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Survival (ACLA Utrecht 2017)

Survival (ACLA Utrecht 2017)

Publié le par Marc Escola (Source : Maria Anna Mariani)

Survival

ACLA Utrecht 2017

One probably didn’t need Gloria Gaynor to remind us that we live in an age of survival. From Darwinism and Liberalism to the Holocaust and the Cold War to Globalization and the Anthropocene, the question of survival has come to dominate our language. And yet Gaynor’s words—“I will survive”—do testify to the pervasiveness of survival and the easy fluidity with which it moves between otherwise distinct discursive spheres. Not only popular culture but also biology and psychology, ethics and politics, anthropology and philosophy, history and literature. For if anything, survival is versatile. As many have noticed, it is a category that seems to capture a range of oppositions between mere life and more life, sub-sistence and sur-plus, passivity and agency. So while survival has most commonly been read in the contexts of extreme adversity and threat (mourning, illness, “bare life,” mass ruination, etc.), it never ceases to recall the power, triumph, and joy of the words: “I will survive.”

In this seminar, we will work to refine our understanding of survival as a contemporary category by engaging in a multidisciplinary discussion. Toward this end, we invite papers that specifically attend to the question of survival as it arises in various places, times, and genres. We welcome papers that consider the figure of the Holocaust survivor, but also encourage submissions that look beyond this particular context and engage with other figures, other geographies, and other histories in comparative perspective. Relatedly, we are particularly interested in work that deals with survival as a problem of translation between languages. Finally, following recent work in literary studies, we would like to include discussion of survival as an issue of the archive and consider how the idea of textual survival may or may not relate to the other registers of the term.

Possible topics include :
- the mutual relationship between survival and testimony

- the survivor: victim or hero?

- the survivor as usurper, or “dangerous supplement” (Derrida)

- surviving oneself: the reflexivity of survival

- necroresistance: from a politics of life to a politics of death.

- the temporality of survival

- self-preservation, eugenics, and (auto-)immunity

- theologies of the afterlife

- survival, canonization, and translation

- the survival of artworks

- survival as poetics

- the right not to survive (or testify)

Interested participants are invited to submit a proposal for a 20-minute presentation. Submissions must be made through the ACLA portal (http://acla.org/seminars) during the submission period (Sept. 1 – Sept. 23, 2016). Seminar organizers will review all submitted papers and propose their rosters to the ACLA by Sept. 30.  The ACLA Program Committee will review all submitted seminars for consideration for inclusion in the program in October.


For more information on the ACLA Annual Meeting, see http://www.acla.org/annual-meeting