Traditionally and even nowadays, the Academy has conceived literatures in terms of nations, in the frame of printed books culture and canon. In the 21st century we have to think otherwise. Since the three challenges are parallel, it is time to ask how we can think cultures beyond the nation, literatures without the nation, women out of or in the nation, other kinds of literary maps for women, as much as new supports for new representations.
The creation of a national identity has been a main issue from 1492 until the Revolutionary times and the establishment of the Nations as States. First, writers working for Monarchies and Empires, and later on, intellectuals creating the idea of Nation, have made strong that identity. The Academy has paid attention to men´s actions in this direction, but what are women doing while the national identities are appearing, from the 16th to the 19th centuries? In which way are women, as readers and writers, contributing or refusing to build these imaginary communities? What forms of identification are being developed, based on an imagined singularity? Is the time of the Nations the women's time? And are their territories the women's ones? Due to the circulation of literary materials by reading and writing, what kind of other “nations” are women building? What are women's nations in an etymological sense? How were they telling boundaries in times of national construction in a political and intellectual sense?
In this meeting, we want to ask ourselves how women were telling and de-telling stories and Histories, territories and boundaries, literary nations.
Six sections will be considered:
- Women reading locally/globally
- Women translating, women transfering espaces
- Women telling frontiers
- Women writing Histories
- Women imagining Nations
- Women looking elsewhere
Women telling nations is an international seminar included in the activities of the international network NEWW (New approaches to European Women's Writing; cf. www.womenwriters.nl), which, in order to renew literary historiography from a gender and a transnational perspective, has already celebrated several seminars and conferences.
The November 2010 meeting of the COST action ISO901, Women Writers in History, (http://www.cost.esf.org/) and the public progress report of Working Groups will take place together with the Women telling Nations conference.
Proposals for contributions will be welcome in any of the three official languages of the Seminar: Spanish, French and English. The reception will be open until 31 March 2010, and later, these proposals will be evaluated by a Scientific Committee.
The organizers are keen to include contributions about current research projects from postgraduates at all stages of their research, from PhD students to postdoctoral researchers, on the aspects listed in our call for papers.
Contributions should be 20 minutes long. Please fill our registration document and send 300-400 word abstracts. More infromation in http://www.ucm.es/info/leethi/newwcost10/index.html