International Conference, April 7 & 8, 2016, Lublin, Poland
Organizers: Izabelle Kimak, Julia Nikiel
MCSU Department of American Literature and Culture in cooperation with Canadian Studies Department and Video Game Research Center is pleased to announce a two-day international conference “ExRe(y). Spaces of Expression and Repression in Post-Millennial North-American Literature and Visual Culture.”
The organizers invite presentations that focus on the forms of expression and repression in American or Canadian literature and visual culture (i.e. film, visual arts, video games, television, and others) spanning the period of the last fifteen years, from the year 2000 to the present day.
Topics may include, but are not limited to the following:
• language as a source and tool of oppression and empowerment
• sexuality: self-expression vs. erotophobia and sexual repression
• mind: creativity and trauma, denial and repressed memory
• the body as a space of self-expression and self-inflicted regimes: dietary and beautification practices, clothing, body modification
• emotional abuse, power, and control relationships
• spaces of confinement: prisons, war zones, refugee camps
• surveillance: panopticons and spaces of control
• political repression and persecution: totalitarianism, autocracy, dictatorship, despotism
• representations of post-millennial watersheds (9/11, Enron, John Jay Report, crisis of 2008)
• new forms of narrative expression (blogs, fan fiction, Twiterature)
• text as an interactive space: ergodic literature, hypertext, cybertext
• video games and virtual worlds as spaces of expression and repression
• cross- and trans-media dialogues (expressing image through text and text through image)
Selected presenters will be invited to participate in a joint book project to be published by Peter Lang in 2017.
Abstracts, including the title of the paper, name of the author(s), and academic affiliation, should be sent to Izabella Kimak and Julia Nikiel (exrey2016@gmail.com) by 15 October 2015.
For further information, please visit: http://exrey.umcs.lublin.pl/