Wednesday 6 - Friday 8 August 2008

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Christine Battersby (Warwick): Mystery, Memory and Modes of the Belated: Nietzsche, Freud and the Discourses of Trauma

Elisabeth Bronfen (Zurich): Sublimities in Hollywood’s Visions of War

Richard Humphreys (Tate Britain): The Baroque Sublime

Gene Ray (independent critic): Trauma, Critique and Social Struggle

Philip Shaw (Leicester): War, Trauma and Sublimity

Researchers and creative writers and practitioners from seventeen countries and four continents meet in Swansea this summer for TRAUMA AND THE SUBLIME, an interdisciplinary conference hosted by the Department of English. The conference will explore present and past versions of trauma and the sublime, and consider the extent to which these terms inhabit each other. By putting the sublime, an idea whose provenance is Romantic aesthetics, in dialogue with trauma, a category that derives from the discourses of psychoanalysis and medicine, the conference will create an exchange that will leave both terms transformed. Conference contributions come from the fields of literature, drama, classical studies, philosophy, ethics, art history, psychoanalysis, film studies, film practice, politics, feminist theory, history, queer studies, cultural studies, heritage studies, holocaust studies and psychotherapy.

The conference presents interdisciplinary perspectives on two terms that inhabit and trouble contemporary culture and history, and encourages reflection on a current moment that is convulsed both by the experience of trauma and ‘terror,’ and by the contest over their meaning. For a full programme and details of the event, please visit the conference website.

Email Steve Vine or Marie-Luise Kohlke for further details.

Conference Organisers