Re-vision in Contemporary Women's Writing
Seminar Organizer: Liedeke Plate, Radboud U Nijmegen

This seminar aims to assess the relevance of Adrienne Rich’s “re-vision” in the context of World Literature/Comparative Literature, theorizing it as a concept for women’s writing, reflecting on its historical development as a mode of feminist praxis, and inquiring into it as a “travelling concept” that journeys beyond its context of emergence. Re-vision can be viewed as a concept that enables contemporary women’s writing in a variety of settings. It can also serve to conceptualize a practice of productive reception and transmission where the local interacts with the cosmopolitan to open up new literary and cultural spaces for women writers.

We welcome contributions that revisit “re-vision” in the context of “feminist/gender theory and its discontents,” evaluate its continued ability to empower women readers and writers today, and/or look into its contemporary reception and redeployment in various postfeminist contexts, including its co-optation for more commercial uses in a variety of “re-visionary fictions.” We are especially keen on taking the concept beyond the confines of the US and Europe, as a “travelling concept,” across World Literature/Comparative Literature. We therefore welcome papers that explore its capacity to generate new texts and alter/native ways of relating to existing, elected or imposed, traditions by re-visioning them and “writing back” to them. We are also interested inquiries into “re-vision” as a concept for the theorization of practices of affiliation and disaffiliation, reception, and transmission across cultures and languages and their gendered aspects and dimensions.

Topics might include:
- Rewriting the literary classics
- Re-vision and tradition
- Re-vision, the past and the future
- Re-visions and the literary marketplace
- Popular fiction / genre fiction and re-vision
- Re-visioning myth and fairytale
- Postcolonial and queer re-visions
- Prequels and sequels
- Rewriting feminist classics – Jane Eyre...
- Postfeminist re-visions / Jane Austen and chick-lit
- Re-visioning as publishing phenomenon - the Canongate myth series
- Rewriting and memory transmission
- Transatlantic and transnational re-visions

Proposals (max 250 words) are to be submitted through the ACLA website: www.acla.org/acla2011 (click on the list of all seminars, then select ‘Re-vision in Contemporary Women's Writing’)

Deadline for Paper Proposals: November 12, 2010

For more information, please contact Liedeke Plate .