[Discussion] Identifications: Faith, Theory, and Identity-Making

[gonul@bilkent.edu.tr]

Call for Papers, Poetry, Fiction, Performance Art:
Purdue English and Philosophy Ph.D. Program Graduate Student Conference
February 6-8, 2004

Deadline for Submissions has been extended to November 3, 2003.


Identifications:
Faith, Theory, and Identity-Making

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Merold Westphal: Faith and (non) Identity
Distinguished Professor of Philosophy
Fordham University

Responding to recent post-secular turns in philosophy and literature, this
conference seeks to bring together graduate students in the humanities who
are interested in thinking through interconnections between faith and
theory. The conference is responding to the possibility that how we learn
to understand subject-formation might facilitate and in turn be sharpened by
theorizing faith and religious-identifications. We invite proposals for
papers and panels, as well as performance pieces, poetry, and fiction.

Deadline for Submissions: November 3, 2003

Please send either a full paper (no longer than 12-15 pages) or a detailed
abstract or panel proposal to: Ada Jaarsma, jaarsma@purdue.edu
Philosophy, BRNG 7th floor, Purdue University
West Lafayette, IN 47907
Or
Mindy Tan, tanh@purdue.edu
Department of American Studies
University Hall, 672 Oval Drive
West Lafayette, IN 47907

Possible questions include:
• How do the processes by which we gain singular and collective identities
(psychoanalytic, existential, critical-theoretical) resonate with
confessions of faith? How do sexual, gender, ethnic, and racial
identifications cohabit with religious identities?

• Do increasing resonances between deconstruction and religious apophatic
teachings point to a contemporary mystical presence in current theoretical
discourse? Can we mobilize this possibility, after the anti-essentialist
thinking of the 90s, to rethink the subject’s relation to theology and faith
without falling back on essentialist concepts?

• Can we reread philosophers of faith (Augustine, Kierkegaard, Weil,
Lévinas, Marion, Irigaray) as well as philosophers of atheism/humanism
(Nietzsche, Sartre, Heidegger, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty) in and through the
problematic of identifications? How do they help us to think through
identity-making?

• Can we mobilize contemporary literary theory to attend to relations of
faith within a text? For example, can we re-envision relations between
modernism and religion through encounters with T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster,
Edith Sitwell, D. H. Lawrence, Salvador Dali?

• If we see a transcendent turn in theory today (Derrida, Caputo, Zizek,
Radical Orthodoxy), what does it say about the state of theory that the
"secular suspension" under which we have been functioning is itself being
suspended?

• In the increasing despair over progressive politics these days, is there a
place for eschatological thinking again? What does it mean that we are
increasingly understanding our politics in transnational and global terms?
How have faith traditions contributed to this discussion and conversely, how
must we rethink our traditions in light of these conditions?

• What is at stake in the ethical injunction to remember? Between memory and
expectation, what is the role of literature in relation to the ethical
demands of realism?

• Can the mystical tradition provide resources for dialogue between
"philosophers of faith" and "philosophers of atheism"?

• Following the “scientific crisis” of disciplines like literary criticism
and history, can we re-define the way we go about academic work to include
an understanding that all method research is informed at some point by an
“illumination” or epiphany that is not culled from, and is rather external
to, the materials with which we are working?


This conference is free and open to the public.
Dinner checks of 15$ are payable to Ada Jaarsma and can be mailed to Ada
Jaarsma, Philosophy, BRNG 7th floor, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN
47907
For updated conference information, please see the Purdue English and
Philosophy Ph. D. program website:
http://www.sla.purdue.edu/academic/idis/phil-lit/ /> 
The conference is supported by Dr. Martin Beck Matustik, Professor of
Philosophy, director of the Purdue English and Philosophy Ph.D. program.
The conference is also supported by the English department, the Women’s
Studies department, Modern Fiction Studies, the Jewish Studies program, and
the Religious Studies program at Purdue University.

Purdue University is an equal access, equal opportunity employer.