CALL FOR PAPERS - German Studies Association 2012
Thirty-Sixth Annual Conference of the German Studies Association
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
October 4-7, 2012
YMAGINA is pleased to announce a call for papers for the following sessions at the 2012 GSA conference.
1. Mothers and Daughters
Fifteen years after the publication of Ann Marie Rasmussen's influential _Mothers and Daughters in Medieval German Literature_ YMAGINA invites papers that engage with issues raised in this text including, but not limited to, questions of
- female identity formation
- transmission of knowledge from mother to daughter or more generally between family members
- closeness or schisms between mothers and daughters or other close family relations
- female literary stereotypes and their relationship to reality
- the deployment of images of mothers and daughters (or fathers, sons, sisters, brothers, etc.) to either support or question a particular standard or ideal.
Papers treating texts not discussed in Rasmussen's book are welcome, as are those that build on Rasmussen's methodology but explore other types of family relationships.
2. Memory and Story Telling: Old Wine in New Wineskins
How do stories rely on and activate cultural knowledge? What connotations do traditional, popular, or well-known narrative elements (for example, well-known characters or iconographies or melodies) carry with them into different contexts? How do internal or external audiences respond to such transfers? Papers are invited that explore the role of memory, tradition, or reinvention in textual, pictorial, or musical narratives of the medieval or early modern period, including post-medieval re-castings of medieval or early modern narratives.
3. Disguise and Deception
Disguise and deception are key elements in many secular and hagiographic texts. What motivates disguise and deception? How does an audience recognize deception and disguise? Who is the target of the disguise and deception? Papers are invited that explore any aspect of deception and disguise – linguistic, visual, religious, sexual, and physical – in medieval or early modern works.
We seek 15- to 20-minutes papers, in English or German. Please send an abstract (max. 250 words) and a brief CV that includes institutional affiliation by Wednesday, February 1, 2012, to BOTH of the following organizers (e-mail submissions only, please). Please indicate if you will need AV equipment.
Dr. Alison Beringer, Department of Classics and General Humanities, Montclair State University: beringera@montclair.edu
Dr. Katja Altpeter-Jones, Foreign Languages and Literatures, Lewis and Clark College altpeter@lclark.edu