The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Department of English and The School of Literatures
CALLFOR PAPERS
TheNovel and Theories of Love
Love is the most insistently recurrentthematic concern of the novel, in its diverse modern forms as well as in its precursorforms — the long prose narratives of antiquity and the late Middle Ages. Thetheme of love, most often in the shape of “love-and-marriage” and associatedtopoi, variously combines with other features of such modern genres as thenovel of ideas, the social consciousness-raising novel, the novel of vocation, theBildungsroman, and the psychological novel.
Fictionalnarratives in general, and the novel in particular, frequently refract andcritique existing ideas of love: e.g., Socratic love, pastoral love, courtlylove, love amidst feud, passionate love at odds with dynastic marriage,Romantic love in uneasy relation to companionate marriages and to communalaffections, love that dare or dare not speak its name, love as a destructive,subversive, constructive, or redemptive force, and love as mediated desire. Somenovelists, such as Stendhal and D. H. Lawrence, developed their own theories oflove and explored, expressed, or tested them in their fictional narratives. Others,such as Austen, the Brontë sisters, Dickens, Flaubert, Hardy, Tolstoy, HenryJames, E. M. Forster, and Nabokov, created narrative conditions for thereader's testing of modified perspectives on love and conjugal unions. Differentinstances of the relationship between theories of love and the potentialitiesof fictional narrative have been explored in the work of H. M. Daleski (1926–2010)— for instance, in his books on D. H. Lawrence, Dickens, and Hardy. Thisscholar's contributions to literary criticism have inspired the subject chosenfor the proposed conference.
Theorganizers of the conference welcome papers that deal with (1) the expressionand/or critique of specific theories of love in novels of various genres andperiods; (2) fictional constructions of new or individual perspectives on love;and (3) the ways in which certain novels innovatively contribute to themetaphysics and ethics of love, even when love is re-described in terms of thepsychology and sociology of desire. Prospective participants are requested todiscuss the ideational content of specific works in close connection with whatthey regard as the artistic merit and aesthetic effects of these works.
The conference is planned for June 18-20, 2012.
Abstracts of 300 to 400 words should besent to partans@mscc.huji.ac.il by May 22, 2011. Preliminary enquiries are welcome.
Updates will be posted on http://partialanswers.huji.ac.il/page.asp?id=18.