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A Joint Venture between the University of Aarhus and Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick.

August 8-9 2008

CFP deadline: May 15th 2008
Location: Aarhus University, Denmark.

"Nobody - that's my name"
- Homer, The Odyssey, VIIII

The Delphic injunction to know thyself, to understand oneself as self, entails alienating self-reflection and the awareness that the limits of any entity, hence its individuation, are determined by what lies outside these borders - otherness. But where is this division between the I and other located? How is this schism constructed? Or can this schism even be discerned? Instead, the injunction of the Arts articulates an inverse yet more immediate approach to the problem of knowing thyself. It entails an understanding of oneself as other: the boundary between "I" and "that which I am not," necessary for our constitution as subjects, dissolves in our Homeric hero's proclamation "Nobody - that's my name."

Invited keynote speakers:

• Luce Irigaray (to be confirmed)
• Thomas Hylland Eriksen, University of Oslo
• Svend Erik Larsen, University of Aarhus
• Eugene O'Brien, University of Limerick
• Ann McCulloch, Deakin University

And Tabish Khair will be giving a reading

The conference is open to scholars and students of all disciplines. Those wishing to participate in the conference are invited to submit an abstract of no more than 300 words to othernessconference@gmail.com by Thursday, 15 May, 2008. The convenors will let the proponents know whether their proposals have been accepted no later than 15 June, 2008. Papers may be given in English with citations in any language, and are limited to 20 minutes. Selected papers will be eligible for publication in a peer reviewed academic journal, and possibly a hard copy edited essay collection.

See our website at http://www.othernessandthearts.org for more information.

All questions regarding conference content (abstracts, presentations, speakers etc.) may be directed to the convenors at othernessconference@gmail.com.

We invite papers and speakers across a broad spectrum of interests which might connect with the following ideas:

Otherness and fear are two concepts that offer an intriguing dynamic of cause and effect: the 'otherness' approached in the experience of fear almost acts as a mirror of both personal and public anxiety or terror of the other. In consequence, representations of 'otherness' are all too often dark and fearful, dominated by hesitation and repression. In much art and literature, shadows of the other abound, haunting the disillusioned subject with reminders of a dark and unrepresentable object ('absolute otherness' or 'the real') that is so intrinsic to subjectivity.

What specific role does the other play in the formation of normative/deviant subjectivity? As speaking subjects constituted through processes of signification, the otherness of our subjectivity becomes most profoundly known when the ineffable other of psychic disorder disrupts our sense of internal coherence and linguistic transparency: as speaking subjects, we are thus faced with painful paradoxes of needing to, but being incapable of, voicing the intense subjectivity inherent in experiences of inexpressible mental suffering. Painfully located beyond the realm of signification, the otherness of pain and psychopathology is characteristically circumnavigated as a consequence of sanity's supposed 'sameness' promoted by Western ideals; however, it is always already resonating in the lacunae among articulations of the wounded self.

Figures of otherness do not only form a part of our contemporary literature, art, and critical theory but also of dominating Western political rhetoric. The 'othering' of vast numbers of the world's population by European colonial thought depended on the construction of a series of binary oppositions. Colonial discourses conceived of the alterity of the non-European subject in terms of terror or deficiency, a figure that provided the threat of both similarity and difference. The colonised land offered a consequence free site for European transgression, an unleashing of an unfamiliar self/other from the bounds of civilisation, a doorway into a heart of darkness. How can we ethically relate to, represent, and narrate the inaudible voices of the subaltern, concrete marginalized others embedded in the materiality of everyday existence, if the absolute other is inevitably translated into a relative or relational other within the economy of the self-same? Similarly, when otherness is seen through a gendered lens, how is it possible to undermine self-enclosed signifying systems that exclude feminine identity and disavow sexual difference? Can the other be known without recourse to the self? Is it possible to distinguish other-than-self from the other defined by and for itself, as well as otherness qua construct from otherness qua ontological category?

In our rapidly changing world, dominated by communication technology, we are ever faced with encounters with 'other' cultures and arts. Nonetheless, we continue to erect and enforce borders and boundaries between peoples and countries. As a natural course of conflict, this complicates relations to and understandings of cultural others and otherness; thus, it compels exigent discussion. When the world is simultaneously increasing and decreasing in time and space, creating a world increscently global yet local, uniform yet diversified, which brings into relief the vexed politics of 'othering' and 'saming', how does one navigate and negotiate cultural identity? In this context, how does the self and the same coexist with the other in an at times estranged and estranging transcultural urban milieu?

It is precisely this variety of formulations, the polysemy of alterity, which this conference wishes to examine from divergent disciplinary and theoretical perspectives. Its aim, therefore, is to convene on the notion of Otherness as a site for critical, socio-political, cultural, and literary exploration.

Welcome topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Otherness in Cultural Representation
• Hybridity, Creolization, and the Global other
• Memory, History, Trauma, and Otherness
• Ethics, Responsibility, and the Other
• Sexuality, Gender, the Body and the Other
• M/other / Sm/other: Engendering Otherness
• Ambivalence and Otherness: Mimicry & Menace
• Absolute Otherness vs. Self-Same Other
• Monstrosity, Spectrality and Terror of the Other
• Uncanny or Abject Others; or The Familiar Other
• The Sublime or the Unimaginable Other
• Malignant Otherness: Madness/Sadness
• Healing Otherness: Sanity & Suffering
• Pathography: Voicing the Otherness of Pain

• Hovedvejleder: Lektor Michael Skovmand (Aarhus Universitet).
• Bivejleder: Professor Charles Lock (Københavns Universitet).

• Lektor Marianne Børch, Institut for Sprog og Kommunikation, Syddansk Universitet (formand)
• Professor Brian Patrick McGuire, Institut for Kultur og Identitet, Roskilde Universitetscenter
• Professor Vincent Gillespie, English Faculty, University of Oxford, England

• Hovedvejleder: Lektor Dominic Rainsford (Aarhus Universitet).
• Bivejleder: Professor Charles Lock (Københavns Universitet).

• Lektor Peter Mortensen, Institut for sprog, litteratur og kultur, Aarhus Universitet (formand)
• Associate Professor David McWhirter, Dept. of English, Texas A&M University, USA
Lektor Lene Østermark-Johansen, Institut for Engelsk, Germansk og Romansk, Københavns Universitet

• language and the conceptualisation of space, motion, events, number, colour, and time;
• theory of mind;
• ontogenetic and phylogenetic emergence of language and conceptualisation;
• universal and language-specific aspects of (categorical) perception;
• neurological aspects of language and conceptualisation

(1)a.  Peter poured water in the bucket     b. *Peter poured the bucket with water

(2)a. *Peter filled water in the bucket	    b.  Peter filled the bucket with water

(3)a.  Peter loaded hay onto the truck	    b.  Peter loaded the truck with hay

1. why do certain verbs occur only in the a. construction, others only in the b. construction, and still others in the two?
2. to what extent may corresponding locative verbs show a different distribution in different languages (there are many languages where the equivalent of (2a) is perfect, e.g. in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Kazakh, etc.), and why?
3. what are the various morphosyntactic means that languages use to licence these two constructions and why is it that, if one of the constructions requires special morphosyntactic means, it normally is the Ground object one?
4. what is the status of the oblique Locatum argument found in the Ground construction?
   e) Which of the two current main types of approaches to argument licensing, the projectionnist one and the constructionnist one, seems more appropriate to account fo the various cross-linguistic phenomena discussed under the locative alternation?