General Information
Dates: Twelfth and Thirteenth of November, 2009
Location:Pugh Hall, rooms 210 and 150
Campus Map
Submissions: September 28th
ego09atuf@gmail.com
Keynote:Dominick LaCapra--"Sebald, Coetzee, and the Narrative of Trauma"
Ustler Atrium, Nov. 13 at 7:00 PM
Question and Answer session with a Reception to follow.
Program
Thursday 12 November
210 Pugh Hall
Panel A
9:00-10:30
Disrupted Development:
Youth and Childhood Culture
Moderator: Todd Jurgess
Poushali Bhadury:
The Return to Innocence:
Nostalgia, Time Travel, and the Garden Tradition in Tom’s Midnight Garden
Rebekah Fitzsimmons:
Competing Identities:
Representations of Self and Historical Memory in The Hunger Games
Michele Lee:
The American Girl Goes Abroad: Ocean Travel in Girls’ Series
Cari Keebaugh:
Unhappy-Ever-Afterlife: The Memory of Childhood
in Little Red Riding Hood’s Zombie BBQ
Panel B
10:45-
12:00
Narrating Past Identity:
Memoir and Literary Expression
Moderator: Trisha Kannan
Matt Sherling (U. of West Georgia):
Let's Walk, Walk, Walk,
Pondering Meanings of the Concrete
Anastasia Kozac & Nadine Flagel (Asst Professor, Brock University):
The Archaeology of Memory:
Excavating Self in Penelopy Lively's Oleander, Jacaranda
Katherine Peters:
Reading from Searching for Tsarnin, A Novel
Panel C
2:00-
3:15
Media-ting Memory:
Nostalgia across Multiple Forms
Moderator: Kevin Sherman
Aaron Keebaugh (UF School of Music):
Politics and Nostalgia in
Victor Herbert’s Irish Rhapsody
Jimmy Newlin:
Boxcutters, or The New Nostalgia For The Old Misogyny:
Hyst-horror-cizing in Antichrist and Jennifer’s Body
Allison Rittmayer:
“Where we ache to go again”:
The Nostalgias of Mad Men
Panel D
3:30-
4:45
Impossible Pasts: Illusions of Historicity. Feature Presentations by UF Department of English
Moderator: Mike Mayne
Camelia Raghinaru:
Subjectivity and the Social Other
in Judith Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power
Eric Doise:
Rearranging Past Reality:
Nostalgia, Simulation, & Testimony in Radio Free Albemuth
Phil Wegner (Associate Professor):
The Worst is Better Than Nothing at All:
Nostalgia in Nineteen Eighty-four (1949 & 1984)
Friday 13 November
150 Pugh Hall
Panel E
9:00-
10:30
Romantic-ized or Decaying Memory?
Nostalgia in 19th-Century Culture
Moderator: Asmaa Ghonimz
David Stahl (U. of West Georgia):
Refashioning the Past:
The (Re)Construction of American Identity in Hobomok
Jessica Reeves (Louisiana-Lafayette):
Nostalgia & Necrophilia in Poe’s “Ligeia”
Annie Abrams (UC Santa Barbara):
Literature is an Heirloom”: Antebellum Nostalgia for Anglo-Saxon Culture
Miranda Mattingly (Florida State):
Haunted by Our Liminal Humanity:
Examining the Abject Identities in Marsh’s The Beetle
Panel F
10:45-
12:00
Evocations of Empire:
Political Analyses of the Past and Present
Moderator: Jackie Amorim
Scott Craig (Florida State):
Did Germany Mobilize Women’s Labor?
Shaun Duke:
Fabricated Histories and Non-nationalist Identities in The House of the Stag by Kage Baker and In an Antique Land by Amitav Ghosh.
Erich Simmers:
Ghosts of Empire: T. E. Lawrence & the Haunted Narratives of Contemporary American Counterinsurgency Doctrine
Christopher Garland:
Our ancestors were Gauls and Britons: Frantz Fanon,
The Metropole, and Colonial Discourses of “Home”
Panel G
2:00-
3.15
Writing History, Writing Trauma:
Literary Representation of Experience
Moderator: Raúl Sánchez (Associate Professor)
Nathaniel Deyo:
Historical Representation & Nostalgia in Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland
Mariko Turk:
Trauma and the Teaching of History in Anderson’s Speak
Arun Pokhrel:
Representations of Time and Memory in Holocaust Literature: A Comparison of Charlotte Delbo’s Days and Memory and Ida Fink’s Selected Stories
Paul Ardoin (Florida State):
Impossible Pasts:
Taking Liberties with Literary History in Travesties
Panel H
3:30-
4:45
Theorizing the Past:
Historical Issues, Contemporary Perspectives
Moderator: Thomas Cole
Taylor Murphy: (Florida State):
“My Intention Had Been to Give it to Her”:
Rousseau’s Nostalgic Pornographic Fantasies in Confessions
Léa Gamache (U. of Victoria):
Barthes or the Mad Collector
David Lawrimore:
The Dialectic of American Renaissance:
The Historical Act of (Re)presenting the Early American Canon
Keynote Speaker
Dominick LaCapra--"Sebald, Coetzee, and the Narrative of Trauma"
Ustler Atrium, Nov. 13 at 7:00 PM
Question and Answer session with a Reception to follow.
Travel Info
The closest hotel within walking distance of campus is the Holiday Inn University Center:
Holiday Inn University Center
1250 W University Ave
Gainesville, FL 32601
352-376-1661
FAX: 352-336-8717
For a reduced rate email
ego09atuf@gmail.com for a group code.
There are also many other hotels in the area.
By Air: The nearest airports are Gainesville Regional Airport, Jacksonville International Airport, and Orlando International Airport, respectively.
By Car: Gainesville is located off of US 441 or I-75.
Local Public Transportation:Gainesville has an excellent Regional Transit System. Please visit their website for City and Campus routes and schedules.
Other information about Gainesville is available in our online
Guide to Gainesville.
Please email any of the below EGO officers if you have travel questions:
Steven J LeMieux
s.j.lemieux@ufl.edu
Call for Papers
Home/sickness: Desire, Decay, and the Seduction of Nostalgia
EGO'S 9th annual conference will explore nostalgia, focusing on the
contradictory relations among desires for recovered pasts as well as
deliberate attempts to manipulate the present through representations of the
past. Of particular interest will be the extent to which both nostalgia and
the desire for utopia are linked to historical trauma, as textual
manifestations of an extratextual cause.
When Johannes Hofer coined the term “nostalgia” in 1688, it referred to a
literal disease plaguing French soldiers who were dying from homesickness.
By the 1870s, it had lost its medical usage but had been taken up by culture
to frame Romanticism’s desire for both the concept of the homeland and the
past. Despite connotations of rosy naïveté, nostalgia retains pathological
connotations in its implicit desire to recreate or reformulate the past.
This decay of the so-called historical truth, then, is replaced by a
necessity to invent conceptions of the past and/or loose conceptions of
home—whether a geographical or ontological distinction. How this
preoccupation with decay frames possibilities for both personal and cultural
reinvention through representation, demands further investigation.
Its cultural complications have continued to reinvent the term, both
positively—in cases where the past is looked at in fondness—and
negatively—when the (longing for a) past becomes again a sickness. This
bi-polar logic is manifest in cultural texts as disparate as the decrepit
streets and uncanny fashion of Ridley Scott’s *Bladerunner* and President
Obama's invocations of JFK’s Camelot. Theorists such as Foucault, Benjamin,
Jameson, and White have continued to reflect upon representation and
recreation of the past, a theoretical counterpart to authors such as
Flannery O’Conner and Tim O’Brien. Present in all these examples are
versions of a desire to re/create the past in order to overcome trauma,
create a political version of historical narrative, or to manipulate the
present and/or future.
We welcome both creative and critical presentations on a variety of topics
dealing with any aspect of nostalgia: desire, the past, representation,
notions of home/identity. Please submit an abstract of 250 words to
ego09atuf@gmail.com by September 28th. If accepted, plan on a presentation
of 15 minutes.
Possible (but certainly not exhaustive) Topics:
- Identity crisis
- Managing trauma through representation
- Theories of memory
- Representations of youth and childhood
- Nostalgia in text, film, or television
- Reconfiguring personal or collective memory
- Nostalgia as the repression of historical memory
- Nostalgia as physical/cultural displacement
- Recovering pre-colonial identity
- Nostalgia and the reproduction of gender
- Theory as a form of nostalgia
- Nostalgia as origin: Foucault's critique.
- Visions of utopia/dystopia