Law & Humanities Blog

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Call For Papers Posted: 03 Aug 2011 11:55 AM PDT The Art and Politics of Irony/L'art et la politique de l'ironie 12-14 April 2012 ~ Montréal, QC An interdisciplinary conference hosted by the Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas, McGill University, in collaboration with Improvisation, Community and Social Practice (SSHRC-MCRI) and the Département d'études anglaises, Université de Montréal Call for papers "The ironist does not have the new within his power . . . he destroys the given actuality by the given actuality itself." Søren Kierkegaard Irony makes the world new by putting the world that exists in question. Its strength lies in its destabilizing power—it is the politics of art, the art of politics, and the language of dissent. By enabling critical representations of the world as it is known, but from within and against the familiarity of our own expectations, irony gives art and discourse special kinds of access to the public sphere, especially by mining beneath the given, the actual, and the known. In politics, philosophy, art and literature, across post-modernism, post-colonialism, and globalization, the question of irony is of expanding relevance to a range of fields of cultural formation and inquiry. Yet it remains insufficiently noticed, understood, or theorized; ironically powerful and silent at once.