[ecrea] Symposium: Different pasts, foreign countries: Remembering and recreating lost worlds in fiction, media and history

*Different pasts, foreign countries: *

*Remembering and recreating lost worlds in fiction, media and history*


/

/A one-day symposium organised by //The Centre for Applied History and 
the Department of English, /

///Macquarie University, Sydney/

/*Friday, 7 September 2018*/


“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” This 
famous opening sentence from L.P. Hartley’s /The Go-Between/ (1953) 
provokes questions of how the “pastness” of the past is remembered, 
recuperated and represented, especially in this postmodern age where the 
complications of reconstructing a plausible past are well-known: the 
problems of erratic and unreliable memory, for example; (hi)stories that 
are created from fragments of archival evidence and oral interviews; the 
deliberate choices writers make in emplotting historical narratives, 
whether fiction or nonfiction; and the role of the writer’s imagination 
in bringing a past world to life and making it relevant to a present-day 
audience – the task, in empiricist historian Herbert Butterfield’s 
words, of transforming a “heap of broken fragments” or a “jumble of 
pictures” caught from the windows of a passing train into the “spirit of 
the age” and a “literature of power”.

This one-day symposium focuses on how the lost worlds of the past are 
conceptualised and created in literature, film, television, digital 
media, art and history. We are particularly interested in the 
construction of historical worlds through narrative/story-telling in 
different genres and media. Possible topics include:

  * close readings of historical fiction that explore the construction
    of particular communities
  * analyses of the /mise-en-scèn/e or diegetic world of historical
    narratives
  * the construction of Bakhtinian chronotopes of the past
  * how a particular medium or narrative genre influences and/or creates
    the historical world being represented
  * narratives of counterfactual history that re-imagine or re-invent
    past worlds
  * the generic and narratological interplay between literary and
    historical writing
  * reconstructing the narrative worlds of the individual, family or
    community through biography, oral history, family and community history
  * the “archival turn” in narrativising and/or visually representing
    past worlds
  * any other topic related to remembering and recreating past worlds

Please send a 150-200 word proposal to (hsuming.teo /at/ mq.edu.au) 
<mailto:(hsuming.teo /at/ mq.edu.au)> or (stephanie.russo /at/ mq.edu.au) 
<mailto:(stephanie.russo /at/ mq.edu.au)> by *Friday, 4 May 2018*.


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