Patron: President of Austria, Dr. Heinz Fischer

KCTOS: Knowledge, Creativity and
Transformations of Societies

Vienna, 6 to 9 December 2007

S E C T I O N S

 

Walls Fallen, Walls Built:
Gender and the Issues of Collective Cultural Memory

Section Chair/ Abstracts, suggestions to:

Fatima Festic (Los Angeles) [BIO]

Email: festic@hotmail.com

 
ReferentInnen / Speakers   >>
 

ABSTRACT:

There has been a renewed interest in collective memory in the work of scholars in various humanities disciplines over the past decade. Perceived as a field of activity in which past events are always reconstructed, maintained, modified, and endowed with political meaning, collective memory relates to forms of unending cultural struggles over territories as much as over meanings. As Said puts it, the art of memory for the modern world is both for historians as well as ordinary citizens and institutions very much something to be used, misused, and exploited in its concern with a specifically desirable and recoverable past, and is subject to inventive reordering and redeploying.

Studies which expose such a refashioned memory scrutinize exclusiveness of recent narratives of repatriation, national revival, independence, re-emergence, etc. as well as excessive indulgence in trauma and its exoticization, and in dismantling the memory’s ideological grounds dismantle the ambiguities of pursuing collective interests that are based on the imagery of fixed divisions between self and the Other and on the suppression of singularity within groups.

In the light of this, the section aims to discuss some aspects of cultural politics which, stemming from modified recollections and their demands, collide with situations of the present and invoke a particularly freighted and self-divisive future. We will discuss gender as an understudied aspect of collective memory and its constructions relating to the luring falsity of the past. Participants are invited to submit the abstracts for their contributions, discussing these issues with reference to literature, film, history and theory.

 

 

ReferentInnen / Speakers / Orateurs

  • Rehabilitating Ulrike Meinhof
    Translating, inventively reordering, and strategically redeploying
    Luise von Flotow (University of Ottawa)
    ABSTRACT

  • Weaving Aura, Gendered Textures: The Secret of Walter Benjamin’s Language Magic
    Sabine Golz (University of Iowa)
    ABSTRACT

  • Crashing Against Walls: Elfriede Jelinek’s Princess Plays
    Christine Kiebuzinska (Virginia Tech)
    ABSTRACT

  • Voicing Trauma in the Deportation narratives of Baltic women
    Leena Kurvet-Käosaar (Tallinn University)
    ABSTRACT

  • Women’s writing and memory
    Jelka Kernev Štrajn (Ljubljana)
    ABSTRACT

  • Domesticating the Uncanny, Enlightening the Bestial: On Some Features of the Gender Structure in Spy Fiction
    Takayuki Yokota-Murakami (Osaka University)
    ABSTRACT

 


Ehrenschutz: Bundespräsident Dr. Heinz Fischer

KCTOS: Wissen, Kreativität und
Transformationen von Gesellschaften

Wien, 6. bis 9. Dezember 2007