Civilisation and Fear: Writing and the Subject/s of Ideology


Conference Call for Papers

22-25 September 2OlO
Ustron, Poland

http://www.fear.us.edu.pl/

***
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
(T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, ll.27-3O)
***


What Eliot voices here is, no doubt, his fear and, simultaneously,
concern about the prospects of European civilisation as he saw it in
the first decades of the 2Oth c. Eliot’s lines carry eschatological
overtones, too. Do we fear the end of our civilisation, or the
condition it has reached at present? What is the connection between
fear and civilisation? Are we still waiting for the barbarians? Do we
have more fear of the real or the virtual? Should we, perhaps, opt for
the positive senses of fear whose presence may testify to the mystery
human life is, or brings to light the limitations which human life
involves? Can we possibly conquer our fears by writing about them, and
redefining their sources? Aren’t we – as individuals, citizens, family
members, superiors and inferiors, natives and strangers, bodies and
spirits – our own fears writ large?



This call for papers is not intended to alarm or intimidate anyone. We
extend a cordial invitation to all scholars who take genuine interest
in any of the issues raised in the title of the conference as well as
those listed below. Our aim is to address a multiplicity of concerns
which often coincide and intersect in modern discourses (including
literary and cultural studies, psychology, sociology, religious
studies, art and others). However, we propose to consider writing
(both literary and non-literary) as a window onto, and a meeting
ground for, the following themes:


• Arts & literature: the future of arts; literatures of terror;
artistic (literary) modes (genres) of terror; the terrific/horrific
sublime; (limits of) self-fashioning and self-expression; anxiety of
influence in the age of parody, travesty and appropriation

• Civilisation & technology: fear of modernisation & of acceleration;
clashes of civilisations; the fearful interplay between culture and
nature; man vis-à-vis machine (e.g., threats to humanness, simulacra
of the human as source of anxiety, “new” humanity)

• Politics & ideology: enslavement, subjection, subordination through
discourses; the “fearful asymmetry”: discourses & practices of the
modern state (intersections of the political and the personal);
democracy, liberty(ies), religion: from orthodoxy to fundamentalism
and back, the self of ideology

• Discourses: thanatophobia and the postmodern condition; religious
studies as a necessary/contingent by-product of recent traumas; fear
and/of metaphysics; power and its institutions as forces prescribing
discourses of the self

• Identity / the self: phobias of exposure to fear and trauma; the
threatened/shifting selfhood & competing models of subjectivity; the
sub/un/conscious; the Lacanian Real

We invite all delegates to deliver 20-minute presentations. Abstracts
of the presentations should not exceed 200 words and should be
submitted electronically to civilizationandfear@gmail.com by March 31,
2010.

For further details please visit: http://www.fear.us.edu.pl

Registration
The registration form will be attached to the first Circular (to be
sent to prospective participants in April) and will be also available
from our website. The registration fee will not exceed $150 (inclusive
of access to all conference events, delegate bag, mid-session
refreshments, seminar room hire, and the publication of conference
proceedings). As you receive this, our negotiations with prospective
sponsors are under way, and we expect to be able to reduce the fee.
You will be notified of any alterations in this regard.


Organisers
Institute of English Cultures and Literatures
University of Silesia
ul. S. Grota-Roweckiego 5
41-205 Sosnowiec
Poland

in cooperation with
The Committee on Literature Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences


Chair of the Organising Committee
Prof. Wojciech Kalaga


Secretary of the Organising Committee
Anna Chromik
civilizationandfear@gmail.com


Plenary speakers
Prof. Agata Bielik-Robson – IFiS, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland
Prof. Horst Ruthrof – Murdoch University, Australia
Prof. Jeremy Tambling – University of Manchester, UK


Venue
The conference will take place in Ustroń, Poland. Details will be
included in the conference circulars. We estimate that full board and
accommodation should not exceed 150 PLN per day (ca $50). Detailed
get-to information will be posted in the forthcoming circular.



Contact us at: civilizationandfear@gmail.com

For further details please visit: http://www.fear.us.edu.pl