Maria Curie-Sklodowska University

Lublin, Poland

May 10-11, 2018

Department of American Literature and Culture, in cooperation with the Video Game Research Center, is organizing a two-day international conference “ExRe(y) 2018. Exhaustion and Regeneration in Post-Millennial North-American Literature and Visual Culture.”

We seek proposals for papers and panels that focus on the topic of exhaustion and regeneration in American and Canadian literature and visual culture (film, visual arts, video games, television, and others) of the last seventeen years, from the year 2000 to the present day.

Topics may include but are not limited to the following:

•  post-millennial literature of exhaustion and replenishment
• psychological and emotional exhaustion and regeneration (mental disorders, breakdowns, burnout, psychotherapy)
• disease and recuperation
• environmental crisis and sustainable design
• globalization as the agent of exhaustion and replenishment
• scarcity and accelerationism
• exhaustion of/with politics
• apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic scenarios in texts of culture
• the many faces of passing: longevity, death, immortality, the undead
• religious/spiritual regeneration (revelation, resurrection and the afterlife)
• the end of the human and post- and transhumanisms
• abuse, war, and the im/possibility of regeneration through violence
• (bypassing) communication and the aesthetics of silence and noise
• exhaustion of traditional literary forms/new modes of literary expression (cybertext, hypertext, ergodic literature, digital and social media storytelling, interactive web fiction)
• adaptations and metanarratives
• dystopias of exhaustion and utopias of regeneration

Selected presenters will be invited to participate in a joint book project to be published by Peter Lang in 2019.

Titled abstracts of up to 250 words should be sent to Izabella Kimak and Julia Nikiel at exreyconference@gmail.com by 15 November 2017. All submissions must include a 100- word biographical statement.