Avatars, Heteronyms, Phantoms: Life Writing, Literary Masks, and the Dispersion of the Self
Organizer: Laura Cernat. Co-Organizer: Virginia Rademacher
This seminar invites papers exploring the genealogy of contemporary writers’ literary avatars and/ or contextualizing these social media ephemerides as part of a broader literary tradition. If we think of Cervantes’s famous conceit of “Don Quixote” as a translation of Cide Hamete Benengeli’s writings, auctorial alter-egos can be said to be coextensive with the history of modern literature. They first start springing from the page as the made-up authors of eighteenth-century pseudo-translations (Vanacker 2018), a tradition which culminated in the nineteenth century (Toremans 2017). With the advent of periodicals, a new stage opens for invented names, often with personalities attached. From the plethora of “pseudo-persons” in Blackwoods’ Magazine in the 1820s (Esterhammer 2020, 38) to Coleridge’s alter-egos (Knox 2010, 425) or John Clare’s “Don Juan”, playing nearly tongue-in-cheek with his known delusion of being Lord Byron, the Romantics did not lack their avatars. Only Modernist authors seemed to outdo them, (re)inventing hybrid life-writing forms from “autobiografiction” (Saunders 2010) to heteronymy. Fernando Pessoa, creator of over seventy alternative selves, seems to hold a record for literary deception, but only if we do not count Romain Gary, the Lithuanian-born “French Ambassador to Hollywood”, multilingual writer, and pseudo-translator of his own “Promise at Dawn”, who pulled the impossible feat of winning the Goncourt Prize twice (under different names).
In most of these cases, the “false” selves have deep auto/biographical roots, thus complicating common assumptions in biofiction and autofiction scholarship about the importance of onomastic identity between the protagonist and a historical figure.
In exploring the avatar as a reincarnation of the heteronym, but also as a phantomatic return of auctorial anxieties about authenticity and the real, this seminar proposes to look at the dispersion of the self into a kaleidoscope of names and personas through the lens of life-writing.
This seminar explores Edgar A. Poe's legacy as a global icon of modernity. As Karen Grumberg states in a recent issue of Poe Studies (2020), “The scholarly interest in Poe as a participant in a global literary network is readily evident in the proliferation of recent studies such as Poe Abroad, 'Cosmopolitan Poe,' Poe's Pervasive Influence, Translated Poe, and 'Poe and his Global Advocates'.” Poe’s afterlife, in fact, extends far beyond literature. Participants are invited to take as a point of departure a story, poem or essay by Poe & “launch” from there to contemporary aspects of the mediascape, broadly construed. Taking into account the network of connecting areas of knowledge that trace foundational ideas back to various aspects of Poe’s writing, our seminar proposes an experiment in thinking about modern culture through some of Poe’s texts. We encourage proposals from non-specialists who would like to explore Poe’s contributions to and influence on their fields, from global literary studies to film and media studies, art, philosophy, cognitive psychology, AI, and beyond.
We welcome proposals addressing the following themes, among others:
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Poe’s Foundational Metropolis: the sounds & sights of modern cityscapes
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Poe’s Global Modernity: the transnational and translinguistic circulation of Poe from the Middle East to Asia to Latin America
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A Global Philosophy of Composition: Poe’s influence on plot theory by short story writers (Borges, Cortázar), filmmakers (Roger Corman, Jean Epstein, D.W. Griffith, J.-L. Godard, Jan Švankmajer), composers (Ravel), or literary theorists (Russian formalists and their followers)
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Induction, Analytic Detective Stories, and AI: From the inductive reasoning of Dupin (“Murders in the Rue Morgue”) to contemporary questions of artificial intelligence & algorithmic function in digital media
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Poe’s Gothic Aesthetics: Photo-mechanical reproduction, photogénie, avant-gardism, & transformative machines (e.g., the x-ray machine)
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Formulas and Topoi Adapted from Poe: Poe’s horror and detective fictions and contemporary procedural films, television series, and games
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Poe’s Technological Fantasies: Contemporary technologically-inflected forms of the uncanny
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Poe’s Thinking Machines: Maelzel’s Chess-player and contemporary models of interpretation, e.g., neuroscientific theories of embodied cognition
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Translation/mistranslation, Anthologies, Canonization: from Poe's early translators (in particular Baudelaire) to contemporary theories of global canonicity
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The Raven and its Afterlives: Translations and transmedial adaptations of the poem
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1002 Urban Tales: from Poe's orientalized satire of modern-day America in “The 1002nd Tale of Scheherazade” to contemporary narratives of enchanted capitalism (e.g., serialized literature, modern philanthropy, rags to riches stories)
Organizer: Yemi Ajisebutu
When we think of Literature of the Diaspora, we often do not think of the mundane. However, narratives of the lives of Diasporic subjects are rooted in their experiences of the mundane in everyday life. According to Rita Felski, in Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (2000), everyday life has “emerged as an alternative to theory and an arena of authentic experience” in recent years in the fields of cultural studies, history, and their adjacent areas, and Comparative Literature and African Diaspora Literature can join to that list (79). The reason is that writers of literary works highlight microscopic details of the characters’ everyday lives in their writings, For example, the loud chewing during dinner or smacking lips in Chimamanda Adichie’s writings because of a delicious meal. Everyday life is phenomenological and seldomly neutral. The space of possibilities also allows for a richer and more nuanced understanding of literary text. What happens when we pay attention to the mundane? What does the mundane manifest in literature and literary narrative?
Although everyday life is nonnegotiable and a measure of everything, Felski believes it is sometimes used “to describe a nonintellectual relationship with the world.” However, the life of the Diasporic subject is a perpetual negotiation between the self and the other. “[And for] Lukacs and Heidegger, for example, the everyday is synonymous with an inauthentic, grey, aesthetically impoverished existence” (Felski, 79). Besides, everyday life is usually domesticated, gendered, and class-based. Since women and working-class people “are more closely identified with everyday than others…”
Literary texts, particularly those that narrate the lives and experience of the Diaspora, narrates characters that exist in spaces that are simultaneously diasporic, transcultural, and domestic in everyday life. How do the authors of these texts narrativize the existence of their characters? What can we see differently about the lived experience of the Diasporic subject when we pay attention to the mundane? What possibilities abound for discourse in the seemingly unimportant details of literary narrative? These are some of the questions this seminar invites you to consider. Papers are welcome from all scholars, especially those whose work intersects with the diaspora and race.
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Organizer: Midhat Shah
Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:
- How do poets utilize metaphorical language to bridge the gap between human experience and the transcendent? What are some examples of transformative metaphors in poetry?
- How have poets drawn from spiritual traditions across the globe to convey their profound yearning for the divine in their verses?
- What is the significance of rhythm, sound, and melody in poetry? How do poets employ these musical elements to evoke deep emotional responses and foster spiritual connections within their readers or listeners?
- How do poets employ musical instruments as metaphors in their verses?
- How does poetry serve as a conduit for connecting individuals with the divine? What spiritual perspectives or teachings can be found in poetry, particularly in relation to themes of love for the divine and profound longing?
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Since the invention of writing, fundamental reorientations of thinking have often occurred hand in hand with innovative forms of writing: Parmenides created didactic poetry of the divine in order to teach his doctrine of true being; Plato the dialogue in order to avoid all doctrines; Aristotle the treatise in order to teach it in his own name; and Montaigne the essay in order to seek truth via unbiased self-observation. This process of differentiation and innovation has continued up until today, for instance, via Nietzsche’s performances of masks, James Joyce’s experimental thoughtstream, Frege’s logical Begriffsschrift, Wittgenstein’s aphoristic album, and Derrida’s deconstruction. And our contemporary world has witnessed an explosion of manifold digital forms of writing, from social media to AI technologies, that have in many regards revolutionized the ways in which we communicate. New forms of communication can bring about radical reorientations; and foundational reorientations often require new forms of writing to communicate them. In this seminar, we seek to explore, via the concepts of the philosophy of orientation, how different forms of writing orient us in different ways and create different worlds of orientation across time and technological innovations. The philosophy of orientation was developed by Werner Stegmaier, at first in German in his Philosophie der Orientation (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2008) and subsequently in its abridged and updated English translation What is Orientation? A Philosophical Investigation (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2019).
We welcome all orientation-philosophical explorations of (but not limited to):
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innovations of the forms of writing across time, including digital forms of communication and AI technologies
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how AI-generated texts inform the ways we think, communicate, and interact with each other
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the distinctions and connections between different genres of writing, such as philosophy, literature, digital texts, AI produced texts
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how different forms of writing shape different ways of thinking and orientation
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digital forms of writing
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differences of writing regarding cultures, classes, races, and ethnic groups
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the relationship between literary theories and texts
Organizer: Eid Mohamed
Co-Organizer: Mustapha Ait kharouach
The main concept behind this seminar is that rich data can provide a unique way of knowledge access about social and cultural change through the lens of literary production. It can provide us with much more insight than any other traditional method of storage. The main problem in digital archives is that, while it is relatively easy to collect large amounts of data, making use of the data is a completely different story. While we can easily store thousands of literary works, it is the analysis of these works that can be of benefit to knowledge synthesis and accumulation.This seminar is open for researchers with projects that explore digitized printed texts printed in the 19th century till present, including literary books, periodicals, and printed ephemera.
Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:
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How can digital humanities shape our humane experiences of literature?
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Does it suggests/offers other avenues of interpretation?
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Can AI add more tenor to the way we read and taste literature?
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Technical challenges of DH with non-anglophone and non-Latin material
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Postcolonial DH and World Literature
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Critique of DH in Literary Studies
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Evaluating digital scholarship in World Literature.
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Can we still maintain the same meaning and demarcations of geography of texts in how they affects their horizones.
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Does the digital sphere revisits the crossing, circulation and translation of literary texts?
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What are the new channels of worldlifying minor and marginalized literatures through the prism of digitalization and vertualualization of literatures?
Organizer: Simla Dogangun. Co-Organizer: H. Esra Almas
Utilizing Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's intricate analysis of Franz Kafka's conceptualization of “minor literature,” and building upon its resurgent academic prominence as evidenced in the seminal works of of Pascale Casanova (2004), David Damrosch (2009, 2017), Wai Chee Dimock (2007), Françoise Lionnet and Shu-Mei Shih (2005) and Galin Tihanov (2014), this panel seeks to navigate the complex dynamics of scale and hierarchy that govern its definition, recognition, and resonance. We invite writers, scholars, translators, and literary enthusiasts to join a dialogue on how the minor shapes, and is shaped by, the world of letters, in relation to the following questions:
Minor Literatures and Languages: How are minor languages and literatures represented and negotiated within the global literary framework? What does it mean to write in a “minor” language in a multilingual context.? How does translation mediate this experience? How do minor literatures resist, redefine, and engage with dominant literary narratives? The Minor and the Marginal: How do marginalized authors articulate and present their unique cultural identities and experiences? What strategies are employed to navigate the dichotomy of the center and periphery, the major and the minor? Intersectionality and Multivocality: How does “the minor” intersect with gender, ethnicity, and class? How does it foster a multidimensional exploration of identity and agency in a globalized context? Global Perspectives on the Minor: How does the examination of “the minor” redefine our understanding of global literary currents? What challenges and opportunities arise in the pursuit of inclusivity and diversity within world literature? Literary Theory and the Minor: What theoretical frameworks, including but not limited to the work of Deleuze and Guattari, help unpack “the minor”? How does the understanding of the minor evolve across epistemic and cultural paradigms? Minor and Hierarchy: Can minor help understand the hierarchies within the literary field – such as genre (Levine and Mani, 2013)?
Organizers: Simla Dogangun (sdogangun@marmara.edu.tr) and H. Esra Almas (esra.almas@bilkent.edu.tr)
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NeMLA CfP
deadline for submissions:
Adrienne Rich has written that her feminist politics entails “locating the grounds from which to speak with authority,” beginning “not with a continent or a house, but with the geography closest in–the body.” Taking inspiration from Rich and foundational women of color feminists, this panel invites papers exploring the politics of position within the academy and scholars' embodiment in relation to our work. Though identity politics has been vilified since the culture wars of the 1990s, we recognize the value of “identity politics” as articulated by the Combahee River Collective; though they assert that “the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity,” an identity politics is inclusive and “makes us concerned with any situation that impinges upon the lives of women, Third World and working people.”
This panel understands Ethnic Studies as disciplines that originated out of identity-based social movements, and which have since cohered into academic fields of knowledge. Yet, who has historically been most encouraged to intervene in these fields? What considerations arise for scholars who work in fields that do not correspond with their own identities? How do we hold space for valuing embodied knowledge—what Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa have called “theory in the flesh”—while recognizing that intellectual inquiry in such fields is the work of everyone? By studying the relationship of embodiment to our scholarship, what can we glean about the politics of knowledge in the academy? This panel invites two genres of papers: autoethnography, and analyses of cultural texts that help us think about these questions.
If you are interested, please first get in touch with a brief email to let us know. You should send us abstracts and a bio by January 28th. Abstracts and bios should be a maximum of 500 and 350 words respectively.
Alex Ramos (anramos@uw.edu)
Smaran Dayal (sdayal@stevens.edu)