With the support of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, UK.
The late Enlightenment is not only the age of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary violence and of Napoleonic battlefields. It is also the age of a new sensibility towards violence. Judicial torture, medical suffering would henceforth be considered as useless, harmful, unbearable. In this conference, we hope to explore the literature of ideas, fiction and theatre so as to better understand how the concept of violence has evolved and why it so brutally concerns us today.
This international, two-day conference will take place at the Institut français, London on 8 and 9 April 2011. It is organised by Durham University and Paris IV Sorbonne. Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words to the following email address before 29 October 2010: thomas.wynn@durham.ac.uk. Papers may be given in French or English. We gladly welcome proposals from graduates.
Issues upon which papers are welcome include but are not limited to:
Institutional violence; Politics and power; Trauma; Sexual violence; War; Violence and technology; Violence and pleasure; Is violence defensible« ; Does violence have a history »; Violence and modernity; Violence in the public and private realms; Law and violence ; Violence, heroism and martyrdom