‘Writing the ghost train: rewriting, remaking, rediscovering’ will be the theme of the AAWP’s 20th conference, hosted by Victoria’s Swinburne University of Technology from Saturday 28 November to Tuesday 1 December, 2015.
‘Reading and writing, we are at once visceral and ghost-like; in our bodies and out of them; making imagined places real’.
—Martin Edmond
While this conference looks back to twenty years of work carried out in the field of creative writing studies by the Australasian Association of Writing Programs, it also looks forward to that which is ‘in the making’. With the title of this conference, ‘Writing the ghost train,’ we pay homage to Martin Edmond’s keynote address of 2014, ‘riding the ghost train,’ an insightful exploration of the creative drive of one singular writer. We also acknowledge that for the original inhabitants of this land, the white man was once—and perhaps still is—a ghost. As the planet moves, with a grim relentless urgency toward destruction brought on by our own spectral dreams, we also note both history and nature’s examples: destruction makes room for creation. Working by association, linking the real with the imagined, the memory with the artefact, the archive with the avatar, this conference is an invitation to explore what such scholars as Todorov, Genette, Hutcheon, Eco and Kristeva have called hypotext, hypertext, genotext, phenotext, and, more generally, the recontextualisation of narrative and aesthetic motifs.
The focus of the conference will be the question of rewriting, interpreting and adapting texts. …
The Conference will provide four thematic streams, with variants of refereed and non-refereed academic papers and creative works, including installations.
- ‘Rewriting the historical event’ will address the issue of interpreting or re-interpreting the past through the filters o memory, ideology and ethics.
- ‘Recovering narratives, re-crafting texts’ will focus on reading drafts and archives against those rewritings that are corrective in nature and those that pay homage to the source.
- ‘Rescripting the text, visual encounters in the text’ will bring together an original literary text with adaptations, transpositions or variations.
- ‘Refashioning the self’ will explore the effects of rewriting texts, remaking images in the experiences of the subject in the text as, for example, through the process of canon-formation.
In addition to this mix of standard academic and creative possibilities, there will be a series of panels, a PhD hub and a Master class for Honours and postgraduate students with a notable writer. If you are interested in convening any of these events, or have suggestions, please get in touch.
Watch this space as important information will be posted from April 1st — the first call for papers.
Contact: Dominique Hecq, dhecq@swin.edu.au