For more than three years now Erelci – Anglophone World LiteratureResearch Group at the Université of Cocody, Côte d'Ivoire – has been conductingand publishing research on topics of literary interests. The latest collectivework published by our group was on « Water and Literature » and itwas a collaborative research with the Centre d'Études et de Recherche du MondeAnglophone de l'Université Omar Bongo in Gabon, June 2011.
To keep this international collaborative dynamics going, our researchgroup is glad to inform all scholars interested in literature of our nextresearch interest: Semiotics of PostmodernHeroes in Contemporary (US) Literature and Arts.
This year's topic was suggested by one of ours who attended the 2011Institute on Contemporary US Literature funded by the State Department andhosted by the University of Louisville. Our Research group beingcross-disciplinary, we have decided to keep the research scope broad in orderto allow for other specialists to contribute their ideas to this project ofwhich the theoretical assumptions are outlined below.
The term “postmodern” as Prof Byers defines it during in his seminars onContemporary US Literature: it is not a style, but the dominant culturalexpression which characterizes contemporary consumption economy. In his essayon late capitalism[1],Jameson explains that the shift from classical capitalism to transnational andinformation capitalism fluidizes boundaries that used to be formerly fixed.Notions of canonicity, race, gender, identity and origin are revisited andpeople become skeptical toward grand narratives. Chaos permeates all aspects ofsocial life; its implications are total: epistemic, sociological, economic,historical, political and cultural.
Fragmentation in culture (literature and arts here) reflects the crisisof social totality. The postmodern hero is not Achilles dying for authenticvalues because nothing is axiologically stable and purely original any more.The simulacrum pervades the postmodern world in and out. He hesitates to be ahistorical subject because nobody believes in its never-coming promises. Themasses rather tend replace the expectations of overriding narratives by littleconcrete victories over the numerous difficulties posed by global consumereconomy. While Homeric and Modernist heroic models disappear, they tend to bereplaced by ordinary ones with no heroic (antiheroic heroes?) appeal to thepoint that the notion of heroic legitimacy turns into a costume too big forthem to wear.
Eternal heroes are also being recycled into exchangeable ephemeral starsand purse-proud buyers of ideological commodities. From unsaleable, heroicvalues share a common shelf with other goods within reach of all consumers.What then ensues is the hyper-democratization, thingification and thenullification of the cult of distinction in the decentered communicationalnetwork in which new heroes find themselves as individual subjects faced withthe Shakespearean dilemma of being or not being. The semiotic modalities of hisrepresentation and identification are a great challenge both for the writersand the readers.
The challengeof his identification may partly depend on our traditional understanding thatthe ink-sign hero eternally stands for an icon. While literary and artisticcreations become more process-prone, conventional readers -looking for thesatisfaction of the masterpiece- take not only the flatness of new heroes but also the attempt to replacethem by cyborgs in science-fiction (Byers calls them posthumanist subjects[2]) as asemiotic flaw in creation. This touches off an interesting discussion scholarsare expected to deepen with their innovative papers.
We will welcome all critical and theoreticalleads on issues of heroic semiotic status, representability, charactercreation, onomastics, identity/selfhood and subjectivity, metamorphosis ofheroes and sociological significance.
Our Scientific Committee will enjoy reading yourabstracts which should be sent by mid-September2011. The okayed abstracts should be finalized and the papers returned tous by November 30th 2011.The papers will first be published by RILE, our electronic journal, in December2011, and later as a book in April 2012. Note that the final papers should beof 20 pages maximum, in Times New Roman and single-spaced. Please italicize thetitles of books and bolden the headings of your papers. The font size is 12.
Please submit your abstracts and papers to anyof the members below:
Dr. Sindou Soumahoro, University of Cocody, Côted'Ivoire, s_soumahoro@yahoo.fr, soumahoro.s@iugb.org
Dr. Koné Klohinwele, University of Cocody, Côted'Ivoire, nielfang@yahoo.fr
Dr. Coulibaly Daouda, University of Bouaké, Côted'Ivoire, jadeboye@yahoo.fr
[1] Jameson,Fredric. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991.
[2]Bartlett, Laura and Byers, Thomas, “Back to theFuture: The Humanist Matrix”, CulturalCritique, 53, Winter 2003, pp. 28-46, p.28.