CALL FOR PAPERS: TEXT, LANDSCAPE, IDENTITY

September 13th-15th 2007, University of Exeter, Cornwall Campus, Penryn

In the last twenty years the notion of landscape has undergone significant theoretical development which has focused attention on discourses, knowledge, power and questions of representation. Geographers have reconfigured the relationship between landscape and identity by drawing on a range of cultural texts. However, their treatment of creative writing has been incomplete, despite cultural geography's engagement with literary theory.

Literary Studies, similarly, has engaged with the social or psychological relations of individual authors to landscapes but not fully understood (a) the combined influence of landscapes and their literary constructions on the creative process and (b) the significance of that process as half-conceived and half-written.

Keynote speakers:
Professor Timothy Fulford, Nottingham Trent University, UK
Professor Donna Landry, University of Kent, UK
Professor Kenneth Olwig, SLU, Sweden

Questions we would seek to discuss include:
· How does a writer respond not just to landscape but to generic conventions of landscape writing?
· How does the writer's response to landscape shift through the stages of writing?
· How do landscape, the textual representation of landscape and the process of representing landscape help shape identity?
· How does a sense of identity inform textual representations of landscape, in turn?
· How do we apply literary models of authorship and readership to the experiences of 'real' authors and readers in response to landscape?
· What are the methodological challenges in answering these questions?
· What are the challenges to theories of identity and/or landscape that need to be addressed?
· How can we combine productively theories of representation and non-representation to understand more fully the practices and performances of writing in relation to landscape?

Please send enquiries or abstracts of 300 words by 30th March 2007 to the
co-organisers:
Dr. Catherine Brace, Department of Geography, University of Exeter, Cornwall
Campus, Penryn TR10 9EZ; email: cbrace@exeter.ac.uk
Dr. Adeline Johns-Putra, Department of English, University of Exeter,
Cornwall Campus, Penryn TR10 9EZ; email: a.g.johns-putra@exeter.ac.uk

http://www.uec.ac.uk/conferences/understandinglandscape/Conference.html