"Against and Beyond: Subversion and
Transgression in Drama, Theatre, Film and Media."
22-24 October 2009
The Department of Studies in Drama, Pre-1800
English Literature, Film and Media invites you
to attend the 2009 Conference at the University of Lódz, 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.
Organising Committee:
Prof. Jadwiga Uchman
Prof. Andrzej Wicher
mgr Piotr Spyra
mgr Katarzyna Ojrzynska
For submissions and enquiries please contact:
mgr Piotr Spyra at: (lodz.conference /at/ gmail.com)
