CSTonline

A one-day symposium organised by The Centre for Applied History and the
Department of English, Macquarie University, Sydney on Friday, 7
September 2018

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." This
famous opening sentence from L.P. Hartley's *The Go-Between* (1953)
provokes questions of how the "pastness" of the past is remembered,
recuperated and represented, especially in this postmodern age where the
complications of reconstructing a plausible past are well-known: the
problems of erratic and unreliable memory, for example; (hi)stories that
are created from fragments of archival evidence and oral interviews; the
deliberate choices writers make in emplotting historical narratives,
whether fiction or nonfiction; and the role of the writer's imagination
in bringing a past world to life and making it relevant to a present-day
audience -- the task, in empiricist historian Herbert Butterfield's
words, of transforming a "heap of broken fragments" or a "jumble of
pictures" caught from the windows of a passing train into the "spirit of
the age" and a "literature of power".

This one-day symposium focuses on how the lost worlds of the past are
conceptualised and created in literature, film, television, digital
media, art and history. We are particularly interested in the
construction of historical worlds through narrative/story-telling in
different genres and media. Possible topics include:

- close readings of historical fiction that explore the construction of
  particular communities
- analyses of the /mise-en-scèn/e or diegetic world of historical
  narratives
- the construction of Bakhtinian chronotopes of the past
- how a particular medium or narrative genre influences and/or creates
  the historical world being represented
- narratives of counterfactual history that re-imagine or re-invent past
  worlds
- the generic and narratological interplay between literary and
  historical writing
- reconstructing the narrative worlds of the individual, family or
  community through biography, oral history, family and community
  history
- the "archival turn" in narrativising and/or visually representing past
  worlds
- ... any other topic related to remembering and recreating past worlds

Please send a 150-200 word proposal to
[hsuming.teo@mq.edu.au](mailto:hsuming.teo@mq.edu.au){target="_blank"
rel="noopener noreferrer"} or
[stephanie.russo@mq.edu.au](mailto:stephanie.russo@mq.edu.au){target="_blank"
rel="noopener noreferrer"} by **Friday, 4 May 2018**.


A one-day symposium organised by The Centre for Applied History and the Department of English, Macquarie University, Sydney on Friday, 7 September 2018  “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” This famous opening sentence from L.P. Hartley’s
<em>
 The Go-Between
</em>
(1953) provokes questions of how the “pastness” of the past is remembered, recuperated and represented, especially in this postmodern age where the

CfP: symposium &#8220;Different pasts, foreign countries: Remembering and recreating lost worlds in fiction, media and history&#8221; Sept 7, 2018 @ Macquarie University, Sydney (AU). Deadline: May 4, 2018.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

CfP: symposium “Different pasts, foreign countries: Remembering and recreating lost worlds in fiction, media and history” Sept 7, 2018 @ Macquarie University, Sydney (AU). Deadline: May 4, 2018.