TWO-DAY UGC SPONSORED NATIONAL CONFERENCE SCIENCE, RELIGION & LITERATURE: AN INTERFACE

Theme of the Seminar In our hyphenated age defined by everything that is post or even post-post, the study of literature cannot be treated as an independent, isolated and rarefied activity. The contours of literary studies are being mapped most vigorously with powerful interventions from the fields of science and religion. While the close interaction between these three key humanist discourses have changed our ways of thinking and modes of being from the time of the Renaissance Age, their combined effects have impacted our contemporary age like no other age. On the one hand, information networks and communication technologies have collapsed the time-space dimensions, connecting individual lives to a wireless global world. On the other hand, the post-9/11 world and post-26/7 India have witnessed fault lines that have deepened borders and boundaries between religions, cultures and people. There is an uneasy sense that our civilization is truly on the brink of a crisis. Our everyday reality has become a mesh of fractured body polity and fragmented human identity, of religious fundamentalism and terrorism, and skewed technological growth. This has had serious consequences on the present world order: it has made the prophecy of a brave New World seem a distinct possibility; the Orwellian spectre of a totalitarian world a palpable reality. The incendiary circumstances of our postmodern realities have had tremendous impact on the two most defining features of human subjectivityliterature and religion. Whereas literature has always aspired to transcend the limits of reason, religion has strived to push the realm of faith beyond imagination. The present scenario of embattled lives has been the focus of both imaginative writing and intellectual discourse. Such is evidenced in the writings of Thomas Pynchon, William Gibson, Ian McEwan, Collin McCarthy, Mohsin Ahmad, to name a few. The work of social scientists and culture theorists like Fredric Jameson, Francis Fukuyama, Christopher Norris, Paul Feyerabend also reveal an incisive engagement with different aspects of science, religion and literature. It is in this intellectual climate that the two-day conference organized by Hislop College, Nagpur plans a multi-disciplinary approach to discuss the complex mediations between science, religion and literature. The conference aims to engage with the themes and issues that arise from the intermingling of these disciplinary narratives. It proposes to investigate matters of reality and representation, of faith and identity, and of text, hypertext and context that define the very nature of literature, theory and our world. The conference hopes that this inter-disciplinary inquiry will yield fresh insights and show new directions to help us understand better our changing world and our changing selves.

SUB THEMES Conflict of science and religion in literary texts Representations of space & time in fiction, drama & poetry Science fiction genres: fantasy, horror, cyberpunk, Gothic & mystical science fiction Literature after 9/11, religion & terrorism Posthuman bodies, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and forms of sexuality Colonial science, subaltern cults & postcolonial alterities Women, feminism and cyberculture Chaos theory, discourse and culture Globalization, religious fundamentalism and the clash of civilizations Ethics, environment and deep ecology Literature of apocalypse and anti-novel Sci-fi films and close encounters of the other kind

Format:

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