University of Massachusetts Amherst

NEWS

CALL FOR PAPERS

INFORMATION FOR PARTICIPANTS

SCHEDULE

ORGANIZERS

SPONSORS

MANY THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS, ORGANIZERS AND PARTICIPANTS FOR CONTRIBUTING
TO SUCH A FANTASTIC CONFERENCE!

NEWS

MYTH CONFERENCE AND EMBLA DEBUT COVERED IN THE ICELAND REVIEW

Read all about Hrafn Gunnlausson's attendance of our conference here.

HRAFN GUNNLAUGSSON TO PRESENT HIS FILM Embla(2007) IN ITS U.S. DEBUT

  Award-winning Icelandic director Hrafn Gunnlaugsson will be present at the conference to
  introduce his latest film, Embla (2007).  The screening will take place at 7:00 p.m. in
  Isenberg School of Management 137 on Friday, February 15, 2008.

  The director first came to international attention and acclaim with his film Inter Nos
  (Okkar á Milli, 1982), followed by the popular Viking revenge film When the Raven Flies
  (Hrafninn flygur, 1984), the first part of the "Raven Trilogy."  Embla is the director's cut of
  the third film of the trilogy, The White Viking (Hvíti víkingurinn, 1991), starring a
  15 year-old Marie Bonnevie as Embla.

  For an essay on the second film in Hrafn's “Raven Trilogy” see “National Identity and Conversion through Medieval Romance: The Case of Hrafn Gunnlaugsson’s Film ‘Í skugga hrafnsins’ (In the Shadow of the Raven)” by Jane Chance, a Professor of English at Rice University with research interests in mythology and myth-making, and Jessica Weinstein.
 
The organizers of the conference would like to thank IcelandAir and the Arctic Research Consortium (ARCUS) for their support in bringing this director and his film to the United States.

 

INTRODUCING SPECIAL GUEST SPEAKER: GLENN ALEXANDER MAGEE

Glenn Alexander Magee, author of Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (Cornell University Press, 2001),
 will deliver a lecture entitled:

“The Mythology of Reason: Romanticism, Idealism and the Quest for a New German Myth”

 Magee is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Long Island University in Brookville, NY.

 

Back to Top

CALL FOR PAPERS

MYTH: A Graduate Conference in German & Scandinavian Studies

In his opening sentence of Transformations of Myth through Time,
anthropologist Joseph Campbell states that the "material of myth is the
material of our life, the material of our body, and the material of our
environment, and a living, vital mythology deals with these terms that are
appropriate to the nature of knowledge of the time."  Though Campbell's
commentary on the universality of myth has come into question in light of
post-structuralist scholarship on the topic, his logic on the corporeality of
myth and its continuous reconstruction within historical contexts rings true
with contemporary conceptions of ideology and narrative.   Myths are both
persistent fictions that provide explanations for religious or natural
phenomena, as well as widely held misconceptions or misrepresentations that
often reveal social truths of a given epoch.  Daily human interaction in turn
leads to mythopoeia, the eventual creation of a mythos or mythology which then
fuels ideology for generations to come.  The myth-destroying inquiry of
science seems to do more to reconfigure a mythos within the collective
unconscious than to obliterate it.

The third biennial graduate student conference in German & Scandinavian
Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst poses the question:  what
do myths tell us about human relationships to the world?  How are certain
myths interconnected with German & Scandinavian history and historiography,
such as the infamous stab-in-the-back legend following World War I or the
yellow star myth of Danish resistance during World War II?  What myths
permeate the field of linguistics of Northern Europeans?  How do myths address
elusive signifiers such as race or gender?  Can folklore and legends be put to
rest, or does a capitalist, media-driven Western European society prevent
certain symbols and archetypes from remaining out of the public eye for too
long?  What discourse of power and resistance can be found in largely
fictional narratives, from ancestral oral histories to glossy feature films?
How far has the discourse on myth come in the last thirty years since the
publication of Hans Blumenberg's seminal text, Arbeit am Mythos, and his
concept of "Metaphorologie?"

Since we are interpreting myth in a relatively broad sense, we welcome paper
proposals addressing a variety of themes for an interdisciplinary discussion
of the above questions and more.

The field of interest includes, but is not limited to, the following topics:

--traditional myths, ancient and modern
--archetypal/universal myths
--Holocaust revisionist history
--myth and cultural assimilation
--myths serving the creation of national identity
--myth and fairy tale as bountiful sources for films and literature
--visual/aural aesthetics of myth and fairy tales
--national myths in international political affairs
--myths of science and progress/science as myth
--gender and myth
--superstition and/or myths of the everyday
--conflicting myths of identity
--generational myths and the retelling of family history
--religion as myth/myth as religion
--myths of ethnic continuity/racial identity
--enshrined myths in academic disciplines (e.g. philology, German Studies,
 Scandinavian Studies, etc.)
--myths about language and dialect
--myths of violence and threat
--the resilience of myths

Please e-mail attached proposals of no more than 300 words along with a short
biographical paragraph to mythumass07@gmail.com by November 10, 2007.

Participants are encouraged to seek funding for travel within their
departments or from outside sources.  Please inform us of your financial
situation ahead of time and how we might best accommodate your needs.

Any immediate inquiries about the conference may be directed to Evan Torner at
etorner@german.umass.edu

Back to Top

 

INFORMATION FOR PARTICIPANTS

Thank you for your interest in participating in our graduate student conference.

If you were chosen for a panel, we ask you to confirm your attendance. We understand that some people may not be able to secure travel funding, in which case please let us know if your acceptance is provisional.

Travel Support

If you would like to apply for travel funding, please submit a letter of recommendation from an advisor or faculty member and a short CV. These materials must be received by January 27, 2008; earlier submission is greatly appreciated.  There are guaranteed funds to help you travel, so please apply if you can!

A/V Equipment

Please contact us as soon as possible if you will need any A/V equipment (e.g., TV, VCR/DVD player, overhead projector, CD player) for your presentation.  You may e-mail these requests to Evan at etorner [at] german.umass.edu.  

Presentations

The presentations should be in English and not exceed 20 minutes in length. Fifteen-minute presentations will allow for more discussion. Please submit the written paper to your panel organizer by February 1, 2008. Early submission is greatly appreciated! In addition to sending us your final paper, please send us either a copy of your CV or a brief bio which specifies how you would like to be introduced at the conference. To request audiovisual equipment for your presentation, please e-mail the organizer of your panel. Be sure to indicate what kind of equipment you will need (e.g., overhead projector, TV/VCR/DVD player, data projector, CD player). Please contact the panel organizer by February 1, 2008 so that the equipment can be reserved.

Travel

The conference will take place on campus in Herter Hall. Please visit http://www.umass.edu/umhome/visit_campus/transport.html to find your way here. Bradley International Airport in Hartford/Connecticut is the closest airport if you were to arrive by plane. We will  be able to pick you up (Friday around 5 p.m.) and drop you off (Sunday around 3 p.m.) in Hartford. Please let your panel organizer know your schedule well in advance, so that we can make arrangements. If you want to take the Peter Pan Bus (from the Logan Airport in Boston or from anywhere else), do not get off in downtown Amherst but at the very last stop: Haigis Mall, University of Massachusetts. The bus stop is right in front of Herter Hall.

Accommodations

The Campus Center Hotel is located on campus about a 5- minute walk away from Herter Hall.  As customary for grad student conferences, there is also the possibility of staying with a fellow graduate student (mostly on pull-out sofas in the living room). But as space is limited, you need to let your panel organizer know your preference as soon as possible.

Back to Top
 

SCHEDULE for MYTH: A Graduate Conference in
German and Scandinavian Studies

FRIDAY - FEBRUARY 15, 2008 - 137 ISENBERG SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT (Flavin Auditorium)

7:00 p.m.-9:30 p.m. --- Screening of the Icelandic film Embla (2007, directed by Hrafn Gunnlaugsson)

Q&A with director Hrafn Gunnlaugsson to follow the screening.

SATURDAY - FEBRUARY 16, 2008 - 601 HERTER HALL

9:00 - 11:00 a.m. --- Panel I: Reevaluations of Mythic Women --- Rachael Salyer, chair

11:30 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. --- Panel II: Mythic Communities and Stereotypes --- Laurie Taylor, chair


2:00 - 3:30 p.m. --- Panel III: Children of Myth --- Kyle Frackman, chair

4:00 - 5:30 p.m. --- Guest Speaker

SUNDAY - FEBRUARY 17, 2008 - 601 HERTER HALL

9:00 - 10:30 a.m. --- Panel IV: Cross-Currents: Myth and Religion in Medieval Germanic Literature
                                --- Michael Moynihan, chair

11:00 - 12:30 p.m. --- Panel V: Myths and the Jewish Question in the GDR --- Allie Merley Hill, chair

12:30 p.m. --- Closing Remarks

Back to Top

 

ORGANIZERS

Ute Bettray, M.A/Ph.D. Student
Ingeborg Bachmann, linguistic/cultural theory, representations of gender

Delene Case White, Ph.D. Student

Timothy Dail, M.A. Student
Contemporary literature, the short story, film studies, composition, queer theory, pedagogy

Kyle E. Frackman, Ph.D. Student
Queer theory, feminist theory, gender studies, boarding schools, fin-de-siècle German and Austrian literature, film, uses and effects of time-space, Scandinavian Studies, Swedish, Finnish

Maureen Gallagher, Ph.D. Student

Melissa Gazo, Ph.D. Student
Cultural Studies, feminist theory, 20th-century German literature and film

Victoria Lenshyn, M.A. Student
Culture of memory in post-war Germanies, DEFA films, representations of the body

Diane Liu, M.A. Student
Post-Wende literature, exile literature

Alexandra Merley, Ph.D. Student
Contemporary German literature (post-Wende), film studies (especially DEFA film), GDR culture and society, German art history (1890-present)

Michael Moynihan
Philology, history of religion, Romanticism, eighteenth-century rediscovery of medieval Germanic literary texts, Scandinavian studies

Rachael Salyer, Ph.D. Student
Philology, medieval literature and culture, Weimar Germany

Laurie Taylor
Queer theory, gender studies, nationalism and identity construction, DEFA films, East German literature

Evan Torner, Ph.D. Student
German film history, contemporary musicology, Utopian/Dystopian science fiction, teaching methods

Conference correspondence can be directed to:

Evan Torner
Conference Planning Committee
Germanic & Scandinavian Studies
510 Herter Hall
University of Massachusetts
161 Presidents Dr.
Amherst, MA 01003-9312

Tel. (413) 545-6681
Fax (413) 577-3808

etorner [at] german.umass.edu
 

Back to Top

 

SPONSORS

The Max Kade Foundation

The American-Scandinavian Foundation

German and Scandinavian Studies @ UMass Amherst

Back to Top