"Against and Beyond: Subversion and Transgression in Drama, Theatre, Film and Media."
22-24 October 2009
The Department of Drama and Pre-1800 Literature invites you to attend the 2009 Drama Through the Ages and Medieval Literature Conference at the University of Łódź, Poland.
Transgressive movement against or beyond the norm seems to be universally present in all ages and genres of literary and artistic creativity. Openly defiant or covertly subversive, rebellion against social standards that define public and personal roles, ideals and spaces remains an artistic instrument of development while liminal sensitivity or extreme experience continue to threaten the prescribed from the allegory of medieval theatre and poetry to the neo-realism of the drama of the 21st century.
It is therefore the aim of this conference to approach the category of extreme and subversive experience and its literary, theatrical, dramatic and cinematographic representations. The organisers would like to commence the discussion from the premise that the category of experience viewed as an extreme transgression or as a redefinition of received categories is a useful tool to diagnose contemporary literature as well as contemporary readings of older works and authors. When related to formal aspects of artistic work as well as to plot, the concept of transgression and subversion opens ways of reading canonical works as components of bigger religious, social and political structures which these works may oppose or depict as alienating, inimical and oppressive.
Suggested themes and topics:
-politics of transgression,
-techniques of subversion,
-storytelling as an act of political/historical/religious subversion,
-spatial conditioning of transgression,
-the city versus the country: modes of geographic transgression,
-powers of subversion in private and public domains,
-transgression and the body,
-cathartic power of suffering,
-subversive religious illumination,
-dance, ecstasy, ritual as ways of experiencing the Other,
-mass media and virtual reality as ways of transgressing the real and the actual.
The list of keynote speakers to be announced soon.
Submissions of topics and abstracts (250 words) should reach the organisers no later than June 15th 2009. Conference fee: 300 PLN.