UofT conference on"Recognition"

Wed Aug 29 09:42:30 EDT 2007

Papers on drama/theatre/performance are welcome.

CALL FOR PAPERS *"From Ignorance to Knowledge": Recognition from
Antiquity to the Postmodern and Beyond*

The Centre for Comparative Literature at The University of Toronto is
inviting proposals for its 19th Annual Graduate Conference, to be held
from April 3rd-5^th , 2008. This conference will explore the central
theme of recognition in a wide range of historical periods, regional
locations, and literary traditions. Panels will be structured around
historical periods, tracing the theme of recognition in Antiquity, the
Middle Ages, and everything from Early Modern, Modern, to Postmodern and
beyond. The Conference Committee is welcoming proposals from diverse
academic disciplines that examine a wide range of genres and media.

In his /Poetics/, Aristotle defines /anagnorisis/ ("recognition" or
"discovery") as "a change from ignorance to knowledge, leading either to
friendship or to hostility on the part of those persons who are marked
for good fortune or bad" (1452a). However, Terence Cave's /Recognitions/
points out that "twentieth-century uses of the term draw perceptibly on
philosophical and psychoanalytic interpretations of literature
(especially tragedy) which fall outside the domain of Aristotelian
poetics proper" (6). The term therefore shifts from "the classic set of
family recognitions (recognition of persons, as in /Oedipus/ and the
/Odyssey/) into a wider set of plots structured explicitly in terms of
the loss and recovery of knowledge" (9). Other examples of recognition
include Joyce's concept of the epiphany and Christina Tarnopolsky's
understanding of "[t]he /moment of recognition/ within the occurrent
experience of shame..." (476).

In Hegelian philosophy, however, the term recognition "underlies
self-consciousness itself, since we only understand ourselves for who we
are by incorporating our understandings of how we are regarded by
others" (Blackburn). For Hegel, "the master-slave relationship is the
result of an uncompleted fight to the death for 'recognition' or
status..." (Solomon). This metaphor of the master-slave struggle for
recognition has influenced the writings of Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx,
and Friedrich Nietzsche. Furthermore, Hegel's conceptualization of
recognition has also been developed in the writings of a wide variety of
thinkers from different disciplines: Alexandre Kojève, Georges Bataille,
Jacques Lacan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Lévinas, Frantz Fanon,
Drucilla Cornell, and Francis Fukuyama. In her review of Paul Ricoeur's
last work, /The Course of Recognition/, Julie Connolly indicates that
"since the publication of Charles Taylor's 1992 essay on recognition in
multicultural societies, the term has occurred in academic publications
with increasing frequency. Moreover, recognition has been the central
term in a recent cross-Atlantic debate, between Nancy Fraser and Axel
Honneth, about the direction of critical theory and the meaning of
justice in today's increasingly globalized world" (133).

The committee therefore invites proposals from graduate students and all
researchers on any topic within the broad scope of this conference's
central theme. Please send a 500-word abstract as a Microsoft Word
attachment no later than October 1st, 2007, to recognition2008 at gmail.com
<mailto:recognition2008 at gmail.com> . Include any requests for technical
support and your CV stating your affiliations and listing your degrees,
publications, and recent positions if applicable.

*Possible topics include but are not limited to*:

-Scenes of recognition in epic, drama, poetry, dialogue, novel, short
story, film, narrative paintings, pictorial poetry and prose, and
operatic encounters

-Recognition in sacred texts, such as in the Hebrew Bible, the New
Testament, the Qu'ran, the Bhagavad Gita, etc.

-Recognition in folk story, storytelling, and the role of recognition in
the oral tradition

-Recognition in politics and contemporary social theory

-Recognition and /Bildungsroman/

- Other literary concepts where a recognition takes place (and may lead
to a revelation), such as Aquinas' /quidditas-claritas, /James Joyce's
notion of 'epiphany'; T.S. Eliot's concept of the 'objective
correlative'; William Wordsworth's 'spots of time'; Ernest Hemingway's
'moment of truth'; W.B. Yeats' 'great memory'; or Giuseppe Ungaretti,
and Giorgos Seferis' 'moment'; Marcel Proust's 'Petites Madeleines', etc.

-Recognition and critical orientations

-Aristotelian /anagnorisis/ and post-Aristotelian models of recognition

-Hegelian and post-Hegelian models of recognition

-Recognition and Hegel's understanding of the emergence of
self-consciousness

-Recognition and Socratic /elenchus /(Tarnopolsky)

-Recognition resulting as a moment of spiritual manifestation or revelation

-Recognition and Lévinas' encounter with the Other; his notion of epiphany

-Themes/tropes of self-recognition, self-transformation, and discovery

-Recognition as a trope in non-'Western' literature(s)

-Recognition in religion and theology

-Recognition, Self, and the Other

-Recognition and imagined communities

-Recognition in travel narratives, cross-cultural knowledge

-Recognition and shame (Tarnopolsky)

*Works Cited*

Aristotle. /Poetics/. Trans. James Hutton. New York: Norton, 1982.

Blackburn, Simon. "Recognition" /The //Oxford// Dictionary of Philosophy/.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Cave, Terence. /Recognitions: A Study in Poetics/. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1988.

Connolly, Julie. "Charting a Course for Recognition: A Review Essay."
/History of the Human Sciences/ 20. 1 (2007): 133-144. /Sage Journals
Online/. 27 July 2007 <http: //hhs.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/20/1/133>.

Solomon, Prof. C. "Master and Slave" /The //Oxford// Companion to
Philosophy/. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Tarnopolsky, Christina. "Prudes, Perverts, and Tyrants: Plato and the
Contemporary Politics of Shame." /Political Theory/ 32. 4. (2004):
468-494. /Sage Journals Online/. 27 July 2007 <

For more information about The Centre for Comparative Literature at  
The University of Toronto, please visit  
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/complit/ and for changes and update  
information concerning the conference, please visit the colloquium  
webpage http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/complit/colloquium.html

Teresa Grazia Russo
Centre For Comparative Literature
93 Charles St. W., 3rd. fl,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5S 1K9.
Tel: (416) 813-4041 Fax: (416) 813-4040

 ________________________________________________________________________
"Those who have an orphan's sense of history love history."--Anna in Ondaatje's Divisadero
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
"La Pocha Nostra is a virtual maquiladora [. . . ] that produces brand-new metaphors, symbols, images, and words to explain the complexities of our times. The Spanglish neologism Pocha Nostra translates as either 'our impurities' or 'the cartel of cultural bastards.' We love this poetic ambiguity. It reveals an attitude toward art and society: 'Crossracial, poly-gendered, experi-mental, ¿y qué?' " --Guilllermo Gómez-Peña.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
Denis Salter
Professor of Theatre
McGill University
________
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://artsservices.uwaterloo.ca/pipermail/candrama/attachments/20070829/9dfd3ba9/attachment.html>