[Bilimsel Haber] CFP: Changing the Subject: Poesis, Praxis, and Theoria in the Humanities (grad) (2/1/06; EGSO, 4/22/06-4/23/06)

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

From: EGSO Albany <egsoalbany@yahoo.com>

Call for Panels and Papers: Deadline 2/1/06

The English Graduate Student Organization (EGSO) of the University at 
Albany,
SUNY announces its annual graduate student conference Saturday April 22 and
Sunday 23, 2006:

Changing the Subject: Poesis, Praxis, and Theoria in the Humanities

Robert Scholes is the Keynote Speaker, presenting a paper titled 
"Changing the
Subject: Periodical Studies"

Robert Scholes is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and Emeritus
Professor Emeritus of English, Comparative literature, and MCM at Brown
University. He served as the 2004 President of the MLA and is currently 
Director
of Modernist Journals Project. Without doubt, those of us in English studies
have encountered at least one text by Robert Scholes. Many times The 
Rise and
Fall of English is a text we confront as we negotiate our place in the 
academy.
However, in our preparation as teachers, Textual Studies approaches 
issues about
literary theory's place in the classroom, in terms of the theoretical and
pragmatic. For our course work as scholars, we see his engagement of 
critical
theory and critical practice in several books, such as Semiotics and
Interpretation and Structuralism in Literature. In addition, Modernist 
scholars
look to his work on the period via In Search of James Joyce and will be 
looking
forward to the publication of Paradoxy of Modernism in 2006.


Changing the Subject: Poiesis, Praxis, and Theoria in the Humanities

For more than two thousand years, Aristotle's division of rational human
activity into Labor, Action, and Contemplation has served to guide 
discussion
about our work as writers, teachers, and scholars. The model has also been
invoked recently to help maintain divisions and identities among the 
disciplines
that make up the humanities. In the past century, Aristotle's model has 
been,
like many cultural assumptions, held up to increasing scrutiny. Martin
Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Paolo Virno are only a few of the thinkers who
have reconceived the boundaries among these categories, while movements as
diverse as psychoanalysis, surrealism, and deconstruction have 
questioned the
very foundation upon which these categories stand. The separations among the
disciplines have undergone a similar challenge and reconfiguration. 
Writers such
as Robert Scholes, Stanley Fish, bell hooks, Paulo Friere, John 
Guillory, and
Bill Readings have examined the shifting ground of the humanities, not only
re-imagining the topic of our study but also our reconceptualizing who 
we are as
human subjects.

Perhaps these changes should not surprise us; for does not the impulse 
for the
crossing of boundaries, for conversation rather than 
compartmentalization, lie
at the very heart of literature? That is, has not literature always 
already had
a tradition of crossing lines, and has not this quality served as a 
definition
for the literary? Have not those boundaries, whether abstract, generic, or
national, been at the subject of works ranging from Aphra Behn's 
Oroonoko to the
more recent by poet John Ashbery, and the novels of W.G. Sebald and J.M.
Coetzee? And, furthermore, has not literature and the teaching of literature
always had as its focus not merely the representation of our identity 
but very
literally our conceiving of it?

What relevance, then, does the classical model have for us today? And 
what, if
anything, might replace it? Possible topics on this theme include 
performance
and criticism of boundary-crossing art, studies of the effect of 
mass-production
and global economies on the work of art, discussions of the politics of 
teaching
and the future of the university, and questions about the role of theory in
today's increasingly cross-disciplinary study.

Panels and papers are sought for three general and flexible areas:
Pedagogy/writing instruction
Creative Writing
Literary/Critical/Philosophical

Please email a 300-500 word panel proposal or abstract with a short 
biography to
egsoalbany@yahoo.com.



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