Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana
University of Zaragoza
Jaca, Huesca (Spain)
March 26-28, 2009

Keynote Speakers:
Meena Alexander, creative writer and academic (India, USA)
Merlinda Bobis, creative writer and academic (Philippines,
Australia)
Gert Buelens, Director of the Centre of Literature and Trauma (Ghent University)
Laurie Vickroy, trauma critic (USA)
Jean-Michael Ganteau, ethics critic (France)

Trauma has become a central trope in the cultural imagination of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and critics across ideological spectrums seem to agree that we are now living in an "age of trauma." Being an important sub-strand of the so-called 'Ethical Criticism,' Trauma Studies emerged as a critical trend in the 1990s through the voices of trauma theorists such as Cathy Caruth, Dominick LaCapra, Shoshana Felman and Geoffrey Harpham, among others. This new interest was the result of the effects of the two World Wars and other armed conflicts, the clash of civilisations, the processes of decolonisation and globalisation, and the alienation of affections triggered off by the new technologies and the consumer society. The Holocaust has become the paradigm of traumatic experience, and the terrorist attacks by religious fundamentalists on the population of New York (11 September 2001), Madrid (11 March 2004), and London (7 July 2005), have introduced the vocabulary of trauma in our general speech. However, trauma theory has also focused on a literature that points to History as the determining factor in causing interracial traumas or postcolonial conflicts.

In the struggle that trauma creates between the "urge to know" and the "need to deny," we welcome contributions that will explore the theoretical, heuristic and hermeneutic articulations of trauma in contemporary narrative in English.

Suggested topics to explore include, but are not limited to:

* The representation of historical and/or personal trauma in contemporary narrative in English.
* The study of formal innovations devised by contemporary writers in order to represent both collective and individual traumas.
* The connections between the representations of historical traumas and personal traumas, of fiction and testimony.
* Trauma and literary genres, politics, gender, postcolonial studies and indigenous peoples’ studies.
* Representations of trauma in the arts.

Three copies of COMPLETED papers (max. 2,500 words, aprox. 9 double-spaced pages, including notes and works cited) following the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, together with a 100-150 word abstract should be sent or e-mailed to the organisers (M. Dolores Herrero, dherrero@unizar.es Sonia Baelo-Allué, baelo@unizar.es). Author information is to be sent in a separate sheet (including name, filiation, contact address and paper title).

Deadline for submissions: January 12th, 2009.

M. Dolores Herrero
Sonia Baelo-Allué
Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana
Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
50009 Zaragoza, Spain

Updates will appear on the conference web site: http://cne.literatureresearch.net/conference/