The English Department in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of

Sousse
&
The Laboratory on Approaches to Discourse in the Faculty of Arts and
Humanities, University of Sfax

Jointly organize a study day on:

9 November 2017
Venue: The Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Sousse,
Adonis Room

Call for Papers

The human body has been a main issue in literature from medieval to postmodern
times. Writers from Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare to William Faulkner and
James Joyce explored, in different ways, the human body and linked it to different notions
like identity, desire, hostility, attraction and abjection. In an essay entitled On Being Ill,
Virginia Woolf stresses the need in literature to voice bodily experiences like heat and cold,
comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health and illness (101). Other bodily
1
experiences like sexual desire and childbirth, pleasure and pain, attraction and repulsion,
youth and decay are equally voiced by the human body in literature.

In the theoretical field, the human body is also a major critical concern. For instance,
psychoanalytical theories consider the body as central in the construction of human psyche.
Freudian and Lacanian theories intersect in dealing with the significance of bodily feelings in the
(dis)balance of a persons psychological state. Likewise, Michel Foucault highlights the centrality
of the body in his discussion of knowledge and power. In feminist theories, the body is equally
seen as the political container of identity, being a marker of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and social
class. From another perspective, postmodernist theorists like Frederick Jameson and Jean
Beaudrillard see the body as the silent container reflecting cultural norms and parameters. The
image of the body is also connected to the postmodernist tendency to experiment with language as
the supreme idiom of articulation. Hence, the body turns into a nonverbal idiom communicating
meanings and feelings beyond the contours of words. Being a locus of identity and self-
articulation as well as an object of power negotiation, the human body is a central question in
postcolonial theories dealing with themes of race, ethnicity and native identity.

Jointly organized by the English Department in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities,
University of Sousse, and the Laboratory on Approaches to Discourse in the Faculty of Arts and
Humanities, University of Sfax, this study day aims to shed more light on the image of the human
body in (post)modern literature by further exploring the nonverbal meanings it constructs and
communicates.

We welcome abstracts of 15-minute presentations that scrutinize the semiotics of the human body
in film, poetry, prose, and drama, and its aesthetics and/or politics in (post)modern literature.
Contributors may explore, but are not restricted to, the following topics:

Body language in (post)modern literature and

visual arts
literary theories
cultural materialist theories
psychoanalytical theories
sensory studies
literary pragmatics

Presenters will subsequently be invited to submit full papers to be considered for publication.

Submission Timelines:
Abstract Submission: Abstracts of about 250 words should be sent by email to
bodylanguage.studyday2017@gmail.com

Submission Deadline: 30 July 2017

Acceptance/Rejection Notification: 15 August 2017