[Discussion] Fwd: CFP: Essays in Culture and Irreversibility (5/30/05; collection)

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

From: Benjamin Schreier <formstone@mindspring.com>

Call for Papers: Essays in Culture and Irreversibility (Collection).
Proposals due 30 May 2005; completed essays likely due September 2005.

Submissions are sought for a collection of papers that has attracted strong
interest from a press. Essays should address cultural representations of
experience that are not amenable to metaphors of return, advent, or
re-collection. Numerous attempts have been made to characterize the modes of
intelligent experience. These have included efforts to locate conceptual
apparatus that underlie apperception, metaphors that lend narrative 
meaning to
experience, or socio-cultural structures that enable the detection of 
historical
significance, to name a few. But such conceptualizations often end up 
revealing
a messianism or other teleology subtending the human experience of 
history. Work
remains to be pursued on the sense, knowledge, or experience of 
irreversibility.
Importantly, this experience is different from nostalgia, which derives its
charge from (and is underwritten by) a fantasy of return. And it is 
incompatible
with existential concern with memory centered on the subject as a kind of
collector, anchor, or focus of historical significance. If messianic 
structures
posit a future to justify the present (if by way of the past), this 
collection
is devoted to examining experience from the perspective of its rearview 
mirror.

Papers should contribute to an analysis of the experience of 
irretrievability,
inaccessibility, irreparability, irremediability, irrevocability, or any 
other
form of irreversibility. The purview of this collection spans the 
concerns of
several disciplines, including philosophy, ethics, literature, history, art
history, linguistics, religion, physics, politics, and sociology, to 
name a few.

Questions, problems, or perspectives that might be considered include, 
but are
by no means limited to, the following:
1. What are the outlines or history of a theory of irreversibility?
2. How is irreversibility represented?
3. How does the experience of irretrievability take shape as a cultural 
form?
4. How does recognition of irrevocability force a reconceptualization of the
experiences of "looking backward" or "looking forward" away from their
respective meanings within a progressive understanding of history?
5. What sort of challenge (if any) does irreversibility pose to teleology?
6. What kinds of politics are compatible with a theory of history as
irremediability? Is such a theory of history radical or conservative?
7. Which authors would be included in a literary history of irreversibility?
8. What does a morality or ethics grounded in the recognition of historical
irreversibility-i.e., of choices or decisions-look like?
9. Is the worldview that attends a conviction of irreversibility inherently
pessimistic, or can it be optimistic?
10. What role does a phenomenology of irreversibility play in contemporary
culture?
11. How does irreversibility affect the current socio-political dominance of
identity-based thinking?

Abstracts of about 500 words or so should be sent by 30 May 2005 to Ben 
Schreier
at formstone@mindspring.com (MSWord attachments preferred) or, if necessary,
Department of English (MC 162), University of Illinois at Chicago, 601 
S. Morgan
St., Chicago, IL 60607. Complete papers will probably be due in September.


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