[Discussion] UPDATE: Dream Writing (UK) (4/20/05; 10/15/05-10/16/05)

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

Keynote speakers announced:

Dream writing
A two-day conference
October 15-16, 2005
The University of Kent, United Kingdom

Update: Keynote Speakers
Adam Phillips  (a psychoanalyst and a writer, also the General Editor of
the new Penguin Freud)

David Mitchell  (the author of Ghostwritten, number9dream and Cloud
Atlas: twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize)


We live alongside our dreams, even if it is not to our liking. Not only
are dreams recurrent themes in literary and visual representations, but
theories of dreams and dreaming permeate all humanities disciplines. The
dream is a potent critical tool; we suggest 'dream' could be the name of
a new genre, like 'film'. We are surprisingly uncritical of our
appropriation of dreams, which are too often taken to mean something
else - symbols, manifestations of our psyche, or as a literary or
rhetorical device through which truth, otherwise suppressed, slips into
the open. This interdisciplinary conference wishes to shed fresh light
on our relationship with dream and the mysteries of its allure, in order
to redefine our approach to dreams. We will explore how, when, and why
dreams come to us within the academic disciplines (or do we resort to
dreams?). We wish to read dreams alongside and against psychoanalysis,
and to ask to what extent 'dreams write', how much the texts we read and
produce in our daily life are informed by dreams, or by our
understanding of what dreams are.

We seek to bring together different disciplines, practices and genres
through the theme of dream writing. Papers are thus sought across the
humanities (literature, art, film, history, philosophy, anthropology,
creative writing, etc), from specialists and non-specialists of dream
theories. We welcome unique approaches to all aspects of dreams and
dream writing, pointing to new ways of dreaming through reading/writing/
conceptualising dreams.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to :
- Dreams and writing
- Dreams and language
- Dreams and psychoanalysis
- Interpretation of dreams
- The politics and ideologies of dreaming
- Translation theories and dreams
- Dreams and intertextuality
- Dreaming in the different epistemes - the Middle Age, Renaissance,
pre-Freudian, non-European dreams etc, their dream theories, and/or
their place in our contemporary ways of dreaming.
- Philosophy of dreams, history of dreaming
- Race and dreams: colonial and anthropological dreams, fantasy
and dreams as the Other.
- Postcolonial uses of the dream space, e.g. dreams as the site of
identities/ethnicities
- Arts and dreaming: films, photography, sculpture, music etc.=20
- Architectural dreams
- Alternative spaces of dreaming: computer games, drugs and
hallucination, utopias, travels, daydreaming, etc.
- Geography of dreams, dreamland
- Nightmares, fear, panic, sanity
- Political dreams, ethical dreams
- Dreams and consumerism
- Dreams and memory
- Censorship and boundaries. Dream as a genre
- Dream and literature, dream journals, autobiography, poems, etc.
- Dreams and religion: theology; dreaming with God(s), God as a dream.
- Sexuality and dreams; gendered dreams
- Voices in dreams. Bodies or materiality of dreams
- Dream universities

Please send proposals of 100 to 300 words for papers of 20 minutes to
Kaori Nagai (K.Nagai@kent.ac.uk) by 20 April 2005.

For further details and enquiries, please contact:
Dr. Kaori Nagai
School of English, The University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NZ, UK
e-mail : K.Nagai@kent.ac.uk
webpage: http://www.kent.ac.uk/kiash/conference/index.html



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