full name / name of organization:
Southwest Graduate English Symposium
Arizona State University
February 16 - 18 2007
The Violent (Re)turn to Ethics?: Implications, Complications, and Situations
Must the (re)turn to ethics involve a turn away from something else, or is ethics inevitably intertwined with other concerns?
The 2007 Southwest Graduate English Symposium seeks submissions that (re)consider and respond to the question of ethics in current cultural contexts. It has been argued that ethics have never been divorced from literary, political, or cultural pursuits. If we accept this position, how have arguments surrounding ethics manifest themselves in a post-structural, post-secular milieu? Work over the last twenty years has demonstrated connections between the turn to ethics and colonization, racialization, and globalization among others. How then are these relations reified or challenged in current debates on ethics? Do these debates emerge as a response to threats of terror, violence and trauma? Do they have religious roots? Do ethics rely on a universalized notion of “Truth?”
Arguably, regardless of its source, the ethical debate informs and influences all cultural interaction. How does the conception of ethics affect the relationship between reader and text? How does it inform our understanding of justice? Who decides what is ethical or just? How do power relations and hierarchies impact our abilities to relate ethically within wider culture and what kinds of violence might a (re)turn imply?
We are interested in cross disciplinary, multi-disciplinary, creative, theoretical and literary considerations on any aspect of this theme.
Questions for consideration may include but are not limited to:
· How are literary criticism and politics related? How do ethics bind them?
· How does the return to ethics influence our position in relation to new nations, immigration, feminist, queer and area studies?
· How do ethics shape identities, communities, and cultures?
· How do different ethics compare and interact?
· How can/not one ethic critique another?
· What are the ethical ramifications of translation?
· How do ethics inform how we teach? Our curriculum design?
· What’s involved in writing/righting ethics?
· How are ethics displayed visually?
For mor information, please see our website: http://www.asu.edu/clubs/gsea/sw/
Paper Abstracts should be no more than 350 words and submitted by January 10, 2007. Please include home and office numbers, complete mailing address, e-mail address, professional affiliation, and AV requirements with your submission.
Please direct submissions to: asu2007symp_at_yahoo.com
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or write Jennifer Higginbotham: higginbj_at_english.upenn.edu
Received on Mon Dec 11 2006 - 18:26:20 EST