Maryland Graduate Forum: History as Text, Text as History

Conference: February 23rd & February 24th
Deadline for abstract submission: December 15th,2006
email contact: mgsforum@gmail.com

We are very pleased and honored to announce that our keynote speaker will be Dr Tom Bishop (NYU), Gould Professor of French Literature and director of the Center for French Civilization and Culture.

At the forefront of literary and cultural scholarship today stands the reevaluation of texts,which challenges their role as apolitical aesthetic works and redefines them as products of their representative cultures capable of reciprocally influencing their society. We have selected the topic “History as Text, Text as History” with the intention of exploring this dynamic relationship of History and Literature.
Furthermore, we do not limit our understanding of the concept of “text” to written documents, but instead will extend the notion of text to include architecture, various media of speech, films, music, official documents and dialects. We expect to organize panels focusing on the following topics:
“Literature as Culture,” “The Visuals Arts as Text,” “Beyond the Facts: The Influence of Contemporary Discourses on the Recording of History,” and “Language Learning through Culture.”

The graduate students of the SLLC at the University of Maryland cordially invite the submission of papers from all disciplines that examine these different topics using the following questions as possible guidelines:

• Cultural influence in linguistic developments:
How does this affect second language acquisition?
What are the implications for anglophone,
francophone, germanophone, hispanophone, Japanese,
lusophone, russophone, and other speakers?

• Can one’s native culture influence his/her
acquisition of a second language? How?

• Evolution in theoretical developments:
romanticism to realism; modern (surrealism,
existentialism, industrialism) to post-modern
(post-colonialism; globalization; orientalism;
post-industrialism); structuralism to
post-structuralism; feminism to post-feminism; How
are these theoretical developments defined in a
text?

• Author interpretation of societal influences in
a text (social, economic, scientific, political,
etc)?

• How does one interpret various forms of the
visual arts as a text? What is the relationship
between literature, culture and other forms of art
(architecture, film, painting, sculpture)? Is the
adaptation of a literary text, such as a film
adaptation, effected by the cultural context in
which it is produced?

• How can one better understand gender relations
(history vs. herstory) of a time by “reading” a
text (that is listening to a musical score, looking
at a sculpture, watching a film, reading a novel
etc)?

These guidelines are meant to generate ideas and are suggestive rather than exhaustive. Proposals with a literary, historical, comparative, linguistic, language acquisition and interdisciplinary approach as well as from any time period are welcome.
Please send a 150-word abstract in English by email attachment (Word preferred) before December 15, 2006 and any inquiries to the following address:
mgsforum@gmail.com