Archives

Calls for Papers / Opportunities — Comments Off on CFP: I <3 Pop
25
Jul 16

CFP: I <3 Pop

I <3 Pop

An interdisciplinary conference of the PhD Program in Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY

Call for Papers

Dates: November 10-11, 2016
Location: The Graduate Center, CUNY
Deadline for submissions: September 1, 2016
Keynote Speaker: TBD

“If I had to choose between the Doors and Dostoyevsky, then—of course—I’d choose Dostoyevsky. But do I have to choose?” –Susan Sontag

 

The information about the conference below has been provided by the “I <3 Pop” organizers:

 

There seems to be no end to the anxieties, fantasies, pleasures, and possibilities of pop culture—how we consume it, avoid it, appreciate it, and allow it to inform our identities.

Yet, can we theorize pop today? And if so, to what extent are we obligated to do so?

Conceptions of pop culture are marked by continuous change, constant revision, and ongoing re-appropriation. Pop can be a stabilizer of the canon, with its distinction of high and low, while also a way to subvert the canon’s very foundations through a critique of elitism. If, as Adorno argued, mass culture is a deception, an industry that reproduces passivity and perpetuates the reification of social life, is there a way to escape this repetition? Or can we conceive of pop culture as a potential space of resistance, following the work of Stuart Hall and other British Cultural studies? Furthermore, are mass culture and pop culture coterminous?

Pop culture and literary studies have maintained a sometimes-uneasy yet necessary kinship. Thus, Elizabethan popular culture becomes the foundation of the English literary canon, while ephemeral magazine columns and stories become permanent fixtures in the literary landscape. The height of modernism makes reference to “The Wasteland” of mass culture and everyday life, at the same time as it elevates the everyman to Ulysses. The pattern continues today in media forms such as TV, which now displays narrative and artistic complexity rivaling art film of international acclaim.

Twenty-first century pop culture presents new questions for consideration: who are we when we absorb or participate in pop culture? The interactive nature of our contemporary forms of pop culture promotes and engages a rhetoric of listening that may in fact imply a dialectical agency for the receiver, rather than blind consumption. However, the politics of this engagement are troubled by various global contexts of reception. Does a study of pop involve universalization and standardization that could pander to dangerous types of political populism or does it engage various registers that foster a productive sense of difference?

We invite papers and presentations from all disciplines focusing on works from any historical period and geographical region, including literature, theory, philosophy, visual arts, film, television, social sciences, technology, and alternative media. Traditional papers are welcome, as well as multi-modal presentations and performances.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

  • Art, advertising, brands, products, food, consumption and the consumer
  • Identity within pop culture, including race and gender
  • Music
  • Technology
  • Comic books, Anime, and narrative forms across media
  • Television
  • Film, including Hollywood, Bollywood, Nollywood, YouTube
  • Popular magazines, journals, sports, and news media
  • Video games and gaming culture
  • Image, the body, and pornography in various media forms
  • Myth and mythology
  • Camp and kitsch
  • The internet and social media
  • Questions of discourse and intellectual property
  • Science fiction, fantasy, horror
  • The taboo, banned media, subcultures, and cult classics
  • Popular language, hybrid language, idioms, text language, and slang
  • Fashion, style, and lifestyle
  • Imitation, appropriation, adaptation
  • Questions of social class and social capital
  • Self-referentiality, pop culture icons and iconography
  • Relations between pop culture and political populism
  • Popular psychology
  • Popular science

 

Please submit a 300-word abstract to cunypop@gmail.com for a 15-20 minute paper, performance, or presentation by September 1st. Proposals should include the title of the paper, the presenter’s name, a 50-word bio including institutional and department affiliation, the form that your presentation will take (if it is not a traditional paper), and any technology requests.

Calls for Papers / Opportunities — Comments Off on CFP: Rutgers University Program in Comparative Literature 2016 Conference
02
Sep 15

CFP: Rutgers University Program in Comparative Literature 2016 Conference

Urban (De)Coloniality and Literature

The Comparative Literature Program at Rutgers University

Deadline for Abstracts: December 1, 2015

Conference Dates: March 3, 2016

Conference Location: New Brunswick, New Jersey

Keynote Speaker: José David Saldívar, Stanford University

Rutgers 1

From the conference organizers:

The biennial graduate student conference at the Rutgers University Program in Comparative Literature seeks to relate the theoretical production of decolonial thought with other critical discourses in the global academy. The conference invites participants to think about (de)coloniality beyond the geographical limit of the Americas, the temporal constraint of modernity, and the monolingualism of hegemonic languages and dominant disciplinary frameworks. The conference aims to address the following questions, among others: What knowledges do Ethnic Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Area Studies outside of Latin American and Caribbean Studies bring to Decolonial Studies? How does literature, especially fiction, and visual arts become a resource for decoloniality? How does (de)coloniality question the meaning and method of comparativity? In which ways does decolonial thought illuminate global configurations of urban life and culture?

Graduate students interested in presenting their research at Urban (De)Coloniality and Literature are asked to submit an abstract of 300 words or less addressing the conference theme.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

*    Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality.
*    Dialogues across African, Latin American, Caribbean, and Asian Studies.
*    Global Urbanism, the Coloniality of the City, and De-Westernization.
*    Gentrification, Racial Segregation, and the Prison-Industrial Complex.
*    Feminist and Queer approaches to (De)Coloniality.
*    Genres of the Human in Theory and Literature.
*    Religion and Empire in the Modern/Colonial World.
*    (De)Coloniality and World Literature, Cinema and other Media.
*    Bridging Comparative Literature, Comparative Philosophy, and Comparative Political Theory.

The deadline for paper proposals is 11:59 PM on December 1st, 2015. Please e-mail all proposals to Conference Co-Chair Rafael Vizcaino (Rafael.Vizcaino [at] rutgers [dot] edu), with “Submission: CL Graduate Conference 2016” as the subject of the e-mail. All submissions should include the title of the paper, the abstract, and the name, affiliation, and contact information of the author.

More information about the conference can be found on their website.

Rutgers 2

Calls for Papers — Comments Off on CFP: Comparative Literature Intra-Student Faculty Forum, University of Michigan
14
Oct 14

CFP: Comparative Literature Intra-Student Faculty Forum, University of Michigan

Comparative Literature Intra-Student Faculty Forum (CLIFF)

University of Michigan – Ann Arbor; Department of Comparative Literature

LEFTovers: What’s L/left of Literature and Critical Theory in the 21st Century?

March 13-14, 2015

Deadline: December 1, 2014

 

Keynote Address by Susan Buck-Morss (Distinguished Professor of Political Science, CUNY Graduate Center; Professor Emeritus, Department of Government, Cornell University)

 

Are the humanities inherently “progressive”? Is such a belief—if, indeed, we have it—a legacy of “the Left” in academia, and is it a legacy that all of us, whether we’re “on the left” or not, must somehow deal with in our scholarship? Those of us in the humanities have been charged with answering for all our “theory,” for our love and vulnerable loving of literature, and for what they’ve wrought. And such charges seem inextricably bound up with the accusations of left failure, crippling relativism and abstraction, and the “Americanization of theory” (Keucheyan, The Left Hemisphere), which has supposedly depoliticized/institutionalized our passionate talks and reduced them to just that, talk. Have we been relegated to—or have we willingly and hermetically sealed ourselves within—familiar echo chambers of resonance and relevance? To whom, and to what ends, are our calls directed? To which calls do we feel ethically bound to respond? Such questions implicate and address all of us; they insist, they demand.

The idea for this conference has been largely influenced by recent debates and published volumes on the remains of “progressive” politics in the humanities. At the same time, the concept of “leftovers” is as concerned with remains as it is with waste—what needs to be cleared away. How, in our irreducibly heterogeneous disciplines/fields, is our work and academic practice still  shaped by residual legacies of leftist politics? What must be retained? refashioned? purged? We invite abstract submissions from across a range of disciplines that will aim to (re-)interpret and (re-)assess the implications of what is “Left” and “left” of literature, literary scholarship, and theory in the 21st century.

Possible topics/themes for papers include, but are by no means limited to:

  • Embodiment, Commodification, Alienation
  • Conceptions & Legacies of “the Left” in Academia
  • Academic Work & the “Public Sphere”
  • Revolution, “Turns,” Shifts
  • The University & Pedagogical Practice
  • Feminist Politics, Racial Politics, LGBT Politics, Identity Politics
  • Practices of and Resistances to Theory
  • Subjectivity, Singularity, Identity
  • Objects & Materiality
  • (Re-)Mediation, “Radical” & “New” Media
  • New Conceptions of Labor & (What Constitute) Proletariats
  • “World Literature” & Its Relations to Contemporary Social Movements

 

Susan Buck-Morss is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Government at Cornell University. Along with numerous articles, her works include the recent and widely influential study on Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, along with others, such as: Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left; Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West; The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project; and The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute.

 

Please send abstracts of no more than 350 words to leftoversumich@gmail.com by December 1st, 2014.

Skip to toolbar