Just a reminder that abstracts for ASAL 2010 are due 19 February 2010.

The theme of the ASAL 2010 conference is “Archive Madness”, and aims to promote and enable consideration of the limits of disciplinary borders and the revival of the archive in literary analysis. The title echoes and redirects Derrida’s famous study “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression”. Archive fever is, for Derrida, is “a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement” (p. 91.) The archive is simultaneously a site of revelation and concealment, both of which are accorded the authority of the actual trace.

The conference theme is timely given the new role of the archive in digital information systems and as a rubric to consider the archive of the literary-disciplinary formation itself, which is currently undergoing radical revisions. The conference asks how we think about the trace of word, text and object in the formation of literary cultures? How do we account for our increasing attachment to the archival trace? And how are these considerations inflected by questions of the national literature and the annals of nation-formation?

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers and for 60 or 90-minute panel discussions (2—3 speakers) that address any aspect of Australian literature and the archive in its historical, material and graphic forms, including the following (if space in the program permits we will also consider papers unrelated to the conference theme):

o  Australian literary disciplinarity

o  Inter/disciplinary institutions

o  Literature and the ‘sister arts’

o  Australian literary inter/nationalism

o  Colonial nostalgia

o  National memory, conservation, amnesia

o  Literary commemoration and monumentality

o  Questions of national residence

o   Australia’s diverse beginnings / arrivals

o  Biography

o  Queer traces and Gender traces

o  Unhomely archives

o  Histories of reading and writing

o  Virtual and new media orthographies

o  Signature, inscription, citation, pseudonym

o   Printing, publication, circulation and reception

Please send 200-word abstracts of papers or panel proposals, with a brief biographical note, to ASAL2010@unsw.edu.au by Friday 19 February 2010.

We welcome proposals from postgraduate students. Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) has generously provided ten postgraduate scholarships, covering costs of travel and accommodation, available to postgraduate students whose own institutions are unable to support their attendance. To enquire about postgraduate scholarships, please contact ASAL2010@unsw.edu.au by Friday 19 February 2010.