Event Profile
Department of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of Delhi is organizing a conference on the concept “Imagined Horizons: Spatial Configurations of the Present”. The conference is planned as a concluding event to the year long course on the theme “Narrative Spaces” conducted by the Department for M.A. and M.Phil students. The objective of the conference is to bring together interdisciplinary and comparative perspectives on space as lived experience and imagined projections in literature, the arts, and film as well as in the social sciences. It intends to explore whether and in what way such perspectives contribute to our understanding of the contemporary world. Space is understood here not merely as place but as place inhabited and animated by a network of social relations and practices. In this sense the focus is not on space as a physical entity with quantitative properties but on topological space that draws attention to its qualitative properties, its constitutive elements, connections and convergences, continuities and discontinuities, which therefore also incorporates the dimension of time, of change and of history. How is space in this sense, more specifically social space in the contemporary world, envisioned? How is it constructed in the so-called spatial disciplines, such as geography, and how in those with more temporal concerns, such as history? What forms does it take in the imagined spaces in literary texts, in works of art, in theatre and cinema? What are the poetics and politics of such spatial configurations? The interested participants can send abstract on the above conceptual outline of the conference.
