1914 and beyond: Literary Reflections of War

UGC sponsored national-level seminar organized by the Department of English, Asannagar Madan Mohan Tarkalankar College, Asannagar, Nadia, West Bengal in collaboration with Nabadwip Vidyassagar College, Nabadwip, Nadia, West Bengal on September 11 & 12, 2015.

CONCEPT NOTE
Angel Gonzalez (b. 1925) whose young life was deeply bruised by the Spanish Civil War, writes: “My poems are as much the result of my personal experience as they are product of the historic time in which it has been my lot to live—or rather, to be a witness.” This could have been written by almost anybody else living in a tumultuous time and looking for representational strategies to deal with it in any part of the world. War is as old as rocks. Anyway, the Great War of 1914-1918 was an event that was unprecedented in human history as it came to involve all the great powers of Europe and eventually most countries of the world. The aim of this national-level UGC sponsored seminar is not only to examine how the Great War has been represented so far in plays, novels, poetry, letters, memoirs, diaries, and personal narratives, but also to assess the politics of those representations. The aim is also to reassess the First World War literature from the perspectives of the contemporary discourses on women, marginality, disability, displacement and environment. We are inviting articles on how the First World War shaped the ‘modern’ aesthetic thought and feeling as a European construct and on the act of representing the effects of the First World War on the lives of the colonized people as well because the colonial and economic rivalries have been identified as one of the chief causes of the Great War that cost the lives of more than 8 million soldiers.
The scholars, students and teachers of various disciplines are free to write about the literary genres and social situations that defined the study of the First World War literature. But as organizers, we would be genuinely happy to receive articles on how the representations of the Great War can enable us to reevaluate and ruminate on the signs of injustice, violence and power imbalance around us in today’s world. We are still witnessing an alarming growth of war technologies and the weapons of mass destruction. Now, among the recognized countries with nuclear weapons are the United States of America, Russia, China, France, UK, Israel, India and Pakistan. The Iraq war started in 2003 when the United States of America claimed that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein illegally possessed chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. There is hardly any denying that war has been vigorously redefined in multiple ways. For instance, the demolition of the twin towers in the United States in recent past has already complicated the prevailing notions of war initiating an era of postmodern warfare in which there is no need for the soldiers to move in an orthodox manner. Recent technological innovations have given war a posthuman dimension rendering the human-soldier redundant at times. Any attempt to unravel how these changes and transformations are being socio-politically and culturally discoursed and how they actively inform the issue of the formation of subjectivity and selfhood is welcome, but even while doing that, please don’t forget to refer back to the phenomenon of the First World War and treat it as your inaugural perspective in a neat and credible way.


CALL FOR PAPERS
In a certain sense, we are perfectly in a position to mark the centenary of the First World War (1914-1918) through organizing this seminar and publishing an edited book with ISBN. Please don’t send the paper by postal mail. Instead, send it to any of the following email addresses as Word attachment: (a) mi.moni23@gmail.com (b) sarkar.chirantan@gmail.com. Mention your name, affiliation, official postal address, phone number and the email address on the very first page. Please do let us know if you are a student, a research scholar, a teacher or anybody having other ties to the area. The deadline is September 5, 2015. The reading period extends from June 1, 2015 to September 5, 2015. Please send the paper during our reading period. Any paper received after September 5, 2015 will not be read at all. Please send full papers not exceeding 6000 words. There is no need to attach abstracts. We strongly encourage the contributors to attend the paper-reading session of the seminar at Asannagar Madan Mohan Tarkalankar College, Asannagar, Nadia, West Bengal on September 11 & 12, 2015. Otherwise, the paper will not be considered for publication. Papers previously published in any form or submitted simultaneously to any other publishing authority will also not be considered. All manuscripts must be double-spaced. Scholarly documentation should adhere to the format outlined in the MLA style sheet 7th edition. Please feel free to ask any questions via mi.moni23@gmail.com or sarkar.chirantan@gmail.com.