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CfP: Experiencing Space � Spacing Experience Concepts, Practices and Materialities [CultDoc]

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 14:11:24 +0100

European Summer School in Cultural Studies ESSCS 2013
PhDnet Literary and Cultural Studies Summer School 2013
in cooperation with the RuhrTriennale Festival for the Arts 2013

September 4-8, 2013, Bochum, Germany

Experience takes time – whether it occurs as a surprising moment or grows out of long-term practice. Yet, the term experience is not only bound to a temporal logic. The PhDnet/ESSCS Summer School “Experiencing Space – Spacing Experience” aims, namely, to explore the spatial dimensions of experience: The German word for experience, “Erfahrung,” etymologically stems from words like to wander or ramble (Umherschweifen) and to cross or perambulate (Durchwandern). Not only the eventful experience of a short moment but also the gradual, long-term gathering of experience are linked to the specific materiality of places, such as schools, laboratories, workshops, sporting fields, etc. Experiences gathered in one particular place can be valueless and even hindrances outside of the spatial specificity in which they happen or are culled.
The Summer School draws upon a long tradition in philosophical, theoretical and empirical scholarship that deals with the concept of experience, ranging from ancient philosophy to European classics by, for instance, Kant, Schopenhauer, Locke and Kierkegaard and more recent works by Oskar Negt, Alexander Kluge and Bernhard Waldenfels, among others. Raymond Williams developed a term for experience throughout the second half of the 20th century which illustrates the ambivalence sketched above and in which experience is a kind of “knowledge gathered from past events, whether by conscious observation or by consideration and reflection” as well as “a particular kind of consciousness, which can in some contexts be distinguished from ‘reason’ or ‘knowledge’”. Experiences that are truly eventful can transform the routine continuity of gathered experiences, throw former experiences into question and usher in states of inexperience.
In addition to these frameworks, the Summer School addresses theoretical approaches that could be organized under the label of the ‘spatial turn’ and which investigate what constitutes various types of space and experience. Which practices contribute to the reciprocal relationship between space and experience? In what way are topologies created and how do they affect subjectivity? The interdisciplinary PhDnet/ESSCS Summer School turns its attention to these key topics – experience and space – within the study of culture to consider their positions within phenomena of transformation and materialization. To pursue these lines of inquiry, the Summer School has chosen a programmatic location. It will take place in cooperation with the RuhrTriennale, an international festival that offers a wide-ranging cultural program within the impressive monuments of the Ruhr area and under the direction of Heiner Goebbels. The venue alone brings spatial experience front and centre. The Ruhr area’s coal mines, coke ovens and industrial halls are assigned new meanings, transformed into spaces for experiences entirely different from those for which they were originally intended. Beyond its aesthetic dimensions, the Ruhr region – with its complex social and cultural processes of transformation – offers a variety of impulses for reflecting upon the relationship between experience and space that even extend to questions such as how a metropolitan region consisting of 53 cities and communities can possibly be experienced.
Contributions to the Summer School can deal with artistic forms of the RuhrTriennale and its region but are by no means restricted to these topics. The program is much more geared toward all PhD students and post-docs working within disciplines that relate to the study of culture (the humanities, philosophy, sociology, political science, fine arts, theater studies, literary and media studies); exploring the relationship between space and (in)experience as sketched above; and seeking a forum for rigorous, interdisciplinary dialogue.
In addition to providing the opportunity to present and discuss one’s own research project, the Summer School offers an attractive academic program with Keynote Lectures and Master Classes and will organize a range of activities that integrate the RuhrTriennale Festival.
Possible topics include the following facets of spatial experience, as well as their treatment within fictional forms of media, in short: their symbolic representations:

Transformations of space and spatial experience (e.g. climate change, gentrification)
Socially differentiated experiences of space
Augmented reality: the interplay between fictional and factual experiences of space (e.g. literary and television-series tourism)
Experience of things and experience of space: subjectivity and materiality (e.g. the staging of space in museums)
Metaphors and spatial experience (e.g. the city as body)
Practices for experiencing space (e.g. eventisation, cocooning)
Experience of non-places (airports, parking lots, etc.)
Experience of closed and open spaces
Sexualising space (e.g. cruising areas)

Select Bibliography

Liz Bondi, Joyce Davidson and Mick Smith (eds.). Emotional Geographies, Aldershot 2005.
Katrin Dennerlein. Narratologie des Raumes, Berlin/New York 2009.
Wolfgang Hallet and Birgit Neumann (eds.). Raum und Bewegung in der Literatur. Die Literaturwissenschaften und der Spatial Turn, Bielefeld 2009.
Martina Löw. Raumsoziologie, Frankfurt (Main) 2001.
Doreen B. Massey. Space, Place, and Gender, Minneapolis 1994.

Submission

Please submit your abstracts (max. 250 words) for 20-minute presentations together with three to five keywords and a short CV (5-10 lines) to Christine Schwanecke, ipp@ggk.uni-giessen.de until April 15, 2013. The selection process will be completed until June 3, 2013. Please also notify your host institution about your application.

The 2013 European Summer School in Cultural Studies (ESSCS)/PhDnet Literary and Cultural Studies Summer School is jointly organized by the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC), the PhDnet Literary and Cultural Studies Summer School (PhDnet) and the International PhD Programme in Literary and Cultural Studies (IPP), in close cooperation with the RuhrTriennale Festival for the Arts http://www.ruhrtriennale.de/en/.

CfP: III Lisbon Summer School for the Study of Culture Lisbon, "Cultures at Work/Working with Culture", June 24 to 30, 2013 [PhDnet]

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 14:56:48 +0100

III Lisbon Summer School for the Study of Culture
24 to 30 June 2013

CULTURES AT WORK/WORKING WITH CULTURE

There is perhaps nothing more contentious than culture. Both as value and practice, it has certainly become the new discursive paradigm of the 21st century, despite of or maybe even because of its prolific signification to address matters that range from philosophy to politics, the economy to religion, ethnicity and aesthetics. Either as value or material creation, culture informs actions and labour practices. In its variety and spoken by many voices, culture is always at work, in a way that will necessarily require that it be graphed in the plural, as cultures.

The III Lisbon Summer School for the Study of Culture aims to bring together doctoral students, young researchers, academics, artists, curators and other cultural workers to discuss the manifold ways in which cultures work. Firstly, by understanding culture as a process and a narrative that constructs the social. Culture structures communal forms of belonging in both normative and non-normative ways, it organizes the relation to the past and in short promotes the self-awareness of groups and societies.

Secondly, by discussing cultural work and its impact in the making and remaking of social meaning. How do artists envisage their practices in the age of austerity and how do they consider themselves relevant agents before the challenges ahead? In fact, culture is also a practice of citizenship, a potentiality, where hegemony, subversion and renewal come together.

Thirdly, by considering the cultural economy and how the growing awareness for the economic contribution of the cultural sector has been changing cultural theory. How does the perception of culture as consumption alter and challenge cultural theory’s critical positioning? And how does it provide a new strategic political visibility for this sector?

Finally, by placing the idea of work centerfold, we want to consider the intersection between cultural practice and former sites of industrial production, how the discipline of labour clashes with the disruptive mode of creation, and how the artistic professions represent themselves and lend themselves to representation. Artistic freedom and disciplinary regulation are inextricably linked. The city as spatial organization disciplines bodies and subjectivities and houses the seats of order and regulation, whilst promoting the relations that allow creativity to thrive. This twofold dimension of the city is particularly relevant in the tactical appropriation of former sites of violent disciplinary regulation (military barracks, hospitals), as well of industrial discipline (factories, warehouses) by artists in cities all over the world.

The organizers invite proposals that discuss cultures at work and focus on the following topics, amongst others:

Cultural work in the age of austerity
The cultural societies (Kulturgesellschaften): The role of cultural institutions in modernity and post-modernity
The cultural sector and the experiential economy
Liquid cultures and material designs: challenges and opportunities
The representation of cultural work in the arts, in literature, film and the media
Global cultures and local practices: the globalization of the creative sector
Field work: Culture as a collaborative project (examples from all fields of cultural activity are welcome)

The Summer School will be hosted by the Lisbon Consortium and will take place at the Catholic University of Portugal and several cultural institutions in Lisbon. Both doctoral students and junior researchers (post-doc) are invited to apply for the summer school.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

- Tony Bennett (Centre for Cultural Research – University of Western Sydney)
- Andreas Huyssen (Columbia University)
- George Yúdice (University of Miami)
- Elena Esposito (Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia)
- Amit Pinchevsky (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
- Frederik Tygstrup (University of Copenhagen)
- Elisabetta di Mambro (The Watermill Center)

Deadline for submissions: January 30, 2013.

Proposals for 15-minute papers should be sent tolxconsortium@fch.lisboa.ucp.pt. Submissions should include paper title, abstract in English (200 words), your name, e-mail address, institutional affiliation and a brief bio (max. 100 words) mentioning main research interests and ongoing projects. Full papers must be submitted two weeks before the beginning of the Summer School. The Organizing Committee will return its decision by March 1st 2013.

Registration fees:

Non-Consortium participants – 250€ for the entire week;
Students from the School of Human Sciences – 200€ for the entire week;
Participants without paper – €50 per session/day | 250€ for the entire week.

For The Lisbon Consortium students and for the students of ESSCS (European Summer School in Cultural Studies) affiliated Universities there is no registration fee.

Organizing Committee:

Isabel Capeloa Gil
Peter Hanenberg
Alexandra Lopes
Paulo de Campos Pinto
Ana Fabíola Maurício
Daniela Agostinho

The Lisbon Consortium is a partnership between the Master and Doctoral Programs in Cultural Studies at the Catholic University of Portugal and cultural institutions in Lisbon: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation • Culturgest • Portuguese Film Museum • Oriente Foundation • Lisbon City Hall • National Theatre Museum • National Culture Centre.
More information under www.lisbonconsortium.wordpress.com.

Conference "The Cultural Dynamics of Generic Change" [CultDoc]

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 10:03:50 +0100

Preparatory Conference
of the IPP, the PhDnet, and the English Department of the JLU
for the Handbook Project

The Cultural Dynamics of Generic Change in Contemporary Fiction:
Theoretical Frameworks, Genres and Model Interpretations
(eds. Michael Basseler, Ansgar Nünning & Christine Schwanecke)
(ELCH 60, Trier: WVT 2013)

Time/Place: November 28 & 29, 2012, International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC), Alter Steinbacher Weg 38, JLU Gießen

In her article on “Genre” in The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, the Finnish genre theorist and narratologist Heta Pyrhönen raises a central question of genre theory that the theory and history of genre has so far failed to provide satisfactory answers for: “What accounts for shifts and changes within a genre?” (Pyrhönen 2007: 119) As Pyrhönen and many other genre theorists have pointed out, genres are curiously janus-faced. On the one hand, they are characterized by more or less fixed sets of conventions or features that make up the repertoire of the respective genre and that fulfil important communicative functions, as Elisabeth Wesseling explains: “Generic repertoires may be regarded as bodies of shared knowledge which have been inferred from perceived regularities in individual literary texts. As sets of norms of which both readers and writers are aware, genres fulfil an important role in the process of literary communication.” (Wesseling 1991: 18) On the other hand, however, genres are also subject to historical changes and cultural variation. Genres thus not only tend to encompass a number of generic variants, they also seem to respond to cultural changes.
The projected volume sets out to explore the processes that are involved in the cultural dynamics of changes, developments and innovation within, and between, genres. As the juxtaposition of the key concepts ‘cultural dynamics’ and ‘generic change’ in the title already highlights, Pyrhönen’s observations at the end of her essay provide the starting point for this volume: “explanations of generic change need to account both for modifications within the literary system and for the impact of the larger socio-cultural context.” (Pyrhönen 2007: 122) Though literary theory has come up with a broad range of accounts of generic change, from the Russian formalist explanations of generic innovation based on defamiliarization to more recent hypotheses based on the notion of hybridisation, medialization and metaization as catalysts of generic change, there is neither a systematic and up-to-date overview of these various explanations of generic change nor much in the way of actual attempts to test the hypotheses generated by genre theory by looking at the ways that new genres have actually emerged.
Focussing on the interrelation between changes in the cultural and historical contexts and the development of literary genres, the projected volume and conference pursues two main goals: The chapters/presentations in part I attempt to provide such a systematic and up-to-date overview and critical discussion of the various explanations of generic change that have been proffered, while also developing some new hypotheses that have not yet been spelled out in genre theory. The articles/presentations in part II are designed as both test-cases of the various hypotheses about generic change and as delineations of the emergence or rise of new genres in contemporary fiction, and as model interpretations of the novels selected as paradigm examples.

Conference Schedule

November 28


12.00 –12.45	Michael Basseler, ANSGAR NÜNNING, Christine Schwanecke (Giessen): Welcome & Introduction: The Cultural Dynamics of Generic Change in Contemporary Fiction
12.45 – 13.30	Michael Basseler (Giessen): Tradition, Innovation and Defamiliarisation in the Evolution of Genres: Explanations of Generic Change from Russian Formalism to the Renaissance of Genre Theory in the 21st Century
13.30 – 14.30	Lunch Break
14.30 – 15.15	Heta Pyrhönen (Helsinki): Adaptations and the decline of genre: A case study in generic change and Jane Austen adaptation
15.15 – 16.00	Jan Rupp (Heidelberg): Bakhtin’s Genre Theory as an Explanatory Framework for Generic Change
16.00 – 16.15	Coffee Break
16.15 – 17.00	Ansgar Nünning & Christine Schwanecke (Giessen): Crossing Generic Borders: Hybridisation as a Catalyst of Generic Change
17.00 – 17.45	Wolfgang Hallet (Giessen): Multimodality as Explanatory Framework for Generic Change
17.45 – 18.30	Ansgar Nünning & Jan Rupp (Giessen/Heidelberg): Media and Medialisation as a Catalyst of Genre Development

November 29


10.00 – 10.30	Nora Berning (Giessen): Literarization, Narrative Configuration, and Fictionalization of the Graphic Novel: The ‘Double Vision’ of Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde (2000)
10.30 – 11.00	Anne Rüggemeier (Giessen): The Re-construction of Auto/biography through Objects: Nancy K. Miller's relational autobiography What They Saved
11.00 – 11.15	Coffee Break
11.15 – 11.45	Christiane Struth & Angela Müller (Giessen): Autobiographies in the Third Person: Othering the Self in Breyten Breytenbach’s Metaautobiography The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist and J.M. Coetzee’s ‘Autrebiography’ Summertime
11.45 – 12.15	Alexander Scherr (Giessen): Fictions of Literature and Science: Representing Poststructuralist Theory, Yeast Genetics, and Human Affairs in Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot (2011)
12.15 – 13.15	Lunch Break
13.15 – 13.45	Beatrice Seligardi (Bergamo): Parodying Traditional Hypotexts and Ironizing the Oxbridge Myth: David Lodge’s way of ‘Making Campus Fiction New’
13.45 – 14.15	Claudia Weber (Giessen): The Cannibalizing Force of Reality Television Fiction: Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games Trilogy
14.15 – 14.45	Polina Shvanyukova (Bergamo): Generic Encounters in Contemporary Italian Crime Fiction: Hybridity in Amara Lakhous’ Recent Novels
14.45 – 15.00	Coffee Break
15.00 – 15.30	Anna Weigel (Giessen): The Impact of Cultural Variation, Hybridization and Medialization on Contemporary Literature: The Rise of the New Genre Fictions of the Internet and a Critique of Jeffery Deaver’s Roadside Crosses (2009).
15.30 – 16.00	Jutta Weingarten (Giessen): Generatiographical Writing in Migration Literature: Sathnam Sangher’'s The Boy with the Topknot as British Asian Generatiography
16.00 – 16.30	MIRJAM HORN (Giessen): Intertextuality, Parody and Playgiarism as Explanatory Frameworks for Generic Change
16.30 – 16.45	Final Discussion

Konferenzprogramm "Gef�hlskulturen. Narrative und Kontexte" [PhDnet]

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0200

Gefühlskulturen. Narrative und Kontexte

Internationale Konferenz
Organisiert durch das
European PhD-Network „Literary and Cultural Studies“ (PhDnet)
und das
International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC)

Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen
7.-9. November 2012

Konferenzprogramm

Mittwoch, 7. November 2012

2:30 Beatrice Michaelis/Ansgar Nünning/Kai Sicks/Martin Zierold (Giessen)

Einführung

3:00 Keynote

Isabel Capeloa Gil (Lissabon): Burial E/Affects from Antigone to bin Laden

Moderation: Ansgar Nünning

4:00 Kaffeepause

4:30 Panel 1: Die Maß/Regelung von Gefühlen

Moderation: Beatrice Michaelis

Sabrina Hufnagel (Bamberg): gehabe dich als ein man. Zur weiblichen Disziplinierung von männlicher Klage in der mittelhochdeutschen Literatur

Claudia Ansorge (Giessen): Emotionen auf der Leinwand. Die Nibelungen-Verfilmungen von Fritz Lang (1924) und Harald Reinl (1967)

Dorit Messlin (Erfurt): Mediocritas est optima regula. Diskurse des Maßhaltens und der Probabilität in den Lexika der Aufklärung (Zedler, Sulzer, Adelung)

Philipp Hubmann/Seth Berk (Münster): Unentdeckte Affekte. Heinrich Leopold Wagners Die Kindsmörderin und das Konzept der Manie in der frühen Criminalpsychologie

Panel 2: Towards a Cognitive Poetics of Emotions

Moderation: Martin Zierold

Jean-Pierre Palmier (Bielefeld): Prescribed Emotions. Narrative and Neural Contextualization of Emotions, Feelings, and Moods

Caroline Pirlet (Giessen): Why Bother? A ‚Natural‘ Account of Literary Emotions – Affectively Narrativizing Eveline

Peter Hanenberg (Lissabon): “Schöne Tage”. Zur Rekonstruktion diskursiver und kognitiver Gefühlskulturen in Peter Handkes Die schönen Tage von Aranjuez
Teresa Hiergeist (Erlangen-Nürnberg): Emotionen im Leser. Partizipationspotentiale narrativer Texte anhand von Leopoldo Alas’ La Regenta

6:30 Aufbruch zum gemeinsamen Abendessen

Donnerstag, 8. November 2012

9:30 Keynote

Tilman Habermas (Frankfurt/Main): How to Elicit Indignation: Reflections of Feeling Rules, Display Rules, and Other Norms in Narratives of Everyday Annoying Experiences

Moderation: Hubertus Büschel

10:30 Kaffeepause

11:00 Panel 3: Was ist Liebe?

Moderation: Doris Bachmann-Medick

Stella Lange (Graz): Transparenz und Intransparenz der Gefühle

Meike Dackweiler (Düsseldorf): Der Ehebruch in deutschsprachigen Romanen am Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts

Michael Gratzke (St. Andrews): Steinzeitmenschen, Gefühlsingenieure und Turbokapitalismus. Narrative der Liebe heute

Panel 4: Affect and Affection

Moderation: Florian Sprenger

Carsten Junker (Bremen): The Slave Ship as Textual and Visual Site of Abolitionist Sentiments

Maja Figge (Oldenburg): Fear, Melancholia, Rage. On the Filmic Economy of Emotions

Anja Michaelsen (Bochum): “You Are Not Alone”. Generalizing Nonprivileged Subjectivity in Sentimental Popular Culture

1:00 Mittagspause

2:30 Panel 5: Bildung der Gefühle

Moderation: Doris Bachmann-Medick

Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek (Berlin): Zärtlichkeit. Über die aristokratischen Ursprünge der bürgerlichen Gefühlskultur

Anna-Katharina Gisbertz (Mannheim): Erwartungen und die Folgen: Anton Reiser und Heinrich von Ofterdingen

Kai Sicks (Giessen): Enthusiasmus als Anomalie. Ludwig Tiecks William Lovell (1795/96) und die Gefühlskultur der Spätaufklärung

Panel 6: Translation of Feelings

Moderation: Robert Ryder

Tara Beaney (Berlin): Extreme Emotions and the Threat of Becoming Other

Polina Shvanyukova (Bergamo): How Many Ways to Say Love? Love and Friendship in Contemporary Italian Migrant Literature

Leonor Sá (Lissabon): Fear, Attraction and so Much More: Powerful Feelings Underneath the Apparently Unemotional and Stereotyped Criminal Judiciary Portrait

4:30 Kaffeepause

5:00 Panel 7: Gefühle zwischen Berührung und Distanz

Moderation: Lorenz Aggermann

Sebastian Treyz (Basel): „Tränen […] der sich fühlenden Menschlichkeit“. Regime der Traurigkeit im Theater des 18. Jahrhunderts

Christine Schwanecke (Giessen): Ein Genre des Gefühls, ein gefühliges Genre oder gar ein Genre der Vernunft? Die englische empfindsame Komödie am Beispiel von Richard Cumberlands The West Indian (1771)

Philipp Schulte (Giessen): „Bitte Abstand wahren“? Zeitgenössische Performance Art zwischen Coolness und Melancholie

Panel 8: Narrating Emotions

Moderation: Pirjo Lyytikäinen

Matti Kangaskoski (Helsinki): Emotions as Bodily Functions. Serge Carrefax in Tom McCarthy’s Novel C

Angela Müller (Giessen): The Failure of Love in the Novels of J. M. Coetzee

Stephanie Frink (Heidelberg): Narrative, Identity, and Emotion in British Fiction at the Turn of the 21st Century: the Role of Emotions in the Process of Narrative Self-Making

7:00 Aufbruch zum gemeinsamen Abendessen

Freitag, 9. November 2012

9:30 Keynote

Claudia Benthien (Hamburg): Affektkulturen. Kulturtheoretische Überlegungen am Beispiel von Scham und Schuld in der Tragödie um 1800

Moderation: Kai Sicks

10:30 Kaffeepause

11:00 Panel 9: Die (Un-)Sagbarkeit von Gefühlen

Moderation: Beatrice Michaelis

Ján Demčišák (Trnava): „In solcher Taubheit bleibt nur körperliche Berührung zwischen den Männern”. Zum Problem der Artikulation homosexueller Gefühle in frühen Dramen von Bertolt Brecht

Elisa Primavera-Lévy (Konstanz): “How do you put hell on paper?” Narrative chronisch Schmerzkranker als Kartierung unbekannten Gebiets

Maren Lickhardt (Siegen): Angst-Störung. Schemen, Codes und Zeichen der Emotionalisierung in der zeitgenössischen Populärliteratur

Panel 10: Political Transformations as Emotional Transformations?

Moderation: Isabel Capeloa Gil

Ana Fabíola Maurício (Lissabon): Modern Feelings. Emotional Landscapes in early Portuguese Modernism

Beatrice Seligardi (Bergamo): The Metacultural Representation of Emotions: the Case of A. S. Byatt’s The Virgin in the Garden

Katrina Nousek (Cornell): Bestellt Werden. Experiences of Interrogation in Contemporary German Novels

1:00 Abschlussdiskussion

1:30 Ende der Konferenz

CfP: CLASH Conference: �Worlds Colide � Connections/Divisions /Dialogues between Cultures� , 7-8 December 2012 [PhDnet]

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0200

CLASH Conference (Cultural, Literary and Social Hybridity)

Postgraduate International Conference: “Worlds Colide – Connections/Divisions /Dialogues between Cultures”

7-8 December 2012
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland

The first decade of the twenty-first century, being already over, has proved stimulating for the development of cultural studies. Due to its growing popularity among researchers, this interdisciplinary project will investigate humanities through the perspective of current cultural theories. The conference also seeks to consider and promote the newest perspectives on literature and culture as well as it will try to find areas common for different cultures as reflected in their works or those which make a given society’s experience exceptional.

We would like to invite all graduates, postgraduates and early career researchers from the realms of humanities and social sciences who would like to present their papers on the following topics:

~ New genres, trends in humanities and social sciences
~ New topics, areas of interest among young as well as more experienced writers, playwrights, poets and artists
~ New perspectives on the canons in a given society’s literatures and cultures
~ Cross-cultural investigations
~ Unresolved conflicts
~ The overlapping of themes, genres and motifs
~ The merging of cultures or cultural clashes
~ The dialogues between different cultures and literatures
~ Negotiated truths in a historical context
~ The familiar and unfamiliar across cultures and literatures
~ Poignancy of political and social experiences across cultures and literatures
~ The reflection of society’s exceptional experiences in literature and culture and their influence on the humanities

We invite 250-300 word abstracts for 20 minute presentations (Times New Roman 12). The deadline for abstracts is 15th September 2012. Please send them to the following address:

clashconference@gmail.com

For further information go to:

http://clashconference.blogspot.se/p/first-circular.html

There is a possibility of post-conference publication of the selected papers.

Opening Up to the Roar of the Cosmos with Rosi Braidotti [CultDoc]

Tue, 22 May 2012 15:30:28 +0200

Two very post-human events occurred on April 19th and 20th at the GCSC, when Rosi Braidotti – currently Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and founding Director of the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University – was invited to give both a lecture and subsequent master class. In both events, Professor Braidotti astounded the audience members with her erudite and energetic personality, her vast intellect, and above all her call to embrace our anithumanism and to “take positivism seriously.”

In her guest lecture, “Nomadic Feminist Theory in a Global Era,” held in the evening of April 19th, Braidotti rarely limited herself to feminist theory, nomadic or otherwise. This is perhaps best revealed by the real hero of the evening: Dolly. As Braidotti herself specified, she is not referring to Dolly Parton, but to Dolly the Sheep. The first mammal ever to be successfully cloned, Dolly represents for Braidotti the defacto decentering of the human today, and the best figure we have so far of the post-human.

Indeed, what is the post-human? Braidotti began her lecture with post-humanism’s four axes: 1) it is historically anti-humanist and 2) fundamentally post-anthropocentrist; 3) it is inhuman, i.e. related to death machines and therefore to the necropolitical; and 4) it is intimately related to the politics of differentiation. In order to explicate the first two axes, Braidotti launched into a broad yet convincing history of philosophy. She began with how the poststructuralists in the 60s and 70s began to target Marxist thought and its underlying belief that man is both the center and criterium by which we organize political and critical action. Ringing the anti-humanist bell, Foucault, Althusser and others suggested that capitalism will in fact not collapse, as the Marxists predicted, and that Marxism, for all its intents and purposes, is wrong. In one of her many entertaining asides, Braidotti slammed contemporary Marxist theoreticians like �i�ak and Badiou, who dream of a robust theory of history that relies on a nostalgic rethinking of Marxist/Leninist theory – “it’s just wanking!” she concluded with bravura.

The anti-Marxist and anti-humanist agenda, thus initiated by the poststructuralists, is what paved the way for a post-humanism-to-come, said Braidotti. It hails in a new kind of life science: a science of life that is not limited to human life, that is, not just to “bios” but also to “zoe”, which Braidotti defines as “the generative vitality of non- or pre-human or animal life” (Transpositions 37). Enter Dolly, the zoe posthuman figure par excellence. This singular creature is, despite its singularity, a complex life assemblage that both explodes subjectivity beyond its subject/object dualism and inhabits contradictory time zones: though Dolly apparently died from a progressive lung disease, Dolly lives in a continuous present, according to Braidotti. In other words, the zoe that Dolly lives was always already there. One wonders then whether, for Braidotti, Dolly ever “died.”

It is perhaps this question that lead Braidotti to conclude her lecture with the necropolitical. Indeed, the peculiar atemporal zo(n)e that the figure of Dolly inaugurates raises major ethical concerns, not the least of which is biogenetic responsibility: are we, Braidotti asked rhetorically, going to choose the sex of our future children? Their eye color? Not dissimilar from these choices that determine as-yet-unborn lives are the ethical and political consequences when conducting the remote-controlled extermination of still-living persons and personages. Here Braidotti effectively used the killing of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi by American drones as an example of our neo-colonial and bio-political climate. And yet, Braidotti concluded that it is up to us, the current generation of young scholars, to come to grips with these new territories of nomadic ethics. This involves a process of confronting the negative (and often death-oriented) elements of the zoe-political and “spin it into positivity” by adopting the ontological pacifism that is best outlined in Spinoza’s Ethics and by practicing a politics of difference that pursues an affirmative and productive force. It is here that this participant, for one, realized not only why there is such a renewed interest in theories of emotion and affect today, but what such scholarly pursuit promises, at least in part, for the academic imaginary.

Braidotti’s master class, entitled “Writing and Being Written by Nomadic Subjects” and held on the morning following her public lecture, was a much more informal affair, but one that further confirmed both her theoretical devotion to “a post-humanistic brand of non-anthropocentric vitalism” (Transpositions 42) and her compassion for the projects and interests of young scholars, including those present. Her mode of grouping the prewritten questions and conducting the master class into three overarching sections – namely, the more general critique of universalism and representation, the application of her philosophy to literary criticism, and issues of gender and sexual difference – illustrated her ability and pedagogical talent to grasp at the macro-level the concerns of the many while answering specific questions at the micro-level. Braidotti started with where she left off in the talk, suggesting that feminist and postcolonial theory are prototypes of a nomadic ethics that emphasize critique and creativity: they attempt to escape dualistic thought (here she referenced Sartre’s introduction to Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth) and instead explore different methodologies of self-estrangement. This last element, for Braidotti, requires a certain degree of “disciplinary disobedience, methodological impurity or disloyalty, and betrayal,” and as such threatens the very success of young scholars looking for work in established disciplines and institutions. The creative practice of self-estrangement must be treated carefully, but practiced nevertheless.

It would be impossible to reiterate all the ways in which Braidotti answered specific questions in the four-hour master class. The references that she suggested for further reading on specific topics alone capture the breadth of topics under discussion: Ulrich Beck on issues of methodological nationalism, Roberto Esposito on autoimmunity, Jackie Stacey on classic monstrosity and genetics, Roland Bogue on Deleuze and music, and Adrian Parr’s useful dictionary on Deleuze, not to mention Butler, Irigaray, Gilroy and his wife, Heidegger (“the old goat!”), Bataille, and Virginia Woolf. But throughout the master class, references to Deleuze were most frequent: on the issue of literary criticism, for instance, Deleuze and Guattari’s Toward a Minor Literature is a good first step. But Braidotti also suggested lesser known texts, such as Deleuze’s Verdi essay and his book on Leibniz as a place to go for examining the ways in which he emphasizes expression over representation, intensity over identity.

Near the end of the master class, Professor Greta Olson raised a practical concern: what can a teacher of feminist thought do when confronted with various reactions by students (including apathy) in the classroom? Braidotti was reminded of Woolf’s text, “Three Guineas”: in an environment where “feminism” becomes a dirty word, Woolf’s answer was “Let’s burn it!” In a more serious vein, Braidotti mused about how, in the time she was going to school, there were no feminist teachers. It is therefore important to renew interest in pedagogical issues, and explore specifically a new pedagogics after feminism has entered the classroom setting.

Braidotti’s last words were reserved for the nomad, which she says always returns. The nomadic subject always involves a conceptualizing of various becomings, which themselves require different modes of intensities and forces, but also a reconfiguration of cartographies and modes of perception. With an almost mystical flourish, Braidotti concluded that becoming imperceptible means to “open up to the roar of the cosmos,” which is as much a harmonious subjection to an ethics of becoming as it is an agreement to a pact of nonaggression as practiced by the Spinozists. In other words, rather than remain merely cosmopolitans, Sir Rosi advises we all practice becoming cosmos-politans. And one can argue that we are already in the process of becoming cosmos-politan by being active members – or knights, if you will – of the “town-cosmos” called the International Graduate Center for the Study of Culture.

Text: Robert Ryder
Fotos: Florian Krauß

CfP: International Conference "Cultures of Feelings: Narratives and Contexts", 7-9 November 2012, University of Giessen [PhDnet]

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 13:50:53 +0200

***** English follows German *****

Seit jeher versetzen literarische, filmische und dramatische Narrative ihre Figuren in fiktionale Experimentalräume, entwerfen so exemplarische kulturelle Konflikte und durchdenken sie hinsichtlich ihrer Aporien und Lösungsmöglichkeiten. Gleichermaßen entwerfen faktuale Narrative – Nachrichten-, Geschichts-, Alltagserzählungen etc. – prototypische Konflikte zwischen Akteur/innen und kulturellen Strukturen. In beiden Fällen sind es oft die Gefühle von erzählten Figuren, die mit kulturellen und sozialen Regimen konfrontiert werden: Einerseits sind Gefühle das Produkt solcher Regime und aufs engste mit ihren Regelungen verbunden (dies betrifft schon die Möglichkeiten der Artikulation von Gefühlen), andererseits richten sich Gefühle nicht selten gerade gegen ihr ‚Außen‘, erscheint letzteres als das Gefühl einengend und normierend. Auf der geplanten Tagung ist beabsichtigt, fiktionale und faktuale Narrative mit Blick auf das Erzählen von Gefühlen zu untersuchen. Im Mittelpunkt sollen dabei die Aushandlungsprozesse zwischen Gefühlen und den ‚Gefühlskulturen‘ stehen, in die sie eingelagert sind und zu deren Konstitution sie beitragen. Zu fragen ist nicht zuletzt nach der analytischen und theoretischen Tragfähigkeit des erst ansatzweise eingeführten Konzepts der ‚Gefühlskultur‘.

Mit dem Begriff ‚Gefühlskultur‘ soll hier die Annahme ausgedrückt werden, dass Gefühle historisch und kulturell jeweils verschieden mit Diskursen und Praktiken verbunden sind, in denen ihre Bedeutung, ihre un/angemessenen Orte und Situationen sowie die Modi ihrer Artikulierbarkeit ausgehandelt und reguliert werden. Zugleich verbinden diese Diskurse und Praktiken Gefühle mit geschlechtlichen, religiösen, nationalen und weiteren kulturellen Differenzkriterien. Auch über diese Kopplungen werden Gefühle in die soziale Dynamik der In- und Exklusion integriert und mit Machtbeziehungen verbunden. Fiktionale und faktuale Erzählungen scheinen ein prototypischer Ort zur Reflexion, Hervorbringung oder Dekonstruktion gefühlskultureller Festlegungen zu sein – und tragen ihrerseits durch die Provokation emotionaler Reaktionen zur Gefühlskultur bei. Die Tagung soll dies in grundlegenden theoretischen Überlegungen sowie am Beispiel konkreter Text-Kontext-Analysen thematisieren.

Die Analysen sollen dabei die folgenden oder weitere Fragen diskutieren: (1) Welche gefühlsbezogenen Konflikte werden in literarischen Texten, in Filmen, Comics, Nachrichten, Alltagserzählungen etc. aufgeworfen? Welche Gefühle werden dabei thematisiert, wie werden sie bestimmt? Geht es um ein Zuwenig oder ein Zuviel an Gefühl? Um die Nicht-Artikulierbarkeit von Gefühlen? Um die Unangemessenheit von Gefühlen in bestimmten sozialen Kontexten? (2) Wie werden Gefühlskonflikte inszeniert, welche Aporien, Lösungsmöglichkeiten etc. werden aufgezeigt? Welche narrativen Subtexte werden im untersuchten Text aufgegriffen? Lassen sich Figurentypen identifizieren, mit denen historisch übergreifend ähnliche Gefühlskonflikte verbunden sind (der Enthusiast, die Leserin etc.)? (3) Welche soziale und kulturelle Verortung von Gefühlen wird in den untersuchten Erzählungen vorgenommen (Gender, Religion, Generation usw.)? Wie werden der emotionalen Intensität von Figuren Grenzen gesetzt, welche Kontrollregime werden um sie herum errichtet (z. B. Diskurse des Maßhaltens, der Effizienz, Formen der Medikalisierung etc.)? In welchen Kontexten sind die Gefühle der Figur erlaubt oder gefordert? (4) Auf welche Weise reflektieren die narrativ inszenierten Konflikte gefühlskulturelle Problemstellungen aus der Entstehungszeit der Narration? Was symbolisiert der Konflikt kulturell und sozial für seine jeweilige Zeit? Welche Funktion hat der Text innerhalb einer umfassenderen Gefühlskultur? Welche Emotionen werden durch die Erzählungen provoziert, auf welche Weise geschieht dies?

Vorträge zu fiktionalen und faktualen Erzählungen aus unterschiedlichen historischen Epochen, insbesondere aber auch vergleichend, sind willkommen. Konferenzsprachen sind Deutsch und Englisch. Bitte senden Sie ein Abstract (300-500 Wörter), 3-5 für Ihren Beitrag relevante Literaturangaben und eine Kurzbiographie bis zum 1.6.2012 an folgende E-Mail-Adresse: Claudia.Weber@gcsc.uni-giessen.de.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Cultures of Feelings: Narratives and Contexts

International Conference
Organised by the
European PhD-Network “Literary and Cultural Studies” (PhDnet)
and the
International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC)

Justus Liebig University Giessen
7-9 November 2012

Literary, filmic, and theatrical narratives place fictional characters in unique and often experimental situations, thereby staging cultural conflicts, otherwise inscrutable aporias and potential solutions. Factual narratives, including news stories, historical accounts and documentaries, similarly tend to chart prototypical conflicts between protagonists and their cultural milieus. In both cases, it is often the protagonists’ feelings that are confronted with cultural and social regimes. On the one hand, emotions are the very product of such regimes, and tightly interwoven with their regulations (this, too, concerns the ability to articulate feelings in the first place). On the other hand, emotions may be directed against their context, with the latter seemingly limiting and normalising the emotion in question. The conference aims to investigate fictional and factual stories with an eye for such narrative configurations of feelings. Discussions will focus on the negotiations between feelings and the ‘cultures of feelings’ in which they are embedded and to whose configurations they contribute. A second issue will concern the analytical and theoretical import of the – as yet rudimentary – concept, ‘cultures of feelings.’

The term ‘cultures of feelings’ articulates the hypothesis that feelings, historically and culturally, are to varying degrees entwined with discourses and policies, whether cultural, political, social or otherwise. It is within these discourses that modes of emotional articulability are negotiated and controlled. At the same time, such discourses and policies connect feelings with religious, national, and gender differences, to mention only a few, and so it is in part through these links that emotions are integrated into the social dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, and therefore to power relations. Fictional and factual narratives are ideal for examining the establishment and deconstruction of emotional-cultural stipulations, while also contributing to the specific cultural environment by provoking emotional reactions. This conference aims to make this a topic of current discussion by engaging in foundational theoretical deliberations and specific instances of text-context analysis.

Although they need not be limited to the following questions, conference papers should be guided by them: (1) What conflicts relevant to emotionality are introduced in literary texts, films, comics, reports, oral narratives, etc.? Which feelings are thematised therein, and how are they defined? Is it a matter of too little emotion, or too much? What are the concerns regarding the inappropriateness of or inability to articulate certain feelings in certain social contexts? (2) How are emotional conflicts staged, and what aporias or potential solutions are expressed? What narrative subtexts are taken up in the primary text? Can character types be identified with whom similar emotional conflicts are linked across specific or trans-cultural histories (the enthusiast, the bookish girl, etc.)? (3) What is the social and cultural positioning of feelings with respect to gender, religion, generation, and so on? How are the emotional intensities of characters kept in check, and what control measures are built around them (i. e. the discourse of moderation, efficiency, and different forms of medication and medicalization)? (4) How do the narratively staged conflicts reflect culturally emotional issues from the emergence of narration? What do these conflicts symbolize, culturally and socially, in different periods? What feelings are provoked through stories, and in what ways? What is the function of the text within the wider culture of feelings?

We welcome presentations covering fictional and/or factual narrative accounts from different historical periods, and are particularly interested in comparative textual analyses. Conference languages are English and German. Please send an abstract of 300-500 words, a list of 3-5 bibliographical references and a short bio by 1st June 2012 to the following email address: Claudia.Weber@gcsc.uni-giessen.de.

Conference Report on "The Ethics and Politics of Representation" [PhDnet]

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 14:35:30 +0100

Conference Report on "The Ethics and Politics of Representation"
University of Bergamo, 25-27 October 2011

A report by Angela Müller and Claudia Weber

"Representation is never innocent" and yet it is at the heart of any cultural and literary practice. From Aristotle to Deleuze the notion of representation and its political and ethical implications constitute a major field of interest in both philosophy and literature. Values, so the organizers of the conference argue in their call for papers, are by no means stable entities but are continuously "created, negotiated, proposed and disseminated in culture". But how is this effected? What mechanisms are at work? Invited by ANGELA LOCATELLI (Bergamo), professors and doctoral researchers from the PhD-Net "Literary and Cultural Studies" partner institutions in Bergamo, Lisbon, Helsinki, Stockholm, and Giessen, as well as scholars from universities in Padua, Pisa, and Bielefeld, explored the diverse modes and purposes of representation in literature, the visual arts, and media, and presented theoretical and philosophical approaches to the notion of representation.

You can read the whole conference report on: http://kult-online.uni-giessen.de/wps/pgn/home/KULT_online/tagungsbericht17-2011/

CfP: II Lisbon Summer School for the Study of Culture, "Peripheral Modernities" [PhDnet]

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 14:12:10 +0100

II Lisbon Summer School for the Study of Culture
Lisbon, July 9-14 2012
PERIPHERAL MODERNITIES

Convenors: Isabel Capeloa Gil (LxConsortium), Roberto Vecchi (U. Bologna)

The long history of the modern seems to stress that modernity was a privilege of Western rationality, disseminated from a European centre across the imaginary waiting rooms of history. Yet, the markers of what was hailed as the sign of Western advancement – industrialization, secularization and rationalization – have been consistently questioned over the past decade as indicators of universal validity and modernity itself reconceived beyond Western provincialism. Homi Bhabha thus conceives of a ‘contra-modernity’ to qualify the post-colonial as a stage that both mimicks and subverts Western modernity, Susan Friedman speaks of ‘polycentric modernities’ that enlarge the geographical scope of the modernization endeavour, whilst Argentinian critic Beatriz Sarlo has defined the Argentinian Modernism as the aesthetical counterpart of the specific South-American decentering into ‘peripheral modernities’. The II Lisbon Summer School for the Study of Culture will take the manifold assumptions about modernity and its modernisms as the stepping stone to address the multiple ways in which the modern has been claimed. Although the distinction between modernity as a social-political construct and modernism as it aestheticcultural counterpart seems to be widely consensual, the neat separation between the two terms is not uncontentious, as the cultural does not exist beyond social framing and neither does the political occur beyond the aesthetic exploits of artists. This gap, stressed in the claim made by Adornian aesthetics’ that modernism reflects modernity’s critical self-awareness, seems to bring more problems than results for a complex mapping of the concept. In fact, the process of modernity is complex, because it brings together the social, the political, the cultural and the economical. It is simultaneously critical and hegemonic, imaginative and rational, dislocated and situated, global and local, traumatic and empowering.

The Summer School invites doctoral students and post-docs to submit theoretical discussions and case-study approaches from all fields of the humanities and the social sciences that consider modernity and modernism as other, diverse, fluid, translocal, plural, polycentric and alternative.

Confirmed keynote speakers are

Arjun Appadurai (University of New York)
Ellen Sapego (University of Winsconsin)
Roberto Vecchi (University of Bologna)
Márcio Seligmann-Silva (University of Campinas, São Paulo)
Jorge Fazenda Lourenço (CECC – FCH|UCP)
António Sousa Ribeiro (Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra)
Ansgar Nünning (University of Giessen)
Vera Nünning (University of Heidelberg)
Elizabeth Bronfen (University of Zurich)
Xiaomei Chen (University of California)

The Summer School will be hosted by the Lisbon Consortium, July 9th-14th 2012.

Both doctoral students and junior researchers (post-doc) are invited to apply for the summer school.

Deadline for submissions to the GCSC internal review process: February 20th, 2012

Proposals for 15-minute papers should be sent to kai.m.sicks@ggk.uni-giessen.de
Submissions should include the title of the proposed paper, an abstract in English (200 words), your name, e-mail address, institutional affiliation and a brief bio (max. 100 words) mentioning main research interests and projects.

Organizing Committee:

Isabel Capeloa Gil Peter Hanenberg Alexandra Lopes Paulo de Campos Pinto Ana
Fabíola Maurício
Check this and further information:
www.fch.lisboa.ucp.pt
www.facebook.com/LisbonConsortium

CfP: ESSCS Summer School 2012 "Structures of Feeling", Copenhagen [PhDnet]

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 14:01:10 +0100

ESSCS Summer School 2012, Copenhagen
Structures of Feeling
Copenhagen, 25-29 June 2012

Raymond Williams coined the term "structure of feeling" in the 1970s to facilitate a historical understanding of "affective elements of consciousness and relationships." Since then, the need to understand emotions, moods and atmospheres as historical and social phenomena has only become more acute in an era of social networking, ubiquitous media and a public sphere permeated by images, commodities and an ever growing culture of advertisement. Over the last years, affect studies have become one of the most thriving branches of contemporary humanities and social sciences, ranging from art and literary studies to psychology, sociology, anthropology and geography in a veritable trans-disciplinary venture to chart and understand the social reality and political effectiveness of shared feelings and propensities, of collective hopes and fears. As a recent and expanding field of research, affect studies are open to all sorts of scrutiny of human feelings in their individual and collective guises, in different historical conditions and circumstances, relative to media, genres and other cultural forms of expression. Thus, recently thinkers as diverse as Brian Massumi, Nigel Thrift and Judith Butler have examined the affective nature and meaning of bodies, of spaces, and of wars, respectively. With this summer school, we invite participants to take part in the investigation of the social life and cultural forms of affect and affectivity. How are affects important and how does affectivity make a difference in memory studies, in urban studies, inperformance studies, and in the entire range of cultural studies across the humanities and social sciences today? The summer school will accommodate 36 students from the ESSCS consortium.Work formats will alternate between panel presentations, keynote lectures,workshops and master classes.

The European Summer School in Cultural Studies is a joint venture between The International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture, Giessen, The Copenhagen Doctoral School in Cultural Studies, The Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, The London Consortium, Université de Paris VIII, The Lisbon Consortium, Ljubljana Graduate School of the Humanities and the University of Trondheim.

Deadline for submissions to the GCSC internal review process: February 29th, 2012

Proposals for 20-minute papers should be sent to ipp@ggk.uni-giessen.de

Both doctoral students and junior researchers (post-docs) are invited to apply for the summer school.