Fatih University
2nd Annual Transdisciplinary Literary and Cultural Studies Conference:
Metamorphosis and Place

May 24-26, 2007
Istanbul

“Places change us,” writes J. Gerald Kennedy. “In different locations we become other people.” While personal, regional, and national identities may be constructed in terms of place, Michel de Certeau has theorized that place is space endowed with value. What happens to a place as personal or societal values change? How do our values change as places change? “Every textual construction of place implies a mapping of an interior terrain,” writes Kennedy. We believe this is true in any discipline, whether one is painting a picture, mapping a gene, diagramming a sentence, constructing a house, or building a place out of words. The transdisciplinary scope of this conference seeks to do more than set one discipline alongside another, exploring of a wide spectrum of themes and topics within a broad and interrelated approach.

Fatih University’s English Language and Literature and American Culture and Literature departments invite narrative, visual, and theoretical representations of place, along with perspectives on what representations of place suggest about the way we conceptualize places, form attachments to them, and project our own metamophoses of identity onto them. Academics in the fields of Literary and Cultural Studies and theorists of Transdisciplinarity as well as presenters from areas formally outside these fields: artists, storytellers, filmmakers, cognitive research specialists, urban planners, actors, scientists, and musicians are invited to join us for a three-day integration of perspectives, shedding light on how place is both a transforming subject and a transformed object.

We thus invite panels, papers, and presentations from various fields on any of the following themes:

• How the stories we tell and hear, and the images we make and see, change our perceptions of place; How geographic dislocations change stories and images
• Linguistic change and the linguistic alteration of place
• Gendered places and the gendering of metamorphosis
• Online metamorphoses, metamorphoses of the internet, and internet as place
• Narrative metamorphoses of place; Place’s metamorphosis of narrative
• Exile and identity in metamorphosis
• Text/Image Studies in relation to place and metamorphosis
• Metamorphoses of the Other and place as Other
• Place in the novel and metamorphoses of the novel
• Literary topographies and metamorphoses in Kafka, Woolf, Ovid, Elif Shafak
• Metamorphoses of democracy, the effects of place on democracy, democracy’s effects on place
• The European Union, ideas of place and planned metamorphoses
• Metamorphosis and place in American cultures and religions; The separation of religion, culture, and place
• Metamorphoses of economy, transforming the industrial economy into a creative economy
• Cognitive mappings of place, metamorphoses of the concept of place
• Post Colonialism and place, metamorphoses of Post Colonial studies
• Visual, theatrical, performative, musical, and cinematic metamorphoses and the effect of place on the visual, theatrical, performative, musical and cinematic
• Metamorphosis of war and war’s metamorphosis of place; Peace Studies
• The metamorphosis of beauty and aesthetics, beautiful places
• Love’s metamorphosis of place and place’s metamorphosis of love
• Transformations of pedagogy in relation to place

400 word abstracts or project proposals and a brief bio should be submitted to the conference organizers by email or post by December 15.

"Before there was earth or sea or the sky that covers everything, Nature appeared the same throughout the whole world: what we call chaos ... confused in the one place ... Nothing retained its shape, one thing obstructed another, because in the one body, cold fought with heat, moist with dry, soft with hard, and weight with weightless things." Ovid