[Discussion] CFP: Cultural Paradigms and Historical Memory (9/15/04; NEMLA, 3/31/05-4/2/05)

[sule tarakcioglu]

CALL FOR PAPERS

'The Waning of History', 'the Return of the Repressed': Cultural
Paradigms  and Historical Memory


Does 'the real' of history escape us in our virtual worlds, as critics
such  as Baudrillard and Jameson claim, or do our virtual worlds
reproduce what they repress, namely 'the real' in a distorted, but
retrievable form, as Freudian thinkers would tend to think? We are
looking for contributions exploring literary or filmic works that
negotiate the relationship between history and historical memory,
addressing the creation of virtual worlds and the manipulation of
cultural production, its successes and backlashes, the relationship of
immaterial and material culture, or investigating alternative concepts
of how cultural production translates historical experience into the
present.

Please send abstracts by September 15 to evelyn.preuss@yale.edu.



At the end of the twentieth century, cultural theorists of both the left
and the right shared a sense that history had lost its cultural
significance. While Francis Fukuyama, for instance, argued that liberal
democracy represented an endpoint in the ideological development of
mankind, ending history as we know it, Frederic Jameson contended that
the postmodern era devalued history through depthlessness and the
fragmentation of time into perceptual presents. These theses call for
critical inquiry: if Western ideologies deny history to such an extent
that their vision of the future crystallizes in an eternal present, if
pop history, pastiche and image culture 'empty out history', what are
these cultural phenomena a token of? Of our desire to eliminate history,
to appropriate it, to consume it? Here, the theorists of postmodernity
clash with psychoanalytic concepts of memory and history. Does 'the
real' escape us in our virtual worlds, as critics such as Baudrillard
and Jameson claim, or do our virtual worlds reproduce what they repress,
namely 'the real' in a distorted, but retrievable form, as Freudian
thinkers would tend to think? To what extent is the virtual indeed
virtual and not 'real' and what are the implications for our experience
of time and our relationship to history? What role does metaphorical
language play in representations of history and to what extent has
history itself become a metaphor?

The proposed panel takes up the discussion generated by the "Umkehrung,
Verkehrung, Wende: Turning Points in German Culture" panels at the 2004
NEMLA Convention, which had raised questions regarding the concept of
time and its relation to experience in the twentieth century, the
politics implied in a historical versus a spatial definition of national
identity and the historical understanding (dis)engendered by comic and
pastiche modes of dealing with the past. "'The Waning of History', 'the
Return of the Repressed'" intends to focus this discussion by
juxtaposing the two prevalent, but antithetical concepts of history at
the end of the twentieth century, anticipating and seeking to formulate
new theoretical approaches.

We are looking for contributions exploring works that negotiate the
relationship between history and historical memory, addressing the
creation of virtual worlds and the manipulation of cultural production,
its successes and backlashes, the relationship of immaterial and
material culture, or investigating alternative concepts of how cultural
production translates historical experience into the present.


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