[Discussion] Continuity/ Rupture

[Gönül Pultar]

CALL FOR PAPERS

Continuity/ Rupture

Perspectives on the past, the present and change

Bilkent University, March 5-7, 2004

The Bilkent University Program in Cultures, Civilizations and Ideas invites
paper proposals for an interdisciplinary symposium on the subjects of
history and temporality, with a particular focus on themes of continuity
and rupture.  The Symposium seeks to examine the ways in which ideas,
methods, periods and disciplines conceptualize their relation with time,
and in particular the past and tradition.

Within a culture that operates in part on archival principles of
preservation and remembrance how do we conceptualize continuity and
rupture? How do things change? Is every change a break?  How are newness
and continuity related to the ways in which cultures reproduce themselves?
Do discourses of revolution necessitate rupture with the past, or do they
inevitably lead to repetition and return?  Recent years have witnessed
intense academic interest among scholars of the humanities and social
sciences in the practice of memory and its failure.  This debate includes
the analysis of continuity, origination, trauma and displacement, as well
as the institutionalization of memory in monuments and other practices of
remembering, misremembering and forgetting.   Does continuity exist as
anything other than a retrospective projectionfrom the interested
perspective of the present?  If all tradition tends now to be seen as to
some degree invented, how do we conceive of influence

the productive as well as the restrictive weights of pasts upon the present?

This is the second annual symposium to be sponsored by Bilkents Program in
Cultures, Civilizations and Ideas.  A goal of the organizers is to provide
a forum where scholars working on these questions in different academic
disciplines, or in the zones between these disciplines, may present their
ideas to an informed and interested audience of scholars approaching these
issues from other perspectives.  We very much welcome proposals from
Faculty and Graduate Students from all disciplines.

Possible areas of concern include literal and figurative archaeology;
archiving and dissemination; trauma and transformation; monuments and lieux
de mémoire; revising national narratives; history as science, history  as
narrative; preservation, renovation and restoration; postmodern traditions;
classicism and its refigurations; cataclysm and apocalypse.