Maryland Graduate Forum: History as Text, Text as History
Conference: February 23rd & February 24th
Deadline for abstract submission: December 15th, 2006
email contact: [log in to unmask]
website: http://www.languages.umd.edu/grad/conf2007/
We are very pleased and honored to announce that our keynote speaker
will be Dr Tom Bishop (NYU), Gould Professor of French Literature and
director of the Center for French Civilization and Culture.
At the forefront of literary and cultural scholarship today stands the
reevaluation of texts, which challenges their role as apolitical
aesthetic works and redefines them as products of their representative
cultures capable of reciprocally influencing their society. We have
selected the topic “History as Text, Text as History” with the
intention of exploring this dynamic relationship of History and
Literature.
Furthermore, we do not limit our understanding of the concept of “text”
to written documents, but instead will extend the notion of text to
include architecture, various media of speech, films, music, official
documents and dialects. We expect to organize panels focusing on the
following topics: “Literature as Culture,” “The Visuals Arts as Text,”
“Beyond the Facts: The Influence of Contemporary Discourses on the
Recording of History,” and “Language Learning through Culture.”
The graduate students of the SLLC at the University of Maryland
cordially invite the submission of papers from all disciplines that
examine these different topics using the following questions as
possible guidelines:
• Cultural influence in linguistic developments: How does this affect
second language acquisition? What are the implications for anglophone,
francophone, germanophone, hispanophone, Japanese, lusophone,
russophone, and other speakers?
• Can one’s native culture influence his/her acquisition of a second language? How?
• Evolution in theoretical developments: romanticism to realism; modern
(surrealism, existentialism, industrialism) to post-modern
(post-colonialism; globalization; orientalism; post-industrialism);
structuralism to post-structuralism; feminism to post-feminism; How are
these theoretical developments defined in a text?
• Author interpretation of societal influences in a text (social, economic, scientific, political, etc)?
• How does one interpret various forms of the visual arts as a text?
What is the relationship between literature, culture and other forms of
art (architecture, film, painting, sculpture)? Is the adaptation of a
literary text, such as a film adaptation, effected by the cultural
context in which it is produced?
• How can one better understand gender relations (history vs. herstory)
of a time by “reading” a text (that is listening to a musical score,
looking at a sculpture, watching a film, reading a novel etc)?
These guidelines are meant to generate ideas and are suggestive rather
than exhaustive. Proposals with a literary, historical, comparative,
linguistic, language acquisition and interdisciplinary approach as well
as from any time period are welcome. Please send a 150-word abstract in
English by email attachment (Word preferred) before December 15, 2006
and any inquiries to the following address: [log in to unmask]
Please address all inquiries and submissions to:
Christina Wall
3215 Jiménez Hall
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
Important dates:
Submission deadline: December, 15th
Acceptance notices: January 15th
Conference: February 23rd and 24th