gg.png)
News
Visions of the Afterlife. Call for conference papers.
October 20, 2022
Call for papers
Between Matthew’s description of heaven as a wedding (22 1-14) - most memorably delivered by Jesus in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ - and Jean Paul Sartre’s verdict that “hell is other people,” there is not only a gap of centuries but also cultures and religions. Despite their disparity, however, both conceptualizations render the fundamental human anxiety related to the weighty question of “what comes next?” They point to the necessity of envisaging the unfamiliar through the familiar, thereby taming the terrifying void.
Visions of the afterlife, therefore, are not only related to the need to imagine the hereafter in the sense of Heaven, Hell and Purgatory (for the Catholics), but also to the contemporary notions of “post-theory”, such as post-humanism and the ideas of postmodernism, post-feminism, post-colonialism and post-nationalism.
The aim of this conference is to explore and discuss the literal, the literary and the metaphorical meanings of the notion of “the afterlife”. We welcome papers representing both the humanities and social sciences in their conceptualizations and reifications of the religious, medical, political and literary “hereafters”
.
âž– Medicine / Medical Humanities / Social Sciences
• The moment of passing
• The mystery of one’s body shutting down
• Marketing death and the life after death
• Out-of-body experience
• End-of life dreams and visions versus science
âž– Philosophy / Theology / Ethics
• Versions of the afterlife from the earliest records to contemporary times across cultures and religions
• Ars moriendi (good endings vs bad endings)
• Secular / atheist alternatives for life after death
âž– Literature / Art
• Literary narratives on the hereafter across cultures and religions
• Saints’ lives and visions
• Theatre and the drama of/on the hereafter
• Gothic literature and the visions of the afterlife
• Literary visions of post-apocalyptic reality
• Artistic representations of the afterlife: Imaging the hereafter
• The afterlives of theory: post-humanism and the ideas of postmodernism, post-feminism, etc.
• The afterlives of ideologies, doctrines, political systems as represented in literary works (post-nationalism, post-colonialism, etc.)
• The afterlives of literary texts and their authors: adaptations, rewritings, etc.
The conference is to take place in September 2023 [more details tba]
Please send your abstracts via email: afterlifewaconference@gmail.com
DEADLINE: May 2023
​
[The conference will accommodate academic papers as well as (grant) research presentations of work-in-progress]
J.M. Coetzee elected Associate Member of the Poznań Chapter of the Agder Academy
May 6, 2022
We are happy to announce that J.M. Coetzee has been elected Associate Member of the Poznań Chapter of the Agder Academy. He is a world-famous writer and the Nobel Prize winner in 2003. He also won the Booker Prize twice - in 1983 and 1999.
​
J.M. Coetzee was born in South Africa and has Dutch Afrikaaner and Polish roots. His father’s family initially immigrated to South Africa from the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, while his great grandfather, Balthasar Dubiel (Dubyl) on his mother’s side, came from Czarnylas, near Poznań. Coetzee holds a BA in English, a BSC in mathematics, and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Texas, Austin. Professor Coetzee lives in Australia and is currently associated with the University of Adelaide.
In July 2012 the opera composed by Nicholas Lens with libretto by Coetzee premiered in Poznań. In the same year, he received an honorary doctorate from Adam Mickiewicz University. Professor J.M. Coetzee has always been supportive of all AMU ventures and we are honoured and delighted to welcome him at the Poznań Chapter of the Agder Academy.