September 30th-October 1st, 2011

Keynote address by Tulane University's Idelber Avelar*

From our vantage point ten years later, it is obvious that September 11th, 2001, was more than a moment of collective tragedy -- it precipitated a fundamental shift in the ways the United States, and to an extent, the world, understood itself. In this sense, we join a host of societies throughout history that have sought to reflect, revive and rebuild in the wake of large-scale traumatic events. This conference will explore language and literature as tools in that rebuilding, considering the many ways that the notion of crisis has intersected with ideas of personal, national and global identity in the last decade and throughout history. We seek to consider whether literature helps to heal the wounds of trauma or encourages them to fester, whether it works to erect identity borders or whether it can also act as a bridge between identities, and what the role of scholars and educators is in shaping language and literature study in this context.

Proposals & Submission Information: The conference encourages participants to critically consider the words “crisis”, “trauma”, and “response”, and to read papers that expand our understanding of those and related terms. We invite interdisciplinary and multilingual discussions that explore a wide range of crises and the equally diverse number of responses. Abstracts must be submitted before August 5, 2011. To submit your abstract, please visit our online submission site: http://goo.gl/am4Kw.

For additional information about the conference, please email organizers Dustin Hixenbaugh & Roanne Sharpe at gracls2011@gmail.com or visit UT’s Program in Comparative Literature’s website: http://www.utexas.edu/cola/progs/complit/.

*Idelber Avelar is a Professor of Latin American Literatures & Intellectual Histories and Critical Theories & Cultural Studies at Tulane University. A graduate of Duke University, he is the author of The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin Ame-rican Fiction and the Task of Mourning (1999), winner of the MLA Kovacs prize, as well as The Letter of Violence: Essays on Narrative, Ethics and Politics (2004), not to mention the more than 50 articles he has contributed to journals on both sides of the Atlantic on Latin American literature, culture and music. He is co-editor of Brazilian Popular Music and Citizenship (2011) and in 2010-2011 received a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies to pursue a new book project entitled “Rethinking Masculinity in Contemporary Brazilian and Argentinean Literatures.” The Unversity of Texas at Austin is very pleased to wel-come him as keynote speaker for the 2011 GRACLS conference.