Seventh International Conference

Melville and the Mediterranean

The Melville Society's Seventh International Conference

Jerusalem

June 17-21, 2009

CALL FOR PAPERS

This conference is devoted to understanding the place of the Mediterranean and the “Holy Land” in Western consciousness. Using Melville’s epic Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land as one focus, the conference is meant to open up discussions related to travel, literature, other humanities and the sciences, aesthetics, anthropology, archaeology, ethnography, and religion. Papers and panels are welcome on a range of international writing about the region, including but not limited to the following:

• Clarel as a major work of travel in the 19th century and today; its qualities
  and challenges; relation to political, historical, religious, mythological,
  scientific, ethnographic, and philosophical views; iconography and
  aesthetics; resurgence and necessity in the canon
• 
  Meaning of the Eastern Mediterranean (Levant) region, its position as a
  basin of culture, civilization, and mythology; the significance of its landscape
  and life to larger existential issues, in works by Melville and various
  writers, in different periods
• 
  Interest, comparatively, in other parts of the Mediterranean region
  Connections between Melville and other writers and artists (e.g.,
  Goethe, Humboldt, Piranesi, Kinglake, Poe, Hawthorne, Twain); connections
  to contemporaneous and later American, British, French,
  German, Italian, Persian, or other Eastern influences, and philosophies
• 
  Works encouraging study and translation of Melville in the region;
  alternative research and outlooks; translation and international context
  of Melville's works; Melville's poetry and poetics
• 
  1876: U.S. Centennial, publication of Clarel, and other publications and
  events in that year
• 
  Theorizing on topics such as travel writing, Orientalism, postcolonial
  theory, race and ethnicity, applied to Melville or others

 

The conference organizers welcome various perspectives and session formats. Appropriately, the activities of this world conference will be centered in international venues in the Old City of Jerusalem and its vicinity, and willoffer opportunities for touring the region.

Send one-to-two page proposals for papers, roundtable discussions, and panels by 1 September 2008 to the email addresses of the conference cochairs:

Basem Ra’ad
basem48@yahoo.com

Tim Marr
marr@email.unc.edu

Hilton Obenzinger
obenzinger@stanford.edu

Click Here for Conference Flyer