Postmodern CriticCFP Mash #8
May 22nd 2007 09:20
In what ways does repetition produce difference? How are we to re-imagine, re-invent, or re-read a text, a genre, or even a discipline?
> Re-imagining, Re-inventing, and Re-reading (grad) (2/15/07; MadLit, 4/20/07-4/22/07)
What are the strategies for representing masculinity, male desire, sexuality, homoeroticism at a textual (as opposed to a situational) level? What makes masculine focalization different from feminine focalization? What are the assumptions that underlie these representations? The strategies that create them?
> Writing the Masculine (2/15/07; journal issue)
What implicit conversations arise between DeLillo's work and that of which other writers?
> Don DeLillo and his Contemporaries (1/25/07; ALA, 5/24/07-5/27/07)
How have communication technologies shaped American history? How has American society molded communication technologies? Who decides about developing and using telecommunication technologies and to what purpose? How are these purposes circumvented institutionally? How do America’s cultural, ethical, and economic assumptions determine and limit the ways in which telecommunications function in American society?
How do contemporary telecommunications transform the sense of America’s timespace? If mass media have failed to breed cultural and political conformity, to what extent have the newest digital technologies failed to produce diversity and difference? We invite presentations on electronic communities--how new media have transformed the patterns of social interactions in terms of politics, religion and sexuality. Does the Internet and the Web foster the heterogeneous character of the U.S.? We expect papers examining the forms and significance of many-to-many communication via e-mail, Internet forums, blogs and chat rooms. What are some of the new interventions in the social construction of emerging telecommunications and the innovative uses of the new and not-so-new, analogue and digital technologies?
Last but not least, we welcome presentations of how analogue and digital telecommunications are represented in literature. What may be the import of digital reading and writing—digital re-reading of old literature, hypertexts, cybertexts and e-literature? How has the terseness of telecommunications shaped telephone/sms/email novels? Where do video games enter literary and cultural practice as narratives?
> Communication Technologies and American Cultural Practice (5/15/07; 11/7/07-11/10/07)
In the context of globalism, what are the “boundaries” of “America”? How are these “boundaries” established, transcended, or disturbed?
> American Globalism (grad & undergrad) (2/18/07; 3/30/07)
A) Theoretical Foundations of Coalition. If organizing is no longer forged on the basis of shared identity or 'unity,' what serves as the 'foundation' for political mobilization? What new forms of coalition, alliance, or issue-based organizing have emerged in the current political, economic, and cultural context? Can these convergences operate only temporarily or can
they be more sustained? How can/must/do coalitions negotiate differences along the lines of gender, sexuality, nationality, religion, and class in articulating a shared platform? What productive alliances have been or can be forged between different marginalized groups? What makes these coalitions cohere? How do these projects (re)shape experiences of race and ethnicity?
B) The Multicultural Terrain of Organizing in the United States. With the rise of Asian/Pacific American and Latino/a social movements, how is the concept of ³coalition² being rearticulated today? Does the 'people of color' construct, expressing the common bonds of non-white groups, still make sense? What new challenges to coalition-building emerge in the context of the variable power relations of nations, economic operations, and discourse
that characterize the contemporary multiracial terrain of US organizing? What strategies can be mobilized to negotiate these differences? What roles are available to whites in multiracial coalitions and in coalitions for racial justice?
C) The Global Context. What challenges and possibilities do new communications and other technologies linking people across the globe offer for multiracial coalitions? How do the ties of nation, state, and culture complicate efforts to organize pan-ethnically? How can models of organizing around race throughout the world, or on behalf of racially identified groups
and concerns, usefully inform organizing strategies in the US context, or vice versa? What is at stake and where are we headed?
> Ethnoscapes: An Interdisciplinary Journal on Race and Ethnicity in the Global Context, Two Volumes (2/16/07 & 3/2/07; journal issue)
What does the traditional English department look like today?
Moreover, students who have little to no desire to teach Milton or Shakespeare are demanded nonetheless to take a substantial number of courses in these fields, rather than immerse themselves in their intended areas of specialization. Why?
How do faculty members who identify as “Americanists” teach African-American literature?
What types of classes are students required to take at the PhD level? Are these requirements beneficial to students who desire to specialize in African-American literature?
How do “perceived” departmental attitudes toward the teaching of and
specialization in African-American literature influence graduate education, dissertations, and
career choices? What behaviors, amongst either faculty members or graduate students, exacerbate or remedy the crisis? Are students encouraged to carve out a niche for themselves within the English department, or are they sent “packing” to the African-American studies department?
> The Crisis Within: The Challenges of Specializing in African-American Literature in a Traditional English Department (3/31/07; MMLA, 11/8/07-11/11/07)
If the avant-garde has historically been associated with the daring, the new and that which deviates from the mainstream, what does it mean for it to become institutionalized in jazz studies? What does it mean to privilege musical culture of the 1960s and 1970s as the "avant garde" of the new Millennium?
What does it mean when institutions embrace the avant garde?
> The Avant Garde (1/15/07; 3/30/07-3/31/07)
- What are the differences or similarities between (the analysis of) non-fictional and fictional storytelling?
- To what degree have the various disciplinary approaches to narrative acknowledged each other's findings? Do they proceed from the same premises?
- Can the terminology developed by narratological approaches to fiction serve as the basis for an interdisciplinary lingua franca in narrative research? Or is fictional narrative significantly different from non-fictional story-telling?
- How can (literary) narratology benefit from concepts and methods proposed by narrative researchers in other disciplines? Might the insights of narrative psychology, for instance, help to further shape the approach known as 'cognitive narratology'?
- Can 'narrative' and 'storytelling' function as 'travelling concepts' (Mieke Bal), facilitating interdisciplinary communication?
- Is there any common ground between hermeneutic, narratological and empirical methods of describing, analysing and interpreting narrative(s)?
> Narratology in the Age of Interdisciplinary Narrative Research (2/15/07; 6/25/07-6/26/07)
Is a theory of the novel necessary?
> The Novel: Democracy's Form? (1/31/07; 4/13/07-4/14/07)
A) Economic Flows, Migration, and Racialized Disparities
How is migration racialized/ethnicized and gendered? What is the relationship between late capitalist economic operations, migration, and racialized disparities in health, education, self determination and representation, and wealth? In what ways do “citizenship gaps”—spaces in which market participation forecloses political membership—re/produce racialized disparities globally?
B) Borders, Boundaries, and “The Nation”
How is immigration policy racialized? What is/should be the current role of the nation-state in generating policy that regulates the movement of wealth and people across borders and in regulating resultant disparities? What forms of regulation/governance that exceed the nation-state can be conceptualized? What role does cultural nationalism play in political membership? What transnational forms of political and cultural membership are/can be imagined?
C) Processes of Racialization
In what ways are immigrant populations affecting domestic racial hierarchies and racial identities? How are transnational cultural flows affecting conceptualizations of race and ethnicity? Their relationship to nation?
> Ethnoscapes: An Interdisciplinary Journal on Race and Ethnicity in the Global Context (3/2/07; journal issue)
Identity formation and the Other: who needs outcastes?
Media representation and power: news from nowhere?
The cultural conundrum: can art represent abuse without abusing?
> Human Rights, Human Wrongs: Slaveries and Freedoms Today (5/1/07; journal issue)
> Re-imagining, Re-inventing, and Re-reading (grad) (2/15/07; MadLit, 4/20/07-4/22/07)
What are the strategies for representing masculinity, male desire, sexuality, homoeroticism at a textual (as opposed to a situational) level? What makes masculine focalization different from feminine focalization? What are the assumptions that underlie these representations? The strategies that create them?
> Writing the Masculine (2/15/07; journal issue)
What implicit conversations arise between DeLillo's work and that of which other writers?
> Don DeLillo and his Contemporaries (1/25/07; ALA, 5/24/07-5/27/07)
How have communication technologies shaped American history? How has American society molded communication technologies? Who decides about developing and using telecommunication technologies and to what purpose? How are these purposes circumvented institutionally? How do America’s cultural, ethical, and economic assumptions determine and limit the ways in which telecommunications function in American society?
How do contemporary telecommunications transform the sense of America’s timespace? If mass media have failed to breed cultural and political conformity, to what extent have the newest digital technologies failed to produce diversity and difference? We invite presentations on electronic communities--how new media have transformed the patterns of social interactions in terms of politics, religion and sexuality. Does the Internet and the Web foster the heterogeneous character of the U.S.? We expect papers examining the forms and significance of many-to-many communication via e-mail, Internet forums, blogs and chat rooms. What are some of the new interventions in the social construction of emerging telecommunications and the innovative uses of the new and not-so-new, analogue and digital technologies?
> Communication Technologies and American Cultural Practice (5/15/07; 11/7/07-11/10/07)
In the context of globalism, what are the “boundaries” of “America”? How are these “boundaries” established, transcended, or disturbed?
> American Globalism (grad & undergrad) (2/18/07; 3/30/07)
A) Theoretical Foundations of Coalition. If organizing is no longer forged on the basis of shared identity or 'unity,' what serves as the 'foundation' for political mobilization? What new forms of coalition, alliance, or issue-based organizing have emerged in the current political, economic, and cultural context? Can these convergences operate only temporarily or can
they be more sustained? How can/must/do coalitions negotiate differences along the lines of gender, sexuality, nationality, religion, and class in articulating a shared platform? What productive alliances have been or can be forged between different marginalized groups? What makes these coalitions cohere? How do these projects (re)shape experiences of race and ethnicity?
B) The Multicultural Terrain of Organizing in the United States. With the rise of Asian/Pacific American and Latino/a social movements, how is the concept of ³coalition² being rearticulated today? Does the 'people of color' construct, expressing the common bonds of non-white groups, still make sense? What new challenges to coalition-building emerge in the context of the variable power relations of nations, economic operations, and discourse
that characterize the contemporary multiracial terrain of US organizing? What strategies can be mobilized to negotiate these differences? What roles are available to whites in multiracial coalitions and in coalitions for racial justice?
C) The Global Context. What challenges and possibilities do new communications and other technologies linking people across the globe offer for multiracial coalitions? How do the ties of nation, state, and culture complicate efforts to organize pan-ethnically? How can models of organizing around race throughout the world, or on behalf of racially identified groups
and concerns, usefully inform organizing strategies in the US context, or vice versa? What is at stake and where are we headed?
> Ethnoscapes: An Interdisciplinary Journal on Race and Ethnicity in the Global Context, Two Volumes (2/16/07 & 3/2/07; journal issue)
What does the traditional English department look like today?
Moreover, students who have little to no desire to teach Milton or Shakespeare are demanded nonetheless to take a substantial number of courses in these fields, rather than immerse themselves in their intended areas of specialization. Why?
How do faculty members who identify as “Americanists” teach African-American literature?
What types of classes are students required to take at the PhD level? Are these requirements beneficial to students who desire to specialize in African-American literature?
How do “perceived” departmental attitudes toward the teaching of and
specialization in African-American literature influence graduate education, dissertations, and
career choices? What behaviors, amongst either faculty members or graduate students, exacerbate or remedy the crisis? Are students encouraged to carve out a niche for themselves within the English department, or are they sent “packing” to the African-American studies department?
> The Crisis Within: The Challenges of Specializing in African-American Literature in a Traditional English Department (3/31/07; MMLA, 11/8/07-11/11/07)
If the avant-garde has historically been associated with the daring, the new and that which deviates from the mainstream, what does it mean for it to become institutionalized in jazz studies? What does it mean to privilege musical culture of the 1960s and 1970s as the "avant garde" of the new Millennium?
What does it mean when institutions embrace the avant garde?
> The Avant Garde (1/15/07; 3/30/07-3/31/07)
- What are the differences or similarities between (the analysis of) non-fictional and fictional storytelling?
- To what degree have the various disciplinary approaches to narrative acknowledged each other's findings? Do they proceed from the same premises?
- Can the terminology developed by narratological approaches to fiction serve as the basis for an interdisciplinary lingua franca in narrative research? Or is fictional narrative significantly different from non-fictional story-telling?
- How can (literary) narratology benefit from concepts and methods proposed by narrative researchers in other disciplines? Might the insights of narrative psychology, for instance, help to further shape the approach known as 'cognitive narratology'?
- Can 'narrative' and 'storytelling' function as 'travelling concepts' (Mieke Bal), facilitating interdisciplinary communication?
- Is there any common ground between hermeneutic, narratological and empirical methods of describing, analysing and interpreting narrative(s)?
> Narratology in the Age of Interdisciplinary Narrative Research (2/15/07; 6/25/07-6/26/07)
Is a theory of the novel necessary?
> The Novel: Democracy's Form? (1/31/07; 4/13/07-4/14/07)
A) Economic Flows, Migration, and Racialized Disparities
How is migration racialized/ethnicized and gendered? What is the relationship between late capitalist economic operations, migration, and racialized disparities in health, education, self determination and representation, and wealth? In what ways do “citizenship gaps”—spaces in which market participation forecloses political membership—re/produce racialized disparities globally?
B) Borders, Boundaries, and “The Nation”
How is immigration policy racialized? What is/should be the current role of the nation-state in generating policy that regulates the movement of wealth and people across borders and in regulating resultant disparities? What forms of regulation/governance that exceed the nation-state can be conceptualized? What role does cultural nationalism play in political membership? What transnational forms of political and cultural membership are/can be imagined?
C) Processes of Racialization
In what ways are immigrant populations affecting domestic racial hierarchies and racial identities? How are transnational cultural flows affecting conceptualizations of race and ethnicity? Their relationship to nation?
> Ethnoscapes: An Interdisciplinary Journal on Race and Ethnicity in the Global Context (3/2/07; journal issue)
Identity formation and the Other: who needs outcastes?
Media representation and power: news from nowhere?
The cultural conundrum: can art represent abuse without abusing?
> Human Rights, Human Wrongs: Slaveries and Freedoms Today (5/1/07; journal issue)
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