[Discussion] CFP: Exploring the Utopian Impulse (Ireland) (2/1/05; 3/11/05-3/12/05)

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

Call for Papers
The First Ralahine Conference on Utopian Studies:
"Exploring the Utopian Impulse"
The University of Limerick, College of Humanities
March 11 and 12, 2005

Reality without real possibility is not complete, the world without
future-laden properties does not deserve a glance.
	-- Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope

The land sustaining us seemed to hold firm
Only when we embraced it in extremis.
All I believed that happened there was vision.
	-- Seamus Heaney, "The Disappearing Island"

Plenary Speakers:  Fredric Jameson, Luke Gibbons

In the current global political climate, it has been argued that utopian
anticipation of any sort is to be rejected as either useless dreaming or
authoritarian control.  However, given the understanding of the utopian
impulse put forward by Ernst Bloch and others, these dark times of
closure, privilege, and violence call out more than ever for Utopia's
transformative energy as a necessary stimulus to needed cultural and
political change.

The research agenda of the Ralahine Centre for Utopian Studies is based
on the premise that social policies and practices are ultimately shaped
by utopian impulses in the cultures out of which they arise (however
debated, conflicted, contested). These utopian impulses can be
identified and studied in the social anticipations and visions
articulated through a variety of texts (literary, legal, political,
theological, musical, visual, etc.) and through social experience
(religious and secular intentional communities, political movements,
cultural practices). These expressions and experiences are best seen as
modes of anticipatory production that generate a
pedagogical sense of possibilities. Utopianism, consequently, is most
usefully understood as a process of future-bearing social dreaming that
informs efforts to make the world a better place, not to the letter of a
plan but to the spirit of an open-ended process.

For this First Ralahine Conference, we invite proposals for papers - of
20 minutes in length - in all areas of utopian studies: literary,
cultural, historical, sociological, political, theoretical, and
philosophical. Papers on Irish dimensions in utopian studies will
constitute one stream of the conference.  Other streams can include
utopian textualties; utopian communities; utopian links with other
cultural formations (e.g., pastoralism or horror, musical or visual
culture, architectural or urban design, etc.); utopianism and feminism,
utopian dimensions of everyday life; utopian dimensions of  cultural and
political policies and practices (local and/or global; public, popular,
or corporate spheres).

Fredric Jameson is William A. Lane Professor of Comparative Literature
and Romance Studies at Duke University.  His works include The Political
Unconscious (1981), and Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism (1991), and he has published extensively on utopianism.

Luke Gibbons is the Keough Family Chair of Irish Studies at University
of Notre Dame, and author of Transformations in Irish Culture (1997),
and Edmund Burke and Ireland (2003).

Please send a proposal of 200-300 words to Michael Griffin, Department
of Languages and Cultural Studies, University of Limerick, Ireland by
February 1, 2005. Proposals can be e-mailed as an attachment to
michael.j.griffin@ul.ie



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