FYI...Stefanie ------- Forwarded Message Follows ------- Dr. Steven Rosendale Department of English, Box 6032 Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ 86011-6032 Tel: (520) 523-5846 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Representing Place: A Conference on Literature, Language, and the Arts November 5-7, 1998 in Flagstaff, Arizona To help celebrate 1998, the Centennial Year of Literature and the Arts at Northern Arizona University, the English Department will sponsor a conference titled "Representing Place: A Conference on Literature, Language, and the Arts." This conference will be an opportunity for artists, writers, and scholars to explore connections between the language we use, the stories we tell, and the places we inhabit. "Stand on the mesa edge at Walpai and look west over the bare distances toward the pale blue outlines of the San Francisco Peaks where the ka'tsina spirits reside. So little lies between you and the sky. So little lies between you and the earth." --Leslie Marmon Silko This quotation celebrates the immediacy of sky and earth, but it also raises the fundamental question that will serve as the focus of this conference: what is that "so little" that does mediate between our environment and ourselves, and what is its importance? What perhaps does lie between us and earth and sky is our representation of those places - the verbal and visual languages that enable (and perhaps constrain) our relationship to the environment. For this conference, we would like to invite a wide range of proposals for addressing these ideas, and for exploring the ways that language, literature, and the arts reflect and construct our impression of the world around us. We invite papers, panels, installations, creative readings, and other events that address these issues. Sample questions to consider for papers and other events include (but are not limited to): -- What is the relationship between "the place itself" and our language for it? How does place inform representation, and how do the means of representation inform our sense of place? Does it ever make sense to talk about "place" as an extratextual reality? -- Deconstructing nature/culture. To what extent is "nature" a cultural phenomenon, and how can we assess its value as a construct? How does one assess, say, the political ramifications of representations of place? How should we conceive of the ideological dimension of our representations of place? Do our representations of place reflect/emerge from/transform dominant ideologies? -- Representing nature as depiction/ representing nature as advocacy. Who speaks for nature? -- What does it mean to "inhabit" a place? Is place thinkable as something other than "environment," - that which surrounds us? Does our language allow us to truly conceive of ourselves as part of "place?" -- How do literary and other discursive forms structure the sense of place? Is "place" ever more than "setting" in narrative? What would a "place-centered" fiction look like? Would it be primarily descriptive? What does the spatial emphasis do to critical assessment of narrative fiction? What would our literary canon look like if our aesthetic sensibility stressed "place" over the essentially temporal movement of plot? -- How does one teach the environment in literature and the arts? How might an emphasis on place impact pedagogy and curricula? Submit 150 word abstracts by June 1, 1998 to: Steven Rosendale Department of English, Box 6032 Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ 86011-6032 Tel: (520) 523-5846 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Conference Website: http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~writcnt/english/fallconf.html ************************************ Dr. Stefanie S. Rixecker Division of Environmental Management & Design Lincoln University, Canterbury PO Box 56 Aotearoa New Zealand E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fax: 64-03-325-3841 ************************************
