Rhetoric of War
12th Annual International Conference, 23-24 May 2014

The Department of English at Saint Louis University Madrid Campus will host its Twelfth Annual International Academic Conference on Friday, 23 May and Saturday, 24 May. The keynote speaker will be Mary A. Favret, Professor of English, Indiana University-Bloomington.

In honor of the First World War centenary, the conference will explore the art of literary discourse and the power of language in recreations and realities of war. We will consider questions such as: How do literary texts rhetorically position friends and foes? How do they witness the reality of war, craft reconciliation, and/or remember war? How do rhetorical techniques change over time and across cultures in regard to changes in political structures, military order, and technology? How is the rhetoric of war affected by other media? Why does the rhetoric of war migrate to other areas of society, and how does it function in non-military contexts? The topic is open to the function of rhetoric as it relates to any war (not only WWI).

Papers may develop questions of rhetoric and war from an interdisciplinary perspective that incorporates: cultural studies, journalism and media, political and popular culture, gender and/or sexuality, cognitive theory, linguistic studies, ethics, religious studies, transnational studies, migration studies, cross-cultural communication, postcolonial studies, globalization, internet and mass media, ecocriticism, medicine, technology, or trauma studies.

We welcome proposals that explore the rhetoric of war as represented in literary texts or use techniques of literary interpretation to analyze other kinds of texts. Suggested topics may include but are not limited to:

Rhetorics of support for and resistance to war
Propaganda
Players in war (e.g., alliances and allies versus enemies, correspondents, heroes, traitors)
Theatre of war
The landscape of war
Changing rhetorics of war
War and censorship
Memory of war (e.g., commemoration, monuments, narrating events)
Trauma, wounds, and the body in war
Genre and representations of war (e.g., protest poetry, funeral oration, elegy, science fiction)
Civil war
Technology and modern warfare
Gendered and/or ethnic rhetorics of war
Migration of war rhetoric (e.g., race war, war on drugs)
War as a metaphor
War in colonial and post-colonial contexts
Global war and globalization

Please submit a 300-word proposal in English along with a short bio via e-mail by Sunday, March 30, 2014 to: slumadridconference@gmail.com
Presentations will be 15 minutes in length.