Suitable topics for twenty-minute presentations related to Ameen Rihani’s poetic and prose works, which exhibit Rihani’s originality as a Romantic, Modernist and Postmodernist precursor, may include but are not limited to the following themes:
The Romantic Dimensions of Rihani’s Works:
- Rihani’s Romantic concepts of Self and Other
- Rihani’s Romantic concepts of God, Nature, and the Human
- Rihani’s concept of Universal Love and the Universal Great City
- Rihani’s Khalid and Baha’ism, Sufism, and Romanticism
- Rihani’s Romantic utopian and cosmic visions
- Rihani’s Romantic Quest
- Rihani’s questioning of prevailing traditional cultural, political, economic, and social norms
- Rihani and British and American Romantic figures
The Modernist / Postmodernist Dimensions of Rihani’s Works:
- Rihani and Modernism
- Rihani and Colonialism/Post-Colonialism
- Rihani’s gender issues
- Rihani and ethnicity
- Rihani and Postmodernism
- Post-Structuralist elements in Rihani's works
- Rihani's relevance to Arab-American politics/Pan-Arabism
- Rihani and the secular tradition
- Rihani’s influence on modern and contemporary Arab/Arab-American writers
The Transnational / Transcultural Dimensions of Rihani’s Works:
- The local, cosmopolitan and global in Rihani
- Rihani as “a citizen of two worlds”
- Rihani and the de-territorialization of language
- The Orientalist / Occidentalist Rihani
- Rihani and the Anglo-Arab Diaspora
Conference Proceedings Volume
After the conference, participants will be invited to submit their manuscripts for possible inclusion (deadlines to be determined later) in a proceedings volume. Papers will be reviewed and selected by the Editorial Board.
Presentation and panel proposal abstracts (200-300 words), along with a brief CV and institutional details, should be submitted by end of December 2010, to Naji Oueijan (Conference Chair): Email: noueijan@ndu.edu.lb and Colette Guldimann (Conference Secretary): Email: cguldimann@ndu.edu.lb.
