BANARAS HINDU UNIVERSITY

International Conference
on
In Search of the Hero(es) within the Genre and Beyond

“A Hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.”
- Joseph Campbell

The world today has become a confused arena populated with masses having no clue of
what is going on around them, and more especially, with them. The enthusiasm and
optimism that foregrounded the most part of the 20th century, despite the great wars and
mass killings, turned pessimistic in last few decades, and now paranoia dictates us. Our
present bearing is so fittingly described by Cooper in the movie Interstellar that “We
used to look up at the sky and wonder at our places in the stars. Now we just look down
and worry about our places in the dirt.” We used to exalt our lives with the sublime
conduct by following examples of people like Gandhi and Buddha. We used to be
inspired by the stories of people, real or fictional, displaying extraordinary demeanor
against hostile forces. Now, we have turned them into commodities with which we satisfy
our fetish devours by owning them. What led humanity to arrive here? The old tales are
not working now and new ones are not in the making. A bizarre wasteland surmounts us
inhabited by a lot that is passive and disinterested, lacking moral convictions, aspiring to
be rescued and purged by someone else for their sins. However, whom they chose to be
rescued by, that posits the question.
This question consciously or unconsciously has become a part of our day-to-day
discourse. Metaphors ranging from the semiotics of avant-garde to pop-culture, from real
to surreal, from genres and beyond, wobble around the same question – What sort of hero
you want to choose to redeem yourself? But before one can delve into this question, one
needs to ask, who and what is a Hero? Joseph Campbell weighs over the concept of hero
and elucidates that a hero is someone who makes a journey into an experience that is
lacking in life or is not permitted to the members of society. The hero, thus, takes an
adventurous journey to have an access to that knowledge and then returns back with some
message; hence, a cyclical process of going and returning. If so, can we call each one of
us heroes, as Norman Mailer said during Kennedy’s Presidential bid in 1960, “each of us
was born to be free, to wander, to have adventure and to grow on the waves of the
violent, the perfumed, and the unexpected, had a force which could not be tamed.” If
these are the interpretations of being and becoming a hero, then what are the
(im)possibilities of academics, theologians, philosophers, and ascetics to become one?
The repetition of journeys that Campbell talks about has been witnessed in the stories
ranging from Jesus to Ram to Buddha to Krishna to Beowulf to Ulysses to Robin Hood to
Milton’s Satan to even contemporary encashment of “hero-making” and “hero-
worshipping” in the likes of Obama to Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin to John Cena to
Shahrukh Khan to Batman. It is in the later body of folks where the concept goes awry
because by the time one reaches to this end of the string, it becomes hard to decipher
between the hero and the image. And thus, is witnessed the emergence of myth-making
of heroes from tribal, local, regional, ethnic, racial, gendered, religious, national and
international communities.
And it becomes more convoluted and twisted because we are strolling in an age
where the stratosphere everywhere is breathing with its own kind of personal and private
heroes conflicting with the other. Orrin E. Klapp justly remarks in his article, “The
Creation of Popular Superheroes,” which seems to be an astute remark for our times that
“an age of mass hero worship is an age of instability,” and it would be rash on our part if
we blind eye ourselves to this fact. ‘The best are lacking in all convictions’ as W B Yeats
once remarked, ‘and the worst are full of passionate intensity’. Only if one can dare to
confront such ‘heroes’ like Bob Dylan emphatically does, “I see through your eyes/And I
see through your brain/Like I see through the water/That runs down my drain” (Masters
of War). So, what is the solution? Shall the heroes be abandoned? Shall the search be for
a Hero rather than heroes? The matter of fact is we are in a mad house and we are all mad
as the Cat mentions to Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland:
‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice.
‘You must be,’ said the Cat, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’
Now, if we can’t abandon the idea of leaving the premises of the madhouse, it is better
then to reconstruct the formula of madness afresh. If we can’t bail out of our heroes for a
Hero (having whom would again be nightmarish), if we can’t go back to the world where
heroes acted as a beacon to overcome our mortal fears, then the need is as Paul Meadows
illustrates, to ‘identify the social interaction of the hero in its myriad form: social control,
leadership, imitation, propaganda, the social movement, crowd psychology’ (“Some
Notes on the Social Psychology of the Hero”).
This conference, therefore, aims to bring forth the scholars and researchers to
deliberate upon the various concepts and jargons about heroes within the genres and
beyond of political, social, cultural, and literary, with hopes to construct and rejuvenate
ideas from the scratches of the stale ones.
Following are the subthemes (but not limited) that this conference aims to dwell upon:
• Hero or Leader
• Hero as Character/Protagonist
• Hero/Anti-hero/Villain/Criminal
• Hero as Poet/Prophet/Philosopher
• Female Hero or Heroine
• Hero in Transition
• Alternative Hero
• Hero as Outcaste/Pariah
• Superhero
• Artist/Author as a Hero
• Hero with Mask
• City/Space as Hero
• Genre Heroes
• Medium/Technology as Hero
• Statesman as Hero
• Nation as Hero
• Hero as Myth/Hero in Mythology
• Hero as Explorer
• Hero as Guardian

List of Speakers

Keynote Speaker

Alicia Maree Malone

The famous film reporter, host, writer and self-
confessed movie geek. She first gained notice
hosting movie-centric shows and reviewing
films in her native Australia, before making the
leap to Los Angeles in 2011. Since then, Alicia
has appeared on CNN, the Today show,
MSNBC, NPR and many more as a film
expert. Currently, she is a host on FilmStruck,
a cinephile subscription streaming service run by the Criterion Collection and Turner
Classic Movies, and she is the creator and host of the weekly show, Indie Movie Guide
on Fandango.
She is the writer of the book Backwards and in Heels about the history of women in
Hollywood.
Alicia has traveled the world to cover the BAFTAs, the Oscars, the Cannes Film Festival,
Toronto Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival and SXSW. She
is a member of the Broadcast Film Critics Association, and over the years has
interviewed hundreds of movie stars and filmmakers.

Plenary Speakers

Prof. Dr. Ursula Kocher

Professor of General Literary Studies and Older

German Literature in the European context at
the Bergische Universitaet, Wuppertal,
Germany. Prof. Ursula Kocher studied
German, Romance, Rhetoric and History at
the Otto- Friedrich University, Bamberg as
well as Eberhard Karls Universitaet,
Tübingen, Germany. From 1991 to 1999 she
was a scholarship fellow at the German
Cultural Foundation. In 2000 and 2001, Kocher
was a research associate of the DFG Research project “The Invisibility of the Imagination
in Elizabethan Culture” at the Humboldt-Universität, Berlin, and then until 2006 a
scientific assistant at Freie Universität, Berlin. She is pioneer for starting many Projects
with Indian.
From 2008 to 2010 Kocher was the spokesman for the Interdisciplinary Center “Medieval
– Renaissance – Early Modern Period.” Prof Kocher has been awarded the “World lion”
of the BergischeUniversität for special merits for the internationalization of the
university.

Prof. Dr. Peter W. Marx

Peter W. Marx (born 1973 in Limburg an der Lahn) is a

German Theatre and Performance Studies Scholar. He
holds the Chair of Theatre and Media Studies at the
Universität zu Köln, Germany, where he functions also as
the director of Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung. Prof.
Marx is recognized for his research
on metropolitan culture at the beginning of the 20th
century as well as on Max Reinhardt with an emphasis on
Cultural Studies. In addition, his work focuses on
contemporary theatre and Shakespeare in performance, particularly on “Hamlet“ as a
figure of cultural mobility.

Prof. Anita Singh

Prof Anita Singh is a Professor in the Department of

English and Co-coordinator of the Centre for
Women‘s Studies and Development at Banaras Hindu
University, Varanasi, India. Her areas of interest are
Gender Studies and Performance Studies. She is
published both as a critical and creative writer. She
has completed a project sponsored by the Indian
Council of Social Science Research, New Delhi, on
Staging Gender: Performing Women in the Ramlila of Ramnagar‘ in 2016. Her recent
edited books are Gender, Space and Resistance: Women and Theatre in India (2013) and
Theory and Praxis :Indian and Western (Eds. Rai, Pandey & Singh) UK: Cambridge
Scholars Publishing (2015). She has also published interviews with Indian women theatre
artiste in Asian Theatre Journal. Her other publications include: Arthur Miller: A Study of
the Doomed Heroes in his Plays; Indian English Novel in the Nineties and After: a Study
of the Text and its Context; 1857 and After: Literary Representations (Eds); And the
Story Begins: My Ten Short Stories. She received Fulbright Fellowship in the year 2013.
In this teaching project she analyzed issues connected with theatre—from aesthetics and
techniques of the theatre to the political, social and moral values of women involved in
theatre. During this period (August 2013 through December 2013) she visited seven
universities and colleges for public lectures and guest classes in the USA.

Dr. Jyoti Sabharwal

She is an Assistant Professor, Department of Germanic and

Romance Studies, University of Delhi, India. Her expertise
lies in German Exile Literature from 1933-1945, with a
special focus on India as a place of exile; Representations
of India in post war novels and shorter prose, the
emergence of migrant writing and questions of history and
memory. Author of the book Willy Haas: Die Begegnung
mit Indien als Exilort. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main,
2013.

Ranjani Mazumdar

She is Professor of Cinema Studies at the School of Arts

& Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New
Delhi. Her publications focus on urban cultures, popular
cinema, gender and the cinematic city. She is the author
of Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City published by
the University of Minnesota Press (2007). Mazumdar
has also worked as a documentary filmmaker and is a
founding member of Mediasorm, India’s first women’s
film collective, which received the Chameli Devi Jain
Award for outstanding media professionals among women. Mazumdar’s documentaries
include Delhi Diary 2001 (on violence, memory and the city); The Power of the
Image (co-directed; a television series on Bombay cinema); and Prisoner of
Gender which won the second prize at an International Television documentary festival.
Mazumdar has been a visiting fellow at Princeton University (U.S.A); a British Academy
Fellow at the University of Westminster (U.K); and visiting faculty at the Department of
Cinema Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University; at the Mass
Communication Research Centre at Jamia Millia Islamia University; and at the Film and
Television Institute, Pune. Her current research focuses on film in the 1960s,
globalization and film culture, and the visual culture of film posters.

Aileen Blaney

Aileen Blaney is an educator, writer and researcher with

an M.Phil and Ph.D. in Film Studies from Trinity College
Dublin, Ireland. Aileen’s film related publications have
appeared in edited book collections and international
peer-reviewed journals. Her research is currently focused
on how the internet, digitization of culture and their
increasing automation are impacting photo-based art
practices and photography in the everyday. She is co-
editor of a forthcoming book Photography in India in Light Years and Digital Times
(forthcoming, 2017). Prior to joining Srishti, she worked at India Foundation for the Arts
(IFA) in its arts practice and curatorial programmes. She was a creative producer (2010-
12) for Dublin-based Forum on Migration and Communications and Pivotal Arts Studio
(Dublin/London), where she contributed to socially engaged documentary arts, curatorial
and public learning projects with a focus on migration. At Srishti, Aileen teaches in the
PhD program, is Course Leader for the MA in Screen Studies and delivers ‘General
Studies’ courses in film, photography and visual theory and criticism at undergraduate
level.
 Key Points

Last date for sending abstract of the paper: 31 December 2017

Last date for sending complete paper: 28 January 2018

Send abstract/paper to the conference email id: heroconferencebhu2018@gmail.com

Selected Presenters will be notified by 10 January 2018

Conference Dates: 23-24 February 2018

Venue: Mahamana Hall, Institute of Science, Banaras Hindu University

Registration Fee: Rs 2,000 (for Research Scholars); Rs 2,500 (for Faculty Members);

and 100 USD (for International delegates)

Format for the Application

i. Full Name:

ii. Sex:

iii. Address (including telephone and email id):

iv. Nationality:

v. Institutional affiliations:

vi. Department:

vii. Academic qualification:

viii. Presently pursuing any course or present occupation/position:

ix. Publications, if there (mention the best three):

x. Specific research area/topic (if any):

xi. Abstract of your presentation in the Conference:

 Chief-Patron Patron

Prof. G.C. Tripathi Prof. S.S. Kaushik

Vice Chancellor Principal
Banaras Hindu University MahilaMahavidyalaya
Varanasi – 221005 BHU, Varanasi

Organizing Committee

Dr. Amar Singh Shipra Tholia Dr. Pravin K. Patel

Convener
Assistant Professor
Department of English (MMV)
Banaras Hindu University
Varanasi – 221005
Mob. +91- 9454950123
Co-convener & Organizing Treasurer
Secretary Assistant Professor
Assistant Professor Department of English (MMV)
Department of German Studies Banaras Hindu University
Banaras Hindu University Varanasi – 221005
Varanasi – 221005 Mob. +91-9554796662
Mob. +91-9451052207