a conference for
graduate students,
faculty, and
professionals

Call for Papers: "Identifications"

A graduate student conference is being organized by a group of students who participated in the Following Christ conference this past December — and they would love to invite other FC'02 delegates to submit papers.

Call for Papers, Poetry, Fiction, Performance Art:

Purdue University
The English and Philosophy Ph.D. Program
Graduate Student Conference, February 6-8, 2004

Identifications:
Faith, Theory, and Identity-Making

Keynote Speaker:

Dr. Merold Westphal: Faith and (non) Identity
Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Fordham University

Responding to recent post-secular turns in philosophy and literature, this conference seeks to bring together graduate students in the humanities who are interested in thinking through interconnections between faith and theory.

The conference is responding to the possibility that how we learn to understand subject-formation might facilitate and in turn be sharpened by theorizing faith and religious-identifications. We invite proposals for papers and panels, as well as performance pieces, poetry, and fiction.

Deadline for Submissions: October 15, 2003

Please send either a full paper (no longer than 12-15 pages) or a detailed abstract or panel proposal to:

Ada Jaarsma, jaarsma@purdue.edu
Department of Philosophy, BRNG 7th floor, Purdue University
100 North University Street, West Lafayette, IN 47907-2067

Mindy Tan, tanh@purdue.edu
Department of History, University Hall, Purdue University
672 Oval Drive West Lafayette, IN 47907

• How do the processes by which we gain singular and collective identities (psychoanalytic, existential, critical-theoretical) resonate with confessions of faith? How do sexual, gender, ethnic, and racial identifications cohabit with religious identities?

• Do increasing resonances between deconstruction and religious apophatic teachings point to a contemporary mystical presence in current theoretical discourse? Can we mobilize this possibility, after the anti-essentialist thinking of the 90s, to rethink the subject's relation to theology and faith without falling back on essentialist concepts?

• Can we reread philosophers of faith (Augustine, Kierkegaard, Weil, Lévinas, Marion, Irigaray) as well as philosophers of atheism/humanism (Nietzsche, Sartre, Heidegger, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty) in and through the problematic of identifications? How do they help us to think through identity-making?

• Can we mobilize contemporary literary theory to attend to relations of faith within a text? For example, can we re-envision relations between modernism and religion through encounters with T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Edith Sitwell, D. H. Lawrence, Salvador Dali?

• If we see a transcendent turn in theory today (Derrida, Caputo, Zizek, Radical Orthodoxy), what does it say about the state of theory that the "secular suspension" under which we have been functioning is itself being suspended?

• In the increasing despair over progressive politics these days, is there a place for eschatological thinking again? What does it mean that we are increasingly understanding our politics in transnational and global terms? How have faith traditions contributed to this discussion and conversely, how must we rethink our traditions in light of these conditions?

• What is at stake in the ethical injunction to remember? Between memory and expectation, what is the role of literature in relation to the ethical demands of realism?

• Can the mystical tradition provide resources for dialogue between "philosophers of faith" and "philosophers of atheism"?

• Following the "scientific crisis" of disciplines like literary criticism and history, can we re-define the way we go about academic work to include an understanding that all method research is informed at some point by an "illumination" or epiphany that is not culled from, and is rather external to, the materials with which we are working?

This conference is free and open to the public.

Dinner checks of $15 are payable to Ada Jaarsma, and can be mailed to Ada Jaarsma, Department of Philosophy, BRNG 7th Floor, Purdue University, 100 North University Street, West Lafayette, IN 47907-2067.

The conference is sponsored by the Purdue English and Philosophy Ph.D. Program together with the Department of English, Women's Studies Program, Modern Fiction Studies, the Jewish Studies Program, and the Religious Studies Program at Purdue University.

For other inquiries contact Martin Beck Matustik, Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Purdue English and Philosophy Ph.D. Program

For updated conference information, please see the Purdue English and Philosophy Ph.D. Program website.