Beyond the Ruin: Investigating the Fragment in English Studies
10th International Conference of the Hellenic Association for the Study of English (HASE)
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Department of English Language and Literature
23-25 November 2017
“Beyond the Ruin: Investigating the Fragment in English Studies”
Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
Apostolos Lampropoulos, Université Bordeaux-Montaigne
Carl Lavery, University of Glasgow
Jyotsna Singh, Michigan State University
Julian Wolfreys, University of Portsmouth
Call for Papers
The ruin and the fragment have enduring, interconnected, yet also distinct legacies, as historical realities, material and/or aesthetic objects, and as categories of thought. The ruin predominantly recalls a classical or distant past, and is valued as a silent yet privileged ground for the reconstruction of the past. On the other hand, the fragment is primarily a conceptual category and a stylistic form, a metonymy of nostalgic wholeness, and a metaphor of and for a modernity that contemplates wholeness as irreversibly lost. In response to historical vicissitudes, the literary and the artistic imagination turned to the fragment in all its forms, as an expression of dislocation, fragmentation, and fragmentariness in modernity. In the wake of the ruin of representation in postmodernism, ruins and fragments may operate as tropes of relatedness and separation, discontinuity and destruction, uniqueness and multiplicity, open-endedness and incompleteness. Whether literal or metaphorical, ruins and fragments bear dualities that are continually recuperated and revisited as they speak of creation and destruction, recovery and silence, memory and forgetting, war and catastrophe, classicism and avant-gardism.
As divisions and conflicting notions about our past and our present are now tokens of our own despair; as quests to restore an illusory wholeness persist; as the tension between the timeless and the crumbling is becoming all the more manifest; as violence and uncertainty are all around us; as ruins make invisible vulnerability visible, this conference invites reflection on the histories, theorisations, and representations of fragments and ruins in Anglophone literatures and cultures.
Possible topics include, but are not restricted to, the following:
Reception, representations, and the significance of ruins through the ages
The dialectic between the ruin and the monument
Fragments and ruins in travel writing
The ruin as metaphor/metonymy
Fragments, ruins and incompleteness
The (un)timeliness of the ruin: silence, erasure, and memory
Ruins and melancholia
Fragmented states of consciousness
Colonial and postcolonial ruins and fragments
Cultural appropriation, recovery, and/or destruction of ruins
Narratives of destruction and catastrophe
Fragments, ruins as palimpsests
The ruin and/or fragment as spectacle
Morality, ethics, responsibility, solidarity vis-à-vis the ruin
The (un)ethics and the politics of material and cultural devastation
Terrorism as/and the creation of ruins
Textual fragmentation and contemporary literature
The fragment in new technologies and the media
The conference will be held at the Main Building of the University of Athens (http://en.uoa.gr/)
The deadline for the submission of proposals for individual 20-minute papers (250-300 words) and of proposals for panel sessions (no longer than 500 words) is March 31st, 2017. Please send a short biographical note (circa 150 words) together with your proposal. Prospective panel organisers should also send the panelists’ names, paper titles, and short bio notes for each panelist and their contact details.
Confirmation of acceptance: 30 April 2017
Proposals should be sent to haseconference2017@gmail.com.
Conference Organisers:
Emmanouil Aretoulakis (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens), emmareto@enl.uoa.gr
Anna Despotopoulou (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens), adespoto@enl.uoa.gr
Stamatina Dimakopoulou (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens),sdimakop@enl.uoa.gr
Efterpi Mitsi (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens), emitsi@enl.uoa.gr
Conference Website: http://www.beyondtheruin.net
Conference Organisers:
Emmanouil Aretoulakis (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens), emmareto@enl.uoa.gr
Anna Despotopoulou (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens), adespoto@enl.uoa.gr
Stamatina Dimakopoulou (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens),sdimakop@enl.uoa.gr
Efterpi Mitsi (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens), emitsi@enl.uoa.gr