Call for Papers

The 10th International Conference of the Taiwan Association of Classical, Medieval and Renaissance Studies

21-22 October 2016

National Pingtung University, Taiwan

Encounters: Friends, Foes, and Companions

Human civilization often entails various kinds of encounters. One of the most fundamental is interpersonal contact from which friendship, animosity, and companionship are born. In Aristotanle’s Nicomache Ethics, friendship is defined in terms of ethical virtues, while in patristic writings friendship refers to a shared sense of being children of the one Father and brothers in Christ. From the Renaissance down to the modern era, there have been engaging discussions about forbidden friendships. In contrast, hostile feelings, especially jealousy and hatred, have long been favorite topics for writers such as Shakespeare who draws from the book of Proverbs in Julius Caesar and Othello to represent how the kisses of an enemy may be profuse.

On a broader scale, encounters can also be examined with reference to the contacts among different cultures and subsequent ideological transmission, conflict, hybridity, assimilation, and transformation. Ever since Classical Antiquity, communication between the East and the West has triggered a series of crucial cultural exchanges and interfaith interactions that can be inexhaustible subject matters for profound deliberation and academic research.

In addition to investigations into encounters in human societies, surveys of cross-species and eco-critical perspectives are welcomed so as to stimulate dialogue on environmental problems from both the viewpoints of the exploiters and the exploited. This discourse may help elucidate how human beings envision environments as their companions or adversaries and how human preconceptions determine the literary representation of human-animal and human-environment relationships.Therefore, aside from conventional approaches, this conference also aims to look at how the works of pre-modern environmental advocates square with the more popular drama, poetry, and even political discourse of the time and how these matters form an important part of literary, cultural, social, and environmental histories.

Within the purview of human contacts with the physical world, we would also welcome studies concerning engagement with nonphysical entities--the demonic and the heavenly—to shed light on the supernatural or transcendental perception of human encounters via different religious beliefs.

Within this four-stratum framework, this conference aims to proffer a forum for investigating human encounters that engender affection and enmity.

Topics for consideration may include (but are not limited to):

- Philosophy of friendship in various cultures

- Friendship from Classical Antiquity to the Renaissance

- Forbidden friendship & homosexuality

- Male friendship and female friendship

- Friendship and patronage

- Friendship and betrayal

- Affiliation and politics

- Human-nonhuman relationships

- Humanism vs. anthropocentrism

- Environmental encounters

- Pre-modern environmental imagination

- Representation of landscape and dreamscapes

- Environmental impact on human psychology

- Utopian imagination and new world order

- Cross-species encounters

- Bestiary and animal studies

- Cross-boundary encounters

- Wars and cultural encounters

- Commerce and cultural encounters

- Cosmography and the human world

- Cosmology east and west

- Pilgrimages and healing environments

- Exorcism vs. healing practices

- Interfaith encounters

- Religious notions of friendship and relationship

TACMRS cordially invites papers that reach beyond the traditional chronological and disciplinary borders of Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies. Please submit abstracts of 250 words and a one-page CV through the on line submission module by 26 February 2016.

For more information, please visit the 2016 TACMRS Conference website: http://2016tacmrsnptu.wix.com/tacmrs