Centre for Catalan Studies. School of Languages, Linguistics and Film
First Call for Papers: Narratives of illness in Catalan culture / Discursos sobre la malaltia a la cultura catalana
The Centre for Catalan Studies at Queen Mary University of London is organizing an interdisciplinary Conference on representations of illness in Catalan culture to be held on
25th and 26th June 2010.
Proposals for papers from any theoretical perspective are invited on topics such as the impact of social and political parameters on the cultural construction of illness; the representation of one of the most problematic forms of ‘otherness’, that of the diseased body or mind, in any kind of text (narrative, poetry, cinema, theatre, painting, posters, graffiti, advertising, comics, music, institutional, medical, etc.); the challenge posed by new configurations of female subjectivity to patriarchal textualizations of the ‘ill woman’; the questioning (or reinforcement) of the social construction of stigmatized illnesses such as cancer or AIDS as signifiers for negative political or psychological realities; the relationship between pathology and desire; the exploration of the ‘blame-the-patient’ philosophy as instrumental in the discrimination and depolitization of illness; the sociogenic factors of illness; the relevance of illness to the construction of cultural memory; the re-reading of Catalan literary and artistic history through the lens of the representation of illness.
Professor Bradley Epps, from Harvard University, will deliver the Inaugural Address. Catalan writer Imma Monsó will be the Conference’s special guest. (Keynote speakers will be announced shortly.)
The Conference is funded by the Institut Ramon Llull (Barcelona).
Papers, in English or in Catalan, should not exceed a 20-minute presentation. The deadline for submission of proposals is the 1st March 2010. Proposals for papers should not be longer than 400 words. They should be sent to the organizers: Jordi Larios, Director of the Centre for Catalan Studies at Queen Mary (j.larios@qmul.ac.uk), and Montserrat Lunati, from Cardiff University (lunati@cardiff.ac.uk).
A selection of papers will be published either as an edited volume or as monographic issue of a peer-reviewed journal.