[Discussion] CFP: Revisionist Histories: Memory and Forgetting (Cyprus) (2/11/05; Inscriptions, 5/12/05-5/13/05)

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

CALL FOR PAPERS

Revisionist Histories: Memory and Forgetting
A Panel Discussion at the
Eighth International Literature and Humanities Conference,
INSCRIPTIONS '05: an arts and culture conference and festival at
Eastern Mediterranean University in
Famagusta, on the island of Cyprus
May 12th - 13th, 2005

"Reading is a belated and all-but-impossible act, and if strong is
always a  misreading. [.] The strong reader, whose readings will matter
to others as well as to himself, is thus placed in the dilemmas of the
revisionist, who wishes to find his own original relation to truth,
whether in texts or in reality (which he treats as texts anyway), but
also wishes to open received texts to his own sufferings, or what he
wants to call the sufferings of history" (Harold Bloom, A Map of
Misreading [Oxford, 1975], pp. 3-4).

"All history must more or less blindly encounter the problem of a
transferential relation to the past whereby the processes at work in the
object of study acquire their displaced analogues in the historian's
account" (Dominick LaCapra, History & Criticism [Cornell, 1985], p. 11).

Representations of history are so unstable that to maintain their
mimetic force, their (experienced or constructed) links with land and
people, with the real, they must constantly be reinforced by political
decisions enforcing closure and limiting the proliferation of meanings.
Fear, acknowledged or not, of the wantonness of language-of the play of
words, of the potential loss of the real-underlies every national
history textbook and every state education system, and to maintain the
presence of the real, this fear is inscribed, either explicitly or
implicitly, on the memories and memorials of every nation: I will not
forget!

Submissions exploring the relation between the real and its
representations are invited for a Panel Discussion on the textual-
historiographical processes by which the presence of "lived experience"
is maintained as such or reconfigured in literature/texts/acts by
historical agents and historians. (While it is not the specific focus of
this panel, we also welcome presentations of this nature regarding the
island of Cyprus, the venue of our discussion-a critical, generative
space where the criteria and parameters of "truth" and historical
representation have always been politically and emotionally charged; and
where the inscription of a question mark may have the force
of a critical interpolation.)

Some possible topic areas (others are welcome):
-cultural amnesia and creations of fictionalized identity
-history as narrative/literature: White, de Certeau, Ranci=E8re
-hermeneutic ripples: reconstruction/construction/deconstruction
-theological models of history: between L=F6with and Blumenberg
-universalism, particularism and problems of relation in history
-trauma, repression and transference in history (LaCapra)
-redemption/eschatology/teleology: the end of history
(Fukuyama, Niethammer)
-periodization and problems of origin and destiny
-Feyerabend, Bachelard, Kuhn, Popper, and paradigms of scientific progres=
s
-history and/as system, progress, reason, freedom, anarchy
-historical intentionality: Barthes, Foucault, Derrida
-race, class, gender, nation, and narration
-the conception of history in Jena Romanticism
-modern historical time: the Annales historians
-history and the public sphere: Arendt, Habermas, Cottereau
-"New Historicism": intersections between history and literature
-Lyotard's "postmodern condition" and historical "grand narratives"
-microhistories: Alltagsgeschichte (Medick) and microstoria (Ginzburg, Po=
ni)
-rethinking social categories and organizations: Kocka, Wehler, Grendi, L=
evi
-Walter Benjamin, history, and aesthetics
-politics and intellectual history: Pocock, Skinner, Koselleck
-history and symbols: Hunt, Furet, Ozouf, Agulhon, Sewell
-epistemological/prescriptive validity and truth: history as propaganda/
ideology
-history, culture, system: Geertz, Weber, Bourdieu, Passeron,Cerutti,
Luhmann
-new technologies and the recording/framing of history
-the persistence of memory: the work of Pierre Nora and Henry Rousso
-historiographical forensics: evidence and exemplarity

Prospective panelists are invited to send 250-word abstracts/proposals
for 15-20 minute presentations on any aspect of these areas to
rodney.sharkey@emu.edu.tr by 11th February, 2005. I look forward to
learning about your research, and to a provocative discussion.

For more information about INSCRIPTIONS '05, please visit our website at
http://www.emu.edu.tr/elh/inscriptions

Please also check out our links to "Individual Research Presentations"
and "Creative/Performance Work."



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