Please share this call for papers with your colleagues, lists, or faculty friends who teach graduate students. Paper proposals can be submitted to
SUNYSB.GradConf@gmail.com. Conference details, registration, and updates will be posted at
www.stonybrook.edu/english/grad/conference/.
Instrument, Image, Ekphrasis:
Intersecting Genres of Knowledge.
24th Annual
Stony Brook University
English Department
Graduate Conference:
An Interdisciplinary Conference
Contact email:
Location: Stony Brook University, Manhattan Campus
Date: Saturday, February 25, 2012
Proposal Deadline: December 17, 2011
Keynote Speaker: Laura Kipnis
The
Stony Brook Manhattan English Department Graduate Conference, the
longest running interdisciplinary graduate student conference in the
nation, welcomes papers and panels from all disciplines, including the
arts, cultural studies, social and hard sciences, and the humanities.
This year’s conference will feature a faculty-sponsored Best Paper
Award; for details and registration visit www.stonybrook.edu/gradconf.
Call for Papers:
The tools of a trade can enclose: a poem
becomes its form, patients become their diagnoses, people their
demographic, and students their grades. Complex ideas about history,
foreignness, alienation, memory, subject and object are often distilled
into a single image produced by our instruments of "knowledge." The
production of an instrument is ekphrastic: it blends genres and frames
one genre within another: A paintbrush, x-ray or spreadsheet; a rubric,
or questionnaire; a literary form – stream of consciousness, or fourteen
lines towards a sonnet. Memory, artifact. Pen and ink. How do the
instruments of a vocation establish a politics of communication? What do
these images reveal, or obscure? When do they make us think, and when
do they put an end to thinking?
The English Department at Stony Brook University is proud to offer
an interdisciplinary call for papers that asks graduate scholars to
reflect on the instruments of their discipline, and to think about how
ekphrasis (ek as "out," and phrasis as "speaking") speaks out about the
intersection of image, instrument, and genre. What is "instrumentality"
in literature, or art, or philosophy? How is it the same, or different,
in the social or hard sciences? Does it imply a certain mentality, or
construct a static "reader"?
Abstracts can be up to 250 words, and should be submitted by Friday,
December 17, 2011. Applicants will be notified of their acceptance
shortly after the December deadline. Students interested in competing
for the Best Paper Prize sponsored by Stony Brook English faculty must
submit a completed paper no later than January 16, 2012 for
consideration. Award winners will be announced at the conference. Email
submissions to:
SUNYSB.GradConf@gmail.com.
Paper and panel submission topics can address a broad range of
interests. Diverse genre proposals are welcome, including music, art,
science posters, social research, etc. Possible "instruments" are listed
below:
Instruments of change: Migrations and Diasporas
Instruments of Memory: Cultural Memory, Testimonial Narratives, Memory and Written Record
Instruments of Place: Maps, regions, “Homelands” (real or imaginary)
Instrumentality, performance, and art (e.g. ekphrastic narratives)
Philosophy (e.g., debates over realism)
Rhetoric (e.g., the use of strategic reason in communication)
History (e.g., scientific instruments in the history of science)
Literature (e.g., literary devices, characters as instruments, Representations
of marginalized people as instruments, literary ekphrasis)
Art (e.g., the use of artistic tools or philosophical questions related to the use of art)
Image in popular media
Health science (i.e. the gaps between tools and the human subject).
Cultural texts
Linguistics and translation
Narrative: Myth, Borders, Storytelling
Visual/Performing Arts and Music; musical ekphrasis
Oral Traditions
Postmodernity and its narratives
Voice and reflexivity in oral and written texts
Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives
Conquest and Political Memory
Globalization and indigenous cultures
Notional Ekphrasis
Displacement Heritage
Technology, gaming, and social media; emerging technologies
Children’s Stories- Language, Authority and Silence
