Purdue University College of Liberal Arts

Information for

The Politics and Poetics of Memory: The 3rd Biannual Graduate Student Conference in Philosophy and Literature at Purdue University, March 7-8 2008

Keynote speakers: Leonard Lawlor (University of Memphis) and Suzanne Guerlac (University of California at Berkeley)

Over the course of the past decade there has been a renewed interest in the topic of memory within Continental philosophy, literary theory, and the humanities in general.  A broad range of scholarship has become increasingly devoted to thematizing memory across a spectrum of special disciplines - for instance, in aesthetics, psychology, phenomenology, ontology, social-political philosophy, and literary studies.  The graduate students of the Philosophy and Literature Program at Purdue University are organizing a conference to promote interdisciplinary dialogue organized around this emerging topic. We encourage paper submissions from graduate students in philosophy, literary theory, film theory, art theory, political science, and all disciplines that are engaged with  ontological, epistemological, metaphysical, political, or aesthetic analyses of memory.

Possible topics:

  • the ontological reading of memory, characterized by such thinkers as Deleuze and Bergson, which contrasts a static, spatial conception of memory with an interpretation of memory as a metaphysical process constitutive of the present of experience.
  • Proustian thematics of active (voluntary) memory and inactive (involuntary) memory, especially as concerns the explication of temporal structures through the work of art.
  • the Bachelardian and phenomenological interpretation of memory and imagination, which views these faculties as opening a window onto a new poetics of humanistic and scientific discourses.
  • the creation of a new typology of memory via film, visual art, and other visual media.
  • Benjaminian analyses of the function and structures of memory as a praxis or mode of resistance against oppressive social and political structures.
  • Freudean, Derridian and engram hypotheses of memory as a trace-structure informing non-metaphysical readings in epistemology of memory. 

EMAIL SUBMISSIONS TO: philconf@purdue.edu

SUBMISSION DEADLINE IS JANUARY 1, 2008.

Papers should be sent as MS Word documents and should not exceed 15 double-spaced pages. Personal information is to be sent in the body of the email and should not appear on the paper itself.


ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:
Dr. Leonard Lawlor (Philosophy, University of Memphis)

Professor Lawlor received his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1988. His primary research and teaching interest is contemporary continental philosophy, including Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, Husserl, and Nietzsche. He is the author of four books: Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology (Indiana, 2002); Thinking Through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question (Indiana, 2003); The Challenge of Bergsonism: Phenomenology, Ontology, Ethics (Continuum Books, 2003); and Imagination and Chance: The Difference Between the Though of Ricoeur and Derrida (SUNY Press, 1992). He is one of the coeditors of Chiasmi International: Trilingual Studies Concerning the Thought of Merleau-Ponty. He has translated Merleau-Ponty and Hyppolite into English. He has written dozens of articles on Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and Gadamer. He received a Faudree - Hardin Professorship in 2004.  He is in the process of writing a new book to be called Memory and Life: An Archaeology of the Experience of Thought.  

Dr. Suzanne Guerlac (French, University of California at Berkeley)

Professor Guerlac's principle areas of research include 19th and 20th century literature, literature and philosophy, myths of literature and theory, literature and nationalism, and contemporary cultural criticism. Her publications include: "The Useless Image - Bataille, Magritte, Bergson", Representations 97 (2006); Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Reading Bergson (Cornell University Press, 2006); "The 'Zig-Zags of a Doctrine': Bergson, Deleuze and the Question of Experience", Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 15 (2004); "French Criticism From 1900-1950", in Johns Hopkins Guide to French Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. I. Szeman (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); "Phantom Rights: Conversations Across the Abyss (Hugo, Blanchot)", Diacritics (2003); "Le Symptome de la mer et la 'folie de l'eau'
chez Valery", Bulletin des Etudes Valeryennes 91 (juin 2002); "La Poetique de la Decoherence", Bulletin de Etudes Valeryennes 88/89 (2001); Literary Polemics: Bataille, Sartre, Valery, Breton (Stanford University Press, 1997), co -winner of the Scaglione Prize for best book in French and Francophone Studies); The Impersonal Sublime: Hugo Baudelaire, Lautreamont and the Esthetics of the Sublime (Stanford University Press, 1990).


"The Politics and Poetics of Memory" is being made possible through the generous financial support of the Dean's Office of the College of Liberal Arts, Purdue University.


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