SEEJ Forum on Mickiewicz

[Benjamin Rifkin]

Dear Colleagues:

On behalf of my colleague Halina Filipowicz, I am posting an announcement
regarding a forum, in _The Slavic and East European Journal_, on
Mickiewicz.  Please direct any and all queries about the forum to Halina
Filipowicz:  hfilipow at facstaff.wisc.edu, Department of Slavic Languages and
Literatures, University of Wisconsin,  1220 Linden Dr.,  Madison, WI
53706-1557

Thank you.

Ben Rifkin

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CALL FOR PAPERS FOR FORUM "MICKIEWICZ:  EAST AND WEST"
TO BE PUBLISHED IN THE SLAVIC & EAST EUROPEAN JOURNAL

I invite articles for a forum, "Mickiewicz: East and West," to be
considered for publication in +Slavic and East European Journal+.  Poised
between the bicentennial of Adam Mickiewicz's birth (in 1998) and the 150th
anniversary of his death (in 2005), the forum proposes to examine how
different constructions of Mickiewicz's "life/work" have affected our
understanding of Polish and Russian literatures. The subtopics listed below
are provided by way of example and suggestion only.

The purpose of the forum is to situate Mickiewicz studies within a vastly
broadened network of intertextual and cross-cultural relations, which
requires, for its interpretation and assessment, methods that are often
mixed, if not interdisciplinary.  I am particularly eager to encourage the
application of new critical methodologies.  At the same time, I propose to
foster a dialogue between different theoretical and methodological
approaches to Mickiewicz studies and thus to escape the narrow way in which
this field has traditionally been constituted.

Contributors may want to reexamine standard narratives of Mickiewicz as one
of Europe's leading literary celebrities; rites of inclusion and exclusion
in the Mickiewicz canon (both in the sense of Mickiewicz's texts and
Mickiewicz scholarship); communal myths and the construction of the
Mickiewicz cult; external propaganda; self-censorship, discipline, shaming,
and punishment in Mickiewicz studies.

Another possible approach is to consider what new subjects, issues, and
problems can be illuminated by specific critical  methodologies; what
impact new critical theories have had on inherited notions of the
aesthetic, the historical, and the cultural in Mickiewicz studies; and what
effect Mickiewicz studies has had on teaching Polish and Russian literatures.

Still another approach is to explore connections which Mickiewicz's texts
may have to texts by other writers, East or West, and to such concepts as
hegemony, orientalism, gender and sexuality, diaspora, hybridity, nomadism,
and performativity, and to theorize a new understanding of Mickiewicz that
would extend the recent remapping of literary studies, especially in terms
of multivalent, cross-cultural, and migratory subjectivities.

The deadline is 1 February 2000.  All articles will be refereed according
to +SEEJ+ usual procedures.

Please send articles and inquiries regarding this forum to:

Halina Filipowicz
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
University of Wisconsin
1220 Linden Dr.
Madison, WI  53706-1557

e-mail: hfilipow at factaff.wisc.edu