17th INTERNATIONAL MELOW CONFERENCE
To be held in Dharamshala, H.P.
9-11 March 2018
SPACE, PLACE, AND LANDSCAPE IN LITERATURES OF THE WORLD
Literary Texts are not suspended in a featureless limbo. Whatever the mode, the lyric, the dramatic, or the narrative, a text, be it the pastoral poem or a narrative of the American wilderness, is concerned with topology. Texts are narrated against a specific backdrop, whether real or fictitious, exquisite or horrendous, utopian or dystopian. Traditionally, narratives belong to a specific time and place, even when they cross borders and spill over to other locales and climes. But with globalization, cultural and otherwise, the traditional notions of space and place have undergone a sea-change, giving rise to a space-centric terminology: no place (Marc Auge), placeness, placelessness, heterotopia (Michel Foucault), deterritorialization (Deleuze and Guattari), etc. So, are we rooted or rootless, topophiliac or topophobic? Do we “belong” to a particular geographical space that influences our thoughts, actions and words? And when we write, does our writing get affected by the flora and fauna, the ranging mountains, the foaming seas or the green meadows in which we live and breathe? Does the landscape find its way into what we dream and write of? Or is that true only of the past writers, with contemporary writers and texts now becoming placeless and deterritorialized, with no identifiable spatial or cultural moorings? This is what MELOW would like to deliberate upon in its next conference.
MELOW 2018 will focus on space, place, and landscape in literatures of the world.
Tentatively, the conference will be divided into the panels mentioned below.
Panel A: Theoretical issues: Critical perspectives on space, place and landscape in literature; environmentalism and eco-poetics, cultural-spatial globalization, virtual places, etc.
Panel B: Nature and Literature: Mountainscapes; waterbodies; Island Literature; verdant greens: Rolling meadows, sprawling plains, moors; Call of the wild: Deserts, wilderness, inhospitable regions, etc.
Panel C: Cityscapes: Urban landscapes; Technologies of Space and Place; science and speculative fiction; surrealistic or fantastic landscapes; utopias and dystopias.
Panel D: Nostalgia: Places lost or left behind in time; a world that was; Displacement, Memory and Place; Diasporas and Migrations, Place and Identity.
Panel E: The Politics of Place: Nationalism, Imperialism and Colonialism; cultural globalization.
Please note: The focus will be on texts, whether printed or cinematic. The thrust will be on WORLD literature. There will be restrictions on the number of abstracts in any given category. In case of overlapping themes, or if there are too many abstracts in a specific field, you may be asked to send another abstract on a different theme.
WE ARE NO LONGER ACCEPTING ABSTRACTS
Organizing Committee:
President: Prof Anil Raina (Chandigarh)
Vice-President: Dr Vijay Sharma (Delhi)
Secretary: Prof Manju Jaidka (Chandigarh)
Jt. Secretary: Prof Manpreet Kaur (Delhi)
Treasurer: Dr Meenu Gupta (Chandigarh)
Executive Members:
Prof Sushila Singh (Varanasi)
Prof Dipankar Purkayastha (Silchar)
Prof Debarati Bandopadhyay (Santiniketan)
Prof Ravichandran (Kanpur)
Dr Roshan Sharma (Dharamshala)
Dr Seema Bhupendra (Udaipur)
Dr Neela Sarkar (Kolkata)
Dr Jyoti Mishra (Chattisgarh)
Dr Vandhana Sharma (Jammu)
Dr Suneeta Patnayak (Chandigarh)
Dr Radha Gautam (Surat)
