Call for Papers
Revisionist Histories: Memory and Forgetting
A Panel Discussion at the Sixth International Literature and Humanities
Conference,
Inscriptions in the Sand: an arts and culture conference and festival
at Eastern Mediterranean University
in Famagusta, on the island of Cyprus
May 30-June 1, 2003


“Reading… is a belated and all-but-impossible act, and if strong is always a
misreading. […] The strong reader, whose readings will matter to others as
well as to himself, is thus placed in the dilemmas of the revisionist, who
wishes to find his own original relation to truth, whether in texts or in
reality (which he treats as texts anyway), but also wishes to open received
texts to his own sufferings, or what he wants to call the sufferings of
history” (Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading [Oxford, 1975], pp. 3-4).

“All history… must more or less blindly encounter the problem of a
transferential relation to the past whereby the processes at work in the
object of study acquire their displaced analogues in the historian’s
 account” (Dominick LaCapra, History & Criticism [Cornell, 1985], p. 11).


Representations of history are so unstable that to maintain their mimetic
force, their (experienced or constructed) links with land and people, with
the real, they must constantly be reinforced by political decisions
enforcing closure and limiting the proliferation of meanings. Fear,
acknowledged or not, of the wantonness of language—of the play of words, of
the potential loss of the real—underlies every national history textbook and
every state education system, and to maintain the presence of the real, this
fear is inscribed, either explicitly or implicitly, on the memories and
memorials of every nation: I will not forget!
Submissions exploring the relation between the real and its representations
are invited for a Panel Discussion on the textual-historiographical
processes by which the presence of “lived experience” is maintained as such
or reconfigured in literature/texts/acts by historical agents and
historians. (While it is not the specific focus of this panel, we also
welcome presentations of this nature regarding the island of Cyprus, the
venue of our discussion—a critical, generative space where the criteria and
parameters of “truth” and historical representation have always been
politically and emotionally charged; and where the inscription of a question
mark may have the force of a critical interpolation.)
Some possible topic areas (others are welcome):

—cultural amnesia and creations of fictionalized identity
—history as narrative/literature: White, de Certeau, Rancière
—hermeneutic ripples: reconstruction/construction/deconstruction
—theological models of history: between Löwith and Blumenberg
—universalism, particularism and problems of relation in history
—trauma, repression and transference in history (LaCapra)
—redemption/eschatology/teleology: the end of history (Fukuyama, Niethammer)
—periodization and problems of origin and destiny
—Feyerabend, Bachelard, Kuhn, Popper, and paradigms of scientific progress
—history and/as system, progress, reason, freedom, anarchy
—historical intentionality: Barthes, Foucault, Derrida
—race, class, gender, nation, and narration
—the conception of history in Jena Romanticism
—modern historical time: the Annales historians
—history and the public sphere: Arendt, Habermas, Cottereau
—“New Historicism”: intersections between history and literature
—Lyotard’s “postmodern condition” and historical “grand narratives”
—microhistories: Alltagsgeschichte (Medick) and microstoria (Ginzburg, Poni)
—rethinking social categories and organizations: Kocka, Wehler, Grendi, Levi
—Walter Benjamin, history, and aesthetics
—politics and intellectual history: Pocock, Skinner, Koselleck
—history and symbols: Hunt, Furet, Ozouf, Agulhon, Sewell
—epistemological/prescriptive validity and truth: history as
propaganda/ideology
—history, culture, system: Geertz, Weber, Bourdieu, Passeron, Cerutti,
Luhmann
—new technologies and the recording/framing of history
—the persistence of memory: the work of Pierre Nora and Henry Rousso
—historiographical forensics: evidence and exemplarity

Prospective panelists are invited to send 250-word abstracts/proposals for
15-20 minute presentations on any aspect of these areas to
[log in to unmask] or [log in to unmask] by 30 October, 2002.
We look forward to learning about your research, and to a provocative
discussion.

For more information about Inscriptions in the Sand,
please visit our website at http://www.emu.edu.tr/elh/index_confer.html.
Please also check out our links to “Individual Research Presentations” and
“Creative/Performance Work.”