[Commlist] "Mirror/Mirror" seminar at ACLA — cfp

We're accepting paper proposals for the following seminar at the ACLA 
annual meeting, which will be held in Montreal, March 14–17, 2024

Mirror / Mirror <https://www.acla.org/node/43014>

Organizers: Hilary Bergen (The New School), Sandra Huber (Concordia 
University)

What is the significance of the mirror in literature, philosophy, and 
interdisciplinary humanities? Often attributed to Hephaestus, the Greek 
god of fire and metal, the mirror can be traced back to ancient Egypt, 
Mycenea, Greece, Etruria, and Rome. Our English word “mirror” comes from 
the Latin /mirari/, to wonder or marvel at. Rife with taboos, omens, and 
secrets, the mirror draws our imagination through its reflective surface 
and into its churning depths. From Sylvia Plath’s speaking mirror, to 
Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage, to Michel Foucault’s mirror-as-heterotopia 
(a non-place or passage), to Sylvia Wynter’s idea of mimesis and the 
reproduction of capital M-Man, mirrors have long fascinated writers and 
thinkers.

Because the mirror gives us a “virtual” image, it is both reflective and 
productive. Today, the act of mirroring draws further technological 
significance with the rise of AI, chatGPT, and other virtual entities 
that both learn through mimesis and /reflect/ human society, with all 
its potentials and shortcomings, back to us. Mirrors hold 
contradictions: as objects on a wall, they perform cold surveillance; as 
screens on the devices we carry with us, they are marked with our body 
heat. The mirror suggests that on its other side is the unreflected, the 
unthought, the double, the Other, the shadow, the unconscious. 
Mirror/mirror.

Our seminar will draw together discourses of the mirror in comparative 
literature and the (broad) humanities. We are interested in the mirror, 
not just as symbol, but as an object that gathers various uses and 
practices. What kinds of subjectivities, positionalities, and 
communities does the mirror create (and uncreate)? For example, dancers 
use mirrors in acquiring technique; magical practitioners use mirrors in 
divination; consciousness-raising feminists of the 1970s used 
mirrors–namely the speculum–for vaginal self-examination; and special 
effects technicians use mirrors to create ghost-like holograms. The rise 
of social media-proliferated selfies and the practical use of video apps 
like Zoom have made it so that our faces are mirrored back to us nearly 
everywhere we look. Although the function of the mirror has changed 
across history, associations with subjecthood, magic, and the slippery 
boundary between truth and deception remain.

We invite proposals on the significance of the mirror. Possible 
approaches could include (but are not limited to):

  * The role of the mirror in contemporary fiction and film

  * The mirror in discourses of science, technology, and media

  * The mirror and its relatives (the screen, the mimetic interface) in
    the creation of modern desires and anxieties

  * The history of self-portraiture as a practice of mirroring

  * Mirroring and mimesis, particularly in critical race theory,
    feminist studies, queer studies, disability studies

  * The mirror as either magical and/or domestic item: its relation to
    both /heimlich/ and /unheimlich/ realms

Submit your abstract through the ACLA portal here: 
https://www.acla.org/node/43014 <https://www.acla.org/node/43014>


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