CFP - Reading Across the Pacific: Australian-United States Intellectual Histories, 14-15 January 2010 [12.05.2009]
Reading Across the Pacific: Australian-United States Intellectual Histories A Symposium hosted by Australian literature at the University of Sydney, January 2010
On 14-15 January 2010, Australian Literature at the University of Sydney in association with the American Association for Australian Literary Studies (AAALS) and the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) will host a symposium on Reading Across the Pacific: Australian-United States Intellectual Histories.
Plenary speakers:
Lawrence Buell - Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature, Harvard University
Paul Giles - Challis Professor of English Literature, University of Sydney (from 2010)
The United States-Australia cultural relationship has often simply been assumed rather than theorized or empirically grounded. This symposium will examine the concrete interaction of the two nations, shifting the emphasis from the broad cultural patterns often compared to the specific networks, interactions, and crossings that have characterized Australian literature in the US, American literature in Australia, and the many mediations and adjacencies that have accompanied this interaction. This entails shifting the characteristic perspective from two monadic nations facing each another across the Pacific to understanding the Pacific as a thread across which the two cultures have read each other, and focusing away from matters of direct literary influence to a broader range of responses, provocations, and dialogues. Taking advantage of new interdisciplinary and theoretical possibilities, the symposium will nonetheless emphasise reading as a practice, whether done individually or collectively; as a consumer, reviewer, or editor; whether performed in a private or public context. Principal questions to be considered are: why has the relationship, though always close and in some ways very obvious, always seemed under-scrutinized? Why has Australia received so little attention in US literary circles? What cultural factors (assumptions, fears, and inhibitions) are in play here? How have they changed over time, as affected by political changes or stylistic or genre transformations?
Abstracts of up to 250 words are due by 31 July 2009
Proposals for papers on the following topics applied to Australian-United States intellectual histories are particularly welcome:
wars, politics, literature
Cold War orientalism
‘distance’ and ‘similarity’ as motifs
publishing history, book history and editing
institutional crossings
intellectual histories of the right & left
feminism and gender magazines and genre fiction
cultures of poetry
African diaspora connections
print, and digital cultures
theatre and performance histories
America and modernity proletarian fiction
U.S.-Australian prosopography
economies of ecocriticism
popular culture Australasia and regional identities
theorising settlement and travel writing
English department cultures: the state(s) of the discipline
comparative nationalisms
memory
Limited funding to assist early career researchers may be available on application to the convenors.
Convenors:
Associate Professor Nicholas Birns
Eugene Lang College of the New School, New York
65 West 11th Street, New York, 10011
United States
Email: birnsn@newschool.edu
Professor Robert Dixon
Professor of Australian Literature
English Department
University of Sydney
Sydney 2006
Australia
Email: robert.dixon@usyd.edu.au
