Dokuz Eylül University
Department of American Culture and Literature
1st INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM OF AMERICAN STUDIES
May 4-5-6, 2016 – Dokuz Eylül University Rectorate- DESEM Halls
Izmir / TURKEY
The Sacred
and
The Sublime


This symposium will bring together academics from across Turkey and the rest of the world to discuss the idea of the “The Sacred and the Sublime”.

Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, writes that ‘whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt.’ This endless, terrifying and finally unapprehendable Sublime will be at the heart of our symposium, during which we will seek to understand just what such conceptions mean in a specifically American context with special concentrations on the places of the sacred and the supernatural.

One of our primary locales for thinking about these issues will be Puritanism and the early religious landscapes of the American colonies. We will see these worries transfigured into the competing aesthetics of Transcendentalism and Dark Romanticism, while a Gothic conception of the sublime runs through the earliest European expressions of American thought right through to twenty-first century science fiction and horror works that reimagine the beginning of the American project in sublime terms. Both the terrors and inspirations of the sublime are fundamental to these quintessentially American developments and we will locate the idea as one of the key influences on developing American culture.

Submissions are invited in any area of American Studies. We encourage submissions that cross disciplinary boundaries, displaying the interdisciplinary focus of American Studies in Turkey, and we will accept submissions from both national and international scholars at all levels.

Possible areas for discussion could include, but are not limited to;

• Apocalypse and Millennium

• Denominations, schisms and cults

• American syncretic religions

• American topics analyzed in the light of Mircea Eliade, William James and other theorist of religion

• Sacred spaces and sacred time

• The American shamanistic tradition

• American Native religion and its representations

• Religion in American society from the Puritans to the present day

• Literature, history, religion, and social and cultural studies

• American Romanticism

• The Gothic / Dark Romantic Tradition in American literature or art

• The English Romantics and the New World

• The sublime in science fiction, westerns and other genre films

• The sublime and Manifest Destiny or any other theme in American history

Questions that may be addressed include:

• What does the sacred entail in a twenty-first century context?

• How can we differentiate the American sublime from its European iterations?

• How can we differentiate between sacred and supernatural conceptions of the sublime?

• In what ways do contemporary conceptions of the supernatural retain or abandon older understandings?

We welcome submissions for academic papers to be presented individually or as a panel;
Please send 250-word abstracts of an individual work or 500-word group/panel descriptions with a short biography as a .doc, .docx, .pdf, or .rtf file to deusamericanstudies@gmail.com till November 13, 2015.