TEXT MATTERS: A JOURNAL OF LITERATURE, THEORY AND CULTURE

Published by the University of Łodź in Poland

editor-in-chief: Dorota Filipczak

No. 4

Special Themed Issue: Revisioning Paul Ricoeur and Julia Kristeva

edited by Pamela Sue Anderson and Dorota Filipczak

At first glance Paul Ricoeur and Julia Kristeva seem to occupy two mutually exclusive positions in philosophical discourse and literary theory. At the same time the closed oeuvre of Ricoeur connects with the expanding oeuvre of Kristeva, whose recent concerns are anticipated in hermeneutics. As the influence of Ricoeur and Kristeva on our readings of literary and cultural phenomena has been enormous, TM invites contributions that reassess the ideas of these thinkers and/or apply them in analysis of literature and culture (or other fields). Submissions related to Ricoeur and/or Kristeva, such as articles, interviews and book reviews are cordially invited. Please see the style sheet for details. The deadline for submissions is October 30th, 2012. They should be emailed to text.matters@uni.lodz.pl. Details about the journal can be found on our website. Editors invite potential contributors to contact them about thematic proposals.

Religious travel is found in many of the world’s greatest literary works, from the pilgrims going to Canterbury to Tripitaka collecting the sacred scrolls in India to Las Casas traveling around the New World to Dante ascending from Hell into Paradise–just to name a few well-known examples.

Presentations on any topic related to literary depictions of religious travel–anything from literal depictions of pilgrimage or mission to metaphorical depictions of spiritual journeying or ascension–are welcome. Source material may come from any religious tradition and geographic region, and genres may include both textual and performed materials (e.g., plays, songs, movies).

Please send a 1 page abstract as .docx or .rtf to J. Stephen Pearson at stpears11@gmail.com by Wednesday, 30 May.

28 September 2012, The University of Nottingham

Dear Colleagues, The Feminist and Women’s Studies Assocation (FWSA) and the Contemporary Women’s Writing Association (CWWA) are pleased to announce details of their collaborative event, ‘Feminism in Academia: An Age of Austerity? Current Issues and Future Challenges’, which will be held at the University of Nottingham on Friday 28th September 2012. The day will include keynote talks by Professor Mary Eagleton (formerly of Leeds Metropolitan University) and Professor Mary Evans (Gender Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science). Please find attached our detailed call for papers for the event. The deadline for the submissions of abstracts is 11th April 2012. Further details about the event can be found at the event website. If you have any questions regarding the event or either Association, please do not hesitate to get in touch with the event organisers, Helen Davies and Claire O’Callaghan at feminismandausterityconference@gmail.com

We look forward to receiving your abstracts and to welcoming you to Nottingham in September. With best wishes, Helen Davies and Claire O’Callaghan.

‘Essential reading for scholars of contemporary culture, theory and religion.’
- Luke Ferretter, Assistant Professor of English, Baylor University, USA

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Book announcements are published based on information provided by ISRLC members, and do not constitute an endorsement on the part of the Society. If you would like to announce your most recent publication (monograph, edited collection, or substantial and scholarly web-based output), please e-mail isrlc2@gmail.com

Georg Langenhorst: Literarische Texte im Religionsunterricht. Ein Handbuch
für die Praxis: (Herder: Freiburg 2011)
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Georg Langenhorst (ed.): Gestatten Gott! Religion in der Kinder- und
Jugendliteratur der Gegenwart (Sankt Michaslsbund: München 2011)
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Book announcements are published based on information provided by ISRLC members, and do not constitute an endorsement on the part of the Society. If you would like to announce your most recent publication (monograph, edited collection, or substantial and scholarly web-based output), please e-mail isrlc2@gmail.com

Sex, Friends and Emotional Highs: Religion and Theology Encounter Popular Music

Thursday 13th September 2012 (4pm) to Saturday 15th September 2012 (12 noon)

Gladstone’s Library, Hawarden, near Chester
Beautiful quiet, location; en-suite bedrooms

Residential rate (all inclusive): £140

Non-residential rate (including dinner on Thursday, lunch and dinner on Friday): £70

Some main contributors:

In person Jo Cox (London)
Clive Marsh (Leicester)
Vaughan S. Roberts (Warwick)
Rupert Till (Huddersfield)

Via Skype or other means (!) Allan F. Moore (Surrey)
Jeffrey Keuss (Seattle)

Marsh and Roberts will reflect on their forthcoming book on theology and popular music, due out from Baker Academic late 2012. Allan Moore (Professor of Popular Music at the University of Surrey) will offer a response. Cox and Till will reflect on three recently-published works (by Keuss – Your Neighbor’s Hymnal, Scharen Broken Hallelujahs, and McClure Mashup Religion). All participants are invited to bring questions to pose, music to play and insights to offer.

To book your place, or with any queries, contact Dr. Clive Marsh, Institute of Lifelong Learning, University of Leicester (cm286@le.ac.uk) by 28th February 2012. Residential places are limited and are likely to book up quickly. Deposits will be payable in early March direct to Gladstone’s library. Those on the Network mailing list have first chance to book. After March 1st, if places remain, publicity will be issued more widely.

ISRLC members may also be interested in Liverpool Hope University’s July conference, Thinking the Absolute.

Futures and Illusions: Hope and the Longing for Utopia

24-26 August 2012

Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Marilynne Robinson
Thomas A. Carlson

Having explored the question of presence and presents, contextualized around the space of home and the movement of homecoming, the 2012 conference will shift to consider the temporality of futures. Our stories train us to orient ourselves to our futures, to the undiscovered areas and regions that await our arrival within them. Understanding and communicating our visions for the future is a work undertaken by fictional narratives, by political movements and monuments, and by religious communities. Although the qualities of a happy future differ in each of these frameworks, the variety testifies that the hope for an eventual utopia is a widespread human quality. Utopias reveal the desire to find meaning in our capacity to build better futures as groups or communities, seeing our changes as universal and longstanding; however, they also reflect our fear that hopes for justice and peace are based in—or result in—mere illusion. Utopias therefore hover near to us: before we move into them, they already influence how we think about the present in a way analogous to the influence of the past. Visions of a future—eternal or otherwise—have tended to have either a theological or antitheological impulse that allows the utopian future to attain an absolute or eschatological status. Although they are visions of the future, developed in a relative present, utopias nonetheless themselves respond to what has come before in a historical tradition. It becomes necessary for prophets to harness the future into the present through the work of narratives as a way to weave all three temporal strands together.

Conceptual Structures:

One conceptual frame arises from the title of Freud’s infamous “Futures and Illusions,” in which he argues that we should desire a future without religion. The hope of a disillusioned world has been echoed recently by the New Atheists, who collectively fault religion for the ills plaguing humanity in the present age. Whether the evidence comes from literature, art, cinema, philosophy, or music, the papers in this section will pose answers to questions such as:

**What future should ideas about God have in framing 21st century societies?
**What role can theology and philosophy play in continuing to construct utopic possibilities?
**What role does the theological virtue of “hope” play in motivating us toward Godly or godless futures?

Papers in this panel might consider reflecting on the nature of hope as depicted in a systematic theologian (Aquinas, Barth, Tillich), by a classic post-Christian thinkers (Feuerbach, Freud, Nietzsche, Marx), by current theologians (Altizer, Caputo, Ricoeur, Taylor, Vattimo, Nancy), or even new atheists (Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens) or their critics (Eagleton, Robinson).

Historical Manifestations:

The most recent expressions of utopian beliefs seem to have been modulated through a fundamentalist framework, where the utopic vision comes after violence (physical or legislative in nature). Other utopian societies and collectives, however, have chosen alternative ways to gather as communities, with different hopes and different visions of the future. Again, using a variety of archival, textual, artistic, theological or literary sources for the foundation of your argument, papers in this section will attend to questions such as:

**What hopes have served as the foundation for utopian communities or societies in the past?
**What were the effects on people whose utopian hopes were shown only to be an illusion?
**What roles have history, memory or ritual played in contextualizing, organizing and determining what values organize utopic visions of the future?

Exemplary historical communities could range from the very recent visions of a world contextualized by radical Islamic theocracy, by capitalistic American democracy, by Marxist or Communist organizations. Other historical visions would also be appropriate—Nazi Germany, the Puritan experiment in America, Calvin’s Geneva, the French Revolution.

Narrative Visions:

Future worlds founded in narrative productions exist in the world of mere possibility. In the 20th and 21st centuries, these visions of a future world have often merged with science in dreaming of new imaginaries for our utopic dreams. Whether one looks to science fiction, to literary theory, or to philosophy, the papers in the narrative section will question things like:

**From Plato to More to Bellamy, authors have generally depicted utopian societies with irony. Is it even possible to have an earnest hope for a concrete utopia, or are utopias doomed to be always only in the future?
**Why has science been able to successfully exist as the center of how we construct narratives of the future?
**Why are narratives necessary to the production or formulation of something that we can identify as a desirable future?

Many science fiction films and narratives would be wholly appropriate to consider here, as would theory about utopian visions (Jameson) or the role played by technoscience for the past 70 years (Hales, Milburn). One also might consider looking to narrative theory on possible worlds (Currie, Ronen) or the relationship between narrative and time (Ricoeur).

Submission of Abstracts:

Session papers should be 20 minutes long, with 10 minutes reserved for questions and answers. Please submit your abstract into the most appropriate of the categories listed above. Each topic has a set of questions designed to helpfully frame the themes of papers for the most productive interchange; naturally, these will not all be addressed in any one paper, and it is not necessary that a paper answer any of them in particular. Submit paper title and an abstract of no more than 350 words, along with your name, institutional affiliation (if applicable), telephone number, and email address by 05 February 2012. Send abstracts and questions to: UIowaRLA@yahoo.com.

Information about featured speakers, abstracts, schedules and other questions will be addressed at: http://uiowarla.blogspot.com/

We invite essays that bring together the fields of cognitive science, literature and religion. Such topics might include the cognitive nature of prayer, ritual, faith, mysticism, myth-making, and belief as represented in the literature of a particular culture and historical period; principles of neurotheology as reflected in reading practices, literacy, the use of analogy and metaphor; theory of mind and the construction of God-images in literature and culture; cognitive theories of acting, dramaturgy, and performance in devotional and religious texts; and more multidisciplinary inquiries from the related fields of evolutionary psychology, neurophilosophy, and cognitive anthropology.

Accepted essays will be published in a Special Issue of the peer-reviewed journal Literature and Theology (Oxford University Press).

Please send essays of no longer than 7,000 words to Paul Cefalu, Lafayette College and Julia Reinhard Lupton, University of California, Irvine. Deadline for receipt of essays is September 1, 2012.