[Antiquitas] CFP: Mimesis, Ethics and Style, University of Helsinki 25.–27.8.2010

[riikka.rossi at helsinki.fi]

Mimesis, Ethics and Style
International Conference on Literary Representation
University of Helsinki
25.–27.8.2010

Finnish Academy Research Project Styles of Mimesis solicits  
submissions for the conference “Mimesis, Ethics and Style” hosted by  
the Department of Finnish Language and Literature, University of  
Helsinki, Finland.

The conference aims to bring together the interconnected though often  
separately studied questions of style and mimesis and open up a new  
kind of discussion not only on the relationship between style and  
representation but also on the ways literary texts engage ethics and  
ideology. It explores the ways in which literature produces its  
peculiar reality effects and negotiates its relationship to value  
systems connecting it to the world of everyday experience and ethics,  
as well as to different ideologies, emotions, world views and fields  
of knowledge. By inviting re-readings of the classical conceptions of  
mimesis as imitation and copying, we hope to bring new insights to the  
concept of intertextuality as well as to the idea of style imitations.

The keynote speakers for the conference:

Robert Doran is Assistant Professor of French and Comparative  
Literature at the University of Rochester, and the author of a number  
of recent articles on Auerbach, mimesis and literary history. He is  
currently working towards a volume titled The Sublime: Cultural  
Aesthetics from Longinus to Nietzsche. He is also the editor of  
Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1953-2005  
(2008), a collection which brings together twenty of René Girard's  
uncollected essays on literature and literary theory.

Stephen Halliwell is Professor of Greek at the University of St  
Andrews. His research interests cover a wide area of the history and  
criticism of ancient Greek literature and the Classical Tradition,  
including attitudes to laughter, the theory of tragedy and Greek  
theatre practice. In 2002 he published The Aesthetics of Mimesis:  
Ancient Texts and Modern Problems, and his current project is a book  
entitled Between Ecstasy and Truth: Values and Problems in Greek  
Conceptions of Poetry.

Professor Jonathan Hart is the Director of the Comparative Literature  
Program at the University of Alberta. His research interests include  
cultural history and comparative Canadian and American studies, as  
well as the visual representations of the New World. Professor Hart is  
the editor of The Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, and his  
most recent publications are Interpreting Cultures: Literature,  
Religion and the Human Sciences (2006) and Comparing Empires: European  
Colonialism from Portuguese Expansion to the Spanish-American War  
(2008).

Professor Patricia Waugh from the Department of English Studies at the  
University of Durham has published widely on the relationship between  
literature, philosophy and science, and is the co-organiser of the  
2008-2009 Institute of Advanced Study workshop series on ‘Thinking  
with Feeling’ on literature, philosophy and the cognitive sciences.  
The third edition of her seminal Metafiction: The Theory and Practice  
of Self-Conscious Fiction will be published by Routledge in 2009, and  
her new volume The Two Cultures: Literature, Science and the Good  
Society is forthcoming in 2010.

We invite Professors, Scholars and Doctoral Students to send proposals  
for original twenty-minute papers discussing the various aspects of:

•	Concepts of Mimesis
•	Ethics of Representation
•	Mimesis, Knowledge and Cognition
•	Mimesis as Style (Intertextuality, Parody, Pastiche)
•	Reality Effect and Concepts of Literary Realism
•	Mimesis and Allegory

Comparative and interdisciplinary approaches are very welcome.  
Audiovisual equipment will be available in the conference rooms.

Please e-mail proposals for papers (max. 500 words) with a short CV or  
a biographical summary to the following address:  
mimesisconference at gmail.com by January 31st, 2010.

For further information on our research project, you are most welcome  
to visit Styles of Mimesis website  
http://www.eng.helsinki.fi/mimesis/index_eng.htm. The conference is  
organised in cooperation with the Finnish Graduate School of Literary  
Studies.

The organising committee:
Professor Pirjo Lyytikäinen (Project Director)
Dr Riikka Rossi (Conference Chair)
Dr Minna Maijala (Graduate School Coordinator)
Dr Saija Isomaa
Assistant Professor Sari Kivistö
Sanna Nyqvist, MA
Dr Merja Polvinen