From: David Colclasure <[log in to unmask]>

Subject: GSA-Habermas and Literature, deadline EXTENDED!




CFP: "Habermas and Literature"
GSA Conference, Milwaukee, Wisconsin September 29 - October 2, 2005

Jürgen Habermas's theories of the public sphere and of communicative 
action both make reference to the importance of literature in 
political public life. But the relation of this body of theory to 
literary artifacts remains an ambivalent one for him. Literature is 
largely relegated to a sphere of aesthetic production that is 
exclusively concerned with articulations of authentic experience and 
purely subjective worlds, not of normative-political discourse. Are 
there nontheless arguments to be made for a significant political 
role for literature within a Habermasian framework? Can Habermas be 
used to argue against Habermas for a specifically literary variety of 
the political public sphere, one that makes a unique contribution to 
political public life? Given Habermas's insistence on the 
constitutive role of "rational" discourse in the workings of the 
public sphere, are Habermas's theories compatible with a notion of 
"literary rationality"? Is the notion of such a rationality desirable 
from the perspective of German Studies or the study of literature in 
general? To what extent can Habermas's modernist theories of 
political action be reconciled with postmodern discourses on 
literature? In what ways would the theory of communicative action and 
its concept of authenticity need to be retooled in order to yield a 
useful account of the political role of literature? How would the 
theory of the public sphere need to be modified in order to 
accomodate the artifacts of and theoretical discourses on 
contemporary literatures?

Please submit your 1 page (250-300 words) abstract with title by Feb 
19, 2005 to David Colclasure at [log in to unmask] (Tel 
831.647.4633, Fax 831.647.4632).

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