full name / name of organization:
The Graduate Students of the Departments of Modern Languages and
Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature, and Political Science at the
University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada invite proposals for their
5th Graduate Student Conference on September 28th-29th 2006:
Declensions of the Self: A Bestiary of Modernity
Is it possible to revitalize our thought and praxis as, and about,
modern human subjects?
Declensions of the word reflect not only the role it plays within a
sentence but also its status as an element acted upon by the sentence.
Declensions of the self reflect not only the role the self plays as one
who uses a myriad of modes of representation to construct his or her
world, but also the extent to which s/he is subject to, and constructed
by, those codes, languages, symbols, metaphors and modes of
A bestiary is a carefully staged spectacle consisting of these modern
dichotomies: the real and the ideal; the said and the unsaid; the
rational and the irrational; the bound and the free; the familiar and
the exotic; word and language; self and world. It makes the self at
once the beast within the cage—the spectacle—and the spectator: the one
who gazes through the bars, the one who is subject to that gaze and the
architect of their predicament.
The dearth of frank discussion about the fears, desires and anxieties
of the modern subject is of urgent concern to us. The abundance of
writing about these matters, and the lack of current, public discussion
of them calls for action.
As Graduate Students in Philosophy, Political Science, Modern Languages
and Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, we invite reasoning
about the irrational, speech about the unspeakable, thought concerning
the modern human beast in all of its forms and follies, in theory and
We welcome submissions from graduate students in Film Studies, Gender
Studies, Fine Arts, Anthropology, Psychology, History, Economics,
Social Sciences, Literature, and Religious Studies. Given the broad
scope of the conference, we will also consider submissions from any
other relevant realm of scholarly inquiry.
200-300 word abstracts ought to be submitted to the Organizing
Committee by July 15th, 2006. Please send abstracts to
mlcsconf_at_ualberta.ca. Presentations ought to be approximately 20
minutes in duration. Submissions in English, French, Spanish and
German are welcome. It is our intention to publish a selection of
articles (20-30 pages) from the presentations that address the theme of
the conference in a particularly relevant fashion.
From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List
Full Information at
or write Jennifer Higginbotham: higginbj_at_english.upenn.edu
Received on Fri Mar 31 2006 - 07:09:17 EST