February 22-24
Major Invited Speakers:
Peggy Kamuf, University of Southern California
Thomas Keenan, Bard College
"There can be no literature without democracy and no democracy without literature."
Jacques Derrida, Passions
Following on the "Violence and Representation" and "Literature on Trial" conferences held at Emory University in recent years, this conference will address the relationship between literature and democracy. Prompted by Derrida's statement, we would like to open these terms to a thinking of literature beyond the work of art and of democracy as more than simply a form of government.
Can there be literature without democracy? What is the place of literature, the literary, and literacy within democracy? How are we to understand democracy in its function as a condition of possibility of literature? Can there be democracy without literature? In what way is democracy conditioned by the literary, by an instability of referential meaning, that would more commonly be seen to threaten it or call it into question? For a democracy to be a democracy, must it always be "to come," must it welcome the very discourse that destabilizes it?
We invite papers that engage these questions or issues related to them. Paper topics might include:
- the discourse of human rights and its critiques
- reading revolutionary and founding texts as literature
- literature and the creation / dissolution of the nation state
- representations / critiques of democracy in literature
- the rhetoric of political speeches and supreme court decisions
- identity politics and the literature of traditionally democratic nations and cultures
- role of mass media and technology in creating, sustaining, or corrupting democracies
- literature and totalitarianism
- ideology and terror
- psychoanalysis and democracy
- free speech and the limits of democracy
- citizens and subjects in the modern democratic state
- democracy, education, and the future of literary studies
Please submit a cover letter and a 300 word abstract for a twenty minute presentation by December 15, 2001. Send to:
Literature and Democracy
Program in Comparative Literature
Emory University
Atlanta, GA 30322
By email, please send abstracts to: bmcgrat@Learnlink.Emory.Edu