CALL FOR PAPERS:

“Liminal Literature: Borders and Genre”

University of Wisconsin-Madison
Madison Conference in Language and Literature (MADLIT)
English Dept. Graduate Student Conference
February 26-28, 2009

The fifth annual University of Wisconsin-Madison Literature Conference (MadLit) invites paper and panel proposals for this year’s topic, “Liminal Literature: Borders and Genre.”

The goal of this conference is to interrogate and critique the role of borders in literary and cultural studies. We invite papers that consider the idea of the border from formal, social, temporal, and/or geographic perspectives. Borders inform the way we think about genre, periodization, gender, race, nationality, geographies, disciplines, and social forms, but how do we account for things that cross, defy, or problematize borders—the liminal, the hybrid, the transgressive? How do troubling texts break down, reinforce, or reform borders?

Keynote Speaker: David Wittenberg

This year’s keynote speaker will be David Wittenberg, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Philosophy, Revision, Critique: Rereading Practices in Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Emerson (Stanford University Press, 2001). His research and teaching interests include 19th and 20th century literary theory and philosophy, American literature, architectural design and theory, and cultural studies. He is simultaneously working on two new book projects. The first is about the history and theory of time travel narratives, tentatively entitled Time Travel: The Philosophy of Popular Culture; it analyzes works from modernist and postmodernist literature, popular fiction and film, physics, historiography, and psychology. The second book project, cautiously entitled Big Culture, is a critique of very large objects and images in contemporary culture and space, as well as a theory of the aesthetics of quantity; it explores such sizeable phenomena as skyscrapers, Hollywood films, philosophical systems, disasters, pop stars, military machines, and Las Vegas hotels.

We seek proposals for 15-20 min. presentations and three-person panels on any aspect of the way borders affect genre, periodization, geographies, disciplines, gender, and material culture:

➢ What texts (or even authors) have been marginalized, overlooked, or (mis)interpreted because they exist at a threshold—generic, temporal, geographic, etc.? What texts have benefited from this status?
➢ How are generic categories formed—or deformed?
➢ What are the consequences of texts that exist between genres or on the threshold of genres?
➢ What are the consequences or limits of categorization? Are categories—generic, historical, material, economic, racial, etc.—productive?
➢ What kinds of borders (regional, gender, race, period, nationality, economic, disciplinary, etc.) influence generic borders?
➢ Are genres transhistorical? Are genders transhistorical? Are spaces transhistorical?
➢ What does transhistorical research reveal? What does it suggest about the limitations of periodization?
➢ What does it mean to be trans-gendered?
➢ How does one define places in relation to each other or in isolation? Can places—or spaces—exist without borders? Is the presence of borders all that is necessary to turn a space into a place?
➢ How do texts—or objects within texts—cross borders, and what implications do these crossing have?
➢ What are the consequences of analytical approaches that cross disciplinary borders? What are the benefits of problematizing disciplinary borders within the humanities?

Please submit a 250-word abstract to Eric Vivier by January 23, 2009. We will announce accepted papers by January 31.