Call for Papers: Irresponsibility ( Singapore, 04/10/06; 9/28-30/06)

Inaugural English Literature Conference: IRRESPONSIBILITY
Division of English, NTU, Singapore, 28-30 September 2006

Literature tells us—before psychoanalysis, before deconstruction—that our crimes are overdetermined, our ethical concepts unstable.  Yet the facile deployment of the rhetoric of responsibility and irresponsibility, in all manner of debate, indicates the widespread abuse of the concept of responsibility, if not its bankruptcy. With our title “Irresponsibility,” we hope to provoke a conversation aimed at assessing both the contribution of literature to our understanding of the concept of responsibility and its vicissitudes, and the possible resistance within literature and literary studies to cheap distinctions between responsibility and irresponsibility.  We hope also to provide a forum for those interested in determining the responsibility of literary studies today, both within its own domain, and in its relation to other disciplines.  We welcome a wide variety of approaches to our theme, and encourage a broad understanding of its scope.

Opening address by Professor Shirley Chew; Plenary address by Professor J. Hillis Miller; keynote address by Professor Eugene O’Brien.

We invite papers and proposals for panels (of 3-4 papers). Suggested topics include, but are not restricted to, the following:

• Representations of irresponsibility in the literature of any period or nationality
• Irresponsible characters, narrators, authors, or literary critics
• Responsibility after Freud (or Kierkegaard, or Sade, or Marx, or Nietzsche, or Derrida)
• Interdisciplinary irresponsibility: Literature and Philosophy, Literature and Science, Literature and Law, Literature and Film Studies, Literature and Cultural studies
• The pleasure of irresponsibility: Libertinism; Sadism; Pornography; Trash Cinema
• Irresponsibility and Postmodernism, Postcolonialism, Poststructuralism
• Irish Literature and Irresponsibility, or Subversion in the Anti-Realist tradition
• Mora l didacticism, mora l dilemmas, moral anxieties in Literature or Film
• Primal guilt: Adam, Eve, Oedipus, Antigone
• Victorianism and the rhetoric of responsibility
• Irresponsibility and Insanity, Dilettantism, Hypocrisy, Scepticism, Faith, the Sacred, Violence, Polemics, Politics, War
• Irresponsibility in responsible Singapore: Singapore literature, the arts, and culture
• Responsibility in the age of terror
• Culpatory and exculpatory rhetoric
• Irresponsibility as resistance
• The ethics of reading

Please send abstracts of 300 words either by email to irresponsibility@ntu.edu.sg or by mail to Conference Committee, English Division, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, NTU, Nanyang Avenue, Singapore 639798. Further information will soon be available at our conference website: www.hss.ntu.edu.sg/english/eng_conference.asp.

Deadline: 10 April 2006