Konferencje

Polish Association for American Studies: 2005 Conference

CONFORMITY AND RESISTANCE IN AMERICA

Kamień Śląski, 23-25 October, 2005

CALL FOR PAPERS

From Ralph W. Emerson, who in his essays defined self-reliance as nonconformity, to Edward W. Said, who has recently addressed the so-called "humanities crisis" by way of referring to an urgent need of the other traditions/humanities, there has been in America a constant awareness of tensions existing between the canonical and the marginalized, the central and the peripheral.

In his 2000 essay "Humanism's Sphere", Said reminds us of the musical etymology of the word canon - a contrapuntal form employing numerous voices - and goes on to say: "the canonical humanities, far from being a rigid tablet of fixed rules and monuments bullying us from the past. will always remain open to changing combinations of sense and signification; every reading and interpretation of a canonical work. allows the modern and the new to be situated together in a broad historical field whose usefulness is that it shows us history as an agonistic process still being made, rather than finished and settled once for all."

Consequently, we are interested in all those issues that address the American canonical humanities as a space of fruitful tensions between what has been generally acknowledged as the canon and what has been questioning and subverting its very foundations and archives. This includes various areas of American cultural and literary studies, gender and minority studies, political and legal theories, philosophy and sociology, history of art, etc. The following topics are mere suggestions:

• the Emersonian heritage of self-reliance understood as nonconformity; ways of destabilizing the American identity; sublime modes of American culture; figures of the American anti-hero and rebel; revisions of the American Myth/Dream
• the heritage of American pragmatism: conformity or resistance?
• the place of the American university as annexed by medical, biotechnical, defense, and corporate interests (Masao Miyoshi's thesis)
• revival of the suppressed languages and cultures; the U.S. as a polyglot country; diasporic communities and minority writing; interpretations of multi-cultural and multi-ethnic America
• the American art in the XX century and beyond: form the Armory Show to the "last avant-garde" (David Lehman) and "21 st-Century Modernism" (Marjorie Perloff); the atonal and the aleatory
• revisions of global economy; "resistance to the overmastering paradigm of globalization" (E.Said); ecology and/vs technology in American agriculture
• political correctness, liberal conformism and conservative opposition; the dialectics of the "American proposition"

Deadline for topic proposals and brief summaries is June 30 th, 2005. Presentations should not be longer than 25 minutes. Conference proceedings will be published.

200-word abstracts should be sent to Dr Tomasz Lebiecki: tomaszlebiecki@interia.pl

For further details, please contact Dr Jacek Gutorow: dreadwork@interia.pl

PRZYSZŁOŚĆ LEKSYKOGRAFII W POLSCE.

Kamień Śląski 1-2 kwiecień 2004r.

Liczba uczestników ok. 20 osób

Kierownik: dr hab. Tadeusz PIOTROWSKI, prof. UO

Sekretarz: dr Tomasz Lebiecki

KONFERENCJA "CONRAD AND EUROPE"

KAMIEŃ ŚLĄSKI 22-24.09.2004

KRAKÓW 24-25.09

Możliwy wyjazd do Berdyczowa na Ukrainie, decyzja uzależniona jest od decyzji strony ukraińskiej i zapadnie do końca lutego.

Liczba uczestników (na dzień 8.02):

45 osób z referatami (42 zagranicznych, w tym 8 osób zaproszonych). Może się jeszcze nieznacznie zwiększyć

(nie licząc organizatorów � 4 osoby oraz osób towarzyszących)

W sumie liczba uczestników może dojść do ok. 65

Koszt uczestnictwa:

dla gości zagranicznych 240-275 Euro

dla Polaków: 600-775 PLN (zależnie od pokoju)

Zapewniamy noclegi, wyżywienie w Opolu, przejazdy Opole-Kamień Śl. i Opole-Kraków

Wszelkie informacje dotyczące konferencji będą zamieszczone na stronie internetowej Ośrodka:

http://conrad-centre.w.interia.pl/conference2004/conference.htm