This year the general topic for literature and cultural studies is DURABILITY AND TRANSIENCE: CULTURAL BORDERS OF TEMPORALITY

The 2009 edition of our Annual Conference invites interdisciplinary approaches to the subjects of time and temporality, with focus on specific differences at work in such domains as Literature, Social Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Communications, Cultural Theory, Media and Film Studies. Our contemporary social, political and psychological predicaments are culture- and time-bound. At a time of culture-specific differences occupying the minds of academics in the humanities and social sciences, more alert than ever to change, it is certainly a challenge to turn to the question of time in an academic conference. Haunting presences in the intellectual debates of the last half century or so (with names such as Heidegger, Braudel, Vovelle, Ricoeur, Pomyan, to say nothing of the New Historicists holding pride of place), time and temporality, history and historicity appear as consubstantial with the discourse of modernity. In the Kantian tradition, time and space are a fundamental legacy of Western thought, undissociable from each other, as, indeed, confirmed by such concepts as espace-temps or chronotope. Some related queries are likely to need an urgent answer: Is time treated differently in various humanistic disciplines nowadays? Do they regard it as a sequence of discrete moments or as a continuous flow? How is temporality used in the investigation of individual psychologies and of social groups? How is it interpreted today in different culture areas? What are the possible mutations which that notion may undergo in the near future?

Here is a list of possible topics to be approached by the participants, which should not be interpreted as a limitation of their choices:
- Durability vs. change, essentialism vs. relativism
- Universal vs. culture-specific, enduring vs. perishable values
- Time warps, temporal narratives, narratives of time
- Assessing time, durability and transience
- Cultural amnesia and cultural anamnesis, retrieving time lost or wasted, (re)living time and history
- Time-bound cultural institutions(literature, literary history, the canon etc.)
- Time in/and literature; Literary categories in/and time.
- Aesthetic temporality versus social, religious, moral, political, perspectives on time
- Historicity and genres
- The ideology and sociology of time
- Cultural identities in temporal perspectives
- Geographic temporalities
- Temporal dimensions of trauma
- Gender temporalities
- Metropolitan vs. colonial time(s)
- War((s) and time(s)
- Temporality and technology
- Digital temporalities (computer time, digital history, virtual lives etc.)

Conference fee: 50 euro (conference documents, refreshments). Presentations, in English, will be 20-min. long plus 10 min. for discussion. Authors are invited to submit abstracts, which will be published in the Conference programme. Abstracts may not exceed 500 words (including a list of keywords). They should be submitted in word format. Proposals must include titles of papers, name and institutional affiliation; mailing address, phone, fax and e-mail address.

Deadline for receipt of proposals: 15 February 2009.
Please send proposals (and direct inquiries) to the following e-mail addresses:

irina.pana@rdslink.ro and litcultstbucharest@gmail.com

A selection of papers will be published in University of Bucharest Review. Please visit the conference webpage: http://www.english-unib.ro/events.htm

We are looking forward to welcoming you in Bucharest

Assoc. Prof. Octavian Roske
Head of Department

The Organizing Committee:

Prof. Irina Pană
Assoc. Prof. Ioana Zirra
Assoc. Prof. Sabina Draga
Asst. Prof. James Brown
Ms. Ruxandra Rădulescu, junior lecturer
Mr. Dragoş Ivana, junior lecturer