CALL FOR PAPERS
University of California, Irvine
Department of English and Comparative Literature
Graduate Student Conference
Reproductions: Literature, Theory,
and Cultural Studies in Transformation
May 12, 2001
Keynote Speakers: Lauren Berlant (University of Chicago) and Michael
Warner (Rutgers University)
How can disciplines, methodologies, and objects reproduce themselves
without foreclosing the possibility--indeed, the necessity--for change? How
can change be sustained within the terms of intellectual history and
disciplinary reproduction? We ask these questions in the context of the
humanities generally, and from within the disciplines of English and
Comparative Literature specifically, at a time when many sense that the
humanities have reached a critical impasse, generated in part by an
inability to reconcile competing definitions of our fields.
We invite papers that think broadly and theoretically about the problem of
reproduction, as well as those that consider the reproductive logics
operative in specific texts, concepts, and traditions. If faithful and
legitimate forms of intellectual reproduction tend toward stasis, can we
develop methodologies that endanger orthodox reproduction? What role does
time--including the resuscitation of the past and the projection of
futurity--play in sustaining or decomposing institutions, texts, and
methods? If, as we contend, both retreatist returns to the disciplines and
celebratory forms of interdisciplinarity ring increasingly hollow to many
practitioners in our fields, how can we imagine the future of our
disciplinary life beyond such positions? It is our hope that these
questions, while perhaps impossible to answer at the level of individual
submissions, will animate the collective conversation at the conference.
Possible Topics to Consider:
-Reproduction and narrative logic
-Disciplinary objects and methods such as the literary, "close"
reading, and the author
-The relation between reproduction and representational models
(mechanical, digital, textual and other reproductions, as well as those
that operate across media such as literature, film, TV, and information
technologies).
-Reproduction and its figures: the child, the family, the state
-The apparent cognates of reproduction such as repetition,
difference, duration, and genealogy.
-The reproductive dimension of key concepts, traditions, and
intellectual histories
-Symbolic change and reproductive terms
-Pedagogy and knowledge transmission
-Sexuality, reproduction, and new reproductive technologies
-Periodization, historical, and generational time
200-300 word abstracts are due by February 15, 2001. Presentations should
be no more
than 20 minutes. Please send abstracts--along with your
name, institution, status, and contact information--by email or by post to:
Arnold Pan
University of California, Irvine
Department of English and Comparative Literature
435 Humanities Instructional Building
Irvine, CA 92696-2650
apan@uci.edu
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