Call for papers
Metamorphoses: Transformations, Transgressions
English, Media & Performing Arts Postgraduate Symposium
University of New South Wales
Friday, 10th September 2010
Call for papers
This conference aims to engage with postgraduates and early career
researchers on points of convergence among the humanities and social
science disciplines to discuss the concept of ‘metamorphosis’, its mythic
echoes and its contemporary imaginings.
>From Ovid to Hans Christian Anderson to Kafka, literal depictions of
metamorphoses dominate cultural discourse and permeate our currencies of
storytelling. Yet metamorphoses also evoke liminal spaces and becomings,
straddling one realm and others simultaneously. Presenters are invited to
investigate metamorphic incidents of rupture and explore what possibilities
might be found at these intersections of embodiment, spatiality and
temporality.
Submissions are anticipated to look at different ways in which bodies
interface with transgression and transformation. Particularly how these
frictions, desires and intensities are expressed through shifts in our identities,
our poetics and our politics. Both theoretical and performance-based
explorations will be included in the symposium.
Topics may include (but are not limited to): •constructing masculinities in
contemporary Australian media discourse •representing the past: legitimacy,
historical narratives, historiographies •feminisms and pornography:
transforming representations of sexualities •somatechnics, technologies and
body modification practices •staging the classics in contemporary Australian
theatre •affect and laughter: refiguring the carnival •apocalyptic futurities:
preoccupations in film and literature •trans identities and gender pluralism
•economies of difference: post-colonial becomings •stripping the
heterosexual matrix: queer reformulations of burlesque •Rudd as ‘Howard
lite’: transformations and constancies in the Australian political landscape
•consuming the flesh: changes in the reception of bodies and aesthetics
•textual violence: depicting sado-masochism •pathos, catharsis and
directions in contemporary theatre •Deleuzian re-imaginings and new critical
frameworks •postdramatic performance: memory, trauma and tragedy
•technological embodiments and shifts in bodily perception •non-places:
morphing spaces and architectural landscapes
Creative practice responses such as performances, poetry and fiction
readings, and non-traditional presentations are encouraged. The conference
will involve an evening program to include these contributions. Papers and
performances will be limited to 20 minutes. Applications for panels are also
welcome. Please send 300 word abstracts and a short (100 word maximum)
biography to:
Anna Westbrook
anna.k.westbrook@hotmail.com
Charlotte Farrell
charlottefarrell@gmail.com
Deadline for submissions: 23rd of July 2010.
Keynote speaker: Dr Daniel Hourigan, Griffith University
In 2009 Daniel Hourigan completed a PhD entitled “The Phantasmatic
Subject of Technology: Slavoj Žižek, Techne, and the Abyss”. He has
published and presented papers on a wide variety of themes and
interdisciplinary topics from psychoanalytic philosophy, radical idealist
thought and jurisprudence, the philosophy of culture, and biotechnology. He
also teaches in a variety of areas for Griffith University including art theory
and media studies.