentations. Complete panel proposals (of 3 or 4 papers) are also highly encouraged.

Proposals (250 words per paper), in English or in French, with a short biographical note (50 words), should be submitted to this mail address by February 1, 2016.

This second conference will take place at the Banff Centre in Canada September 22-25, 2016. Situated in Banff National Park, surrounded by the magnificent scenery of the Rockies, the Banff Centre is a unique place to promote the arts and all disciplines on a Canadian and on an international level. For further information concerning the Canadian Literature Centre at the University of Alberta, please visit www.abclc.ca.