The (In)Visibility of War in Literature and the Media

Call for Papers: Lisboa, Centro de Estudos de Comunicação e Cultura (CECC), Universidade Católica Portuguesa, 7 - 9 May 2009

The conference wishes to address the visibility of war in the media and in literature in the 20th and 21st centuries. Either as a visible or a latent event, as a singular experience or as invisible discourse, war has shaped the social construction of modernity and influenced cultural and political production. The discourse of war as mediation is indeed a site of contention, where the narrative of the nation clashes with the individual rights and exerts pressure upon the subject of the narrative/reporting, thus affecting the substance of narration. This primal event, as modernist rhetoric claimed, was on the one hand aesthetically inspirational and culturally productive, and on the other ravaging and destructive. In fact, war is deeply intertwined with representation. On the one hand, as an exceptionally violent event, war challenges the work of representation. On the other, the work of representation is structurally supported by conflict and antagonism. More...