From Border Building to Border Hopping: The Shifting Nature of the Text

16th Annual Carolina Conference on Romance Literatures
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
March 25-27, 2010

From Border Building to Border Hopping: The Shifting Nature of the Text


Artistic production carries with it an inherent quality of crossing
borders, given that the artist must cross from a public face to an insular,
creative self at each moment of creation. This conference is dedicated to
analyzing the various aspects of borders as seen in artistic creation -
authors and characters crossing geographic borders, sexual and gender
boundaries; transgressing the norms allowed by a given political regime;
bending or breaking traditional boundaries of genre and medium; rejecting
the High Culture / Low Culture dichotomy; the dispersion of texts
themselves across boundaries geographic, political, temporal and more.

At the same time, presenters may consider the parallel and opposing
phenomenon of Border Building – including the role of artistic production
in nation-building and in the construction of borders of identity, as well
as the (re)definition of academic disciplines – and how such construction
is carried out by artists and academics.

Keynote speakers for the 2010 Carolina Conference are Réda Bensmaïa
(Professor of French Studies and Comparative Literature), Teresa Fiore
(Professor of Italian Studies) and José Manuel Prieto (Novelist, Professor
of Spanish-American Literature). There will also be an Invited Reading by
author Manuel Muñoz.

Abstracts must be submitted by December 18, 2009. Abstracts are limited to
250 words and must be submitted online at: ccrl.unc.edu

Papers or panels on all aspects of literature and film in French, Italian,
Spanish, Portuguese, and Comparative Literature will be considered.
Interdisciplinary approaches are encouraged. Individual presentations
should be limited to 20 minutes.

Exceptional papers by both graduate students and professors will be
considered for publication in Romance Notes.