Fleshing out the Text
November 7, 2008

Plenary speakers
Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, Brandeis University
Outside professor, TBD

It is difficult to imagine a region of contemporary criticism that does not take the body as one of its crucial terms. Cultural, ethical, aesthetic, political, and economic discourses, to name just a few, adopt it as both a governing metaphor and an object for investigation. Yet, in all its prominence—or perhaps by virtue of its prominence—the body seems to resist analytical openness. At once intimately familiar and conceptually elusive, whatever we manage to say about the body seems always to raise new problems, to which we can offer only provisional answers.

"Fleshing out the Text," an interdisciplinary conference, seeks to begin offering new and better answers to these questions by innovatively probing those discourses that embrace, resist, and constitute bodies across a broad spectrum of historical, theoretical, and literary contexts. We invite papers that dismember, remember, and generally "flesh out" the body and its texts through critical interventions that open up and even operate upon them in provocative and unexpected ways.

The conference is open but not limited to original scholarship in the following areas:

• Corporeal poetics
• The textual corpus, the corpus as text
• Historicizing the body
• Trauma, wounds, and scars
• Narratology and narrative
• Illness, disease, harm, and healing
• Disability studies
• Science and technology
• Post-rational revisions of the body
• Skin, membranes, boundaries
• Organicism
• Medicine and the body
• Gendered, sexed, and queer bodies
• The post-colonial body
• Raced bodies
• The religious or mystical body
• Performativity, theatricality
• Dualism, monism, and other paradigms
• Monstrous bodies
• The body politic
• The urban body
• Spaces and architecture

Submissions are not limited on the basis of historical period or genre; we hope to have papers and panels that span an array of cultural, historical, theoretical, and disciplinary contexts. We also seek papers for this year's Special Topics Panel on Digital Embodiment.

Send panel proposals and/or paper abstracts (350 words maximum) to bodyconference@brandeis.edu by June 1, 2008.