The conference will be the first of its kind at Queen Mary and aims to offer a rigorous yet friendly environment for post-graduates from both philosophy and literature departments to debate issues.
Application Deadline EXTENDED: Friday, February 26, 2016
The conference will be the first of its kind at Queen Mary and aims to offer a rigorous yet friendly environment for post-graduates from both philosophy and literature departments to debate issues that are central to both disciplines.
Our Keynote speaker is: Dr Paul Davies, University of Sussex
This year’s theme is: The Problem of Mimesis in Literature
Enormously influential and infamously misunderstood, the concept of mimesis has been around in western thought for millennia ever since Aristotle’s Poetics. In antiquity, it was already discussed in a surprisingly diverse manner and then went through waves of reinterpretation, appropriation, and simplification in later periods. Its influence can even be seen in the emphatic rejection of the concept in late Romanticism and Modernism.
More recently, the concept has returned with a vengeance, whether as an instrument to undermine established power structures, or to put under scrutiny the very objectivity of reality upon which the concept is arguably predicated.
Whether you are interested in re-interpreting historic accounts of mimesis or want to contribute to current debates, you are welcome to apply. While we recognise that the concept of Mimesis has specifically classical origins which were particularly influential in the western tradition, we welcome non-western approaches to this topic.
While not limited to the following, we are specifically interested in papers that deal with the problem of mimesis in:
1. Greek and Roman Aesthetics
2. Literary Movements (such as Romanticism or Modernism)
3. Continental Philosophy (such as German Idealism, Philosophical Hermeneutics or Post-Structuralism)
4. Analytic Philosophy (such as Philosophy of Language and Philosophy of Aesthetics).
5. Approaches to Literary Criticism (such as Post-Colonialism, Marxism or Gender Studies)
To Apply:
Please submit a 500 word proposal in which you explain how your paper relates to our theme and sketch your argument. The deadline is Friday, January 15th, 2016. Please send your proposal to queenmarymimesis2016@gmail.com. Your final presentation should be no longer than 20 minutes. Please be prepared for further 5 – 10 minutes of questions relating to your presentation.
Please submit a short academic biographic statement in a document separate from the abstract, so that we can consider applications in a blind review. Please state in about three sentences with which institution you are affiliated, your current title (i.e. MA, PhD), your supervisor, and a one or two sentence summary of the theme of your research.
For more information, please go to: https://queenmarymimesis2016.wordpress.com/