[Bilimsel Haber] CFP: The Future/Ends of Narrative/Theory (5/1/06; MMLA, 11/9/06-11/12/06)

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

"The Future/Ends of Narrative/Theory"
MMLA 2006 Comparative Literature Panel
9-12 November 2006, Palmer House Hilton, Chicago IL

contact:
Mark Pettus (mapettus at wisc.edu), University of Wisconsin-Madison


Faced with practice, theory often turns its gaze toward the future,
casting predictions from a symptomatic present. Out of the present,
theory often prophesies the end of a movement or its continued progress.
Kant, for instance, read the French Revolution as a sign of mankind's
progress and Prussia's peace with the revolutionary government of France
as portending perpetual peace between all nations. Earlier in "Idea for
Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose" (1784), Kant claimed that
the philosophical effort of writing such a history--one which seemingly
could only come from a novel--itself would participate in the
progressive achievement of man's nature.

In proclaiming the ends of history and art, Hegel symptomatically read
his own present more in accordance with eschatology than utopia. In the
20th century, Kojeve (end of man) and Fukayama (end of history) take up
similar dialectical predictions while anti-dialectical thinkers
(Heidegger and the end of metaphysics, Foucault and the end of man,
etc.) show the same penchant for making prophesy of the present.

 From Jameson's utopic reading practice in The Political Unconscious to
Hardt
and Negri's celebration of the revolutionary potential of global
capitalism in Empire, even Marxist critics have found signs of future
progress in apparently ideological fields. In the end, very little seems
to be capable of binding predictive theory.

This panel examines how both theory and narrative form predictions and
prophecy out of moments of the present, particularly how the modes of
theory and narrative interact in predictions of historical progress or
closure.

Questions and topics to consider:

- in prediction, what is the economy of history, theory and narrative?
- how does predictive theory make use of narrative?
- how does prediction depend on figuration and tropes?
- how do predictive theories travel (e.g. Thomas Friedman's use of
Malcolm Gladwell's notion of the tipping point in diagnosing the
prospects for democracy in the Middle East)?
- how do predictive theories based on cyclical views of history differ
from ones based on linear historical models?
- how do predictions perform or participate in their theoretical
objects?
- what sort of attitudes toward the present are entailed by predictive
theories?

All genres and periods are welcome. Please submit abstracts of 250 words
or less by 1 May 2006.





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