CFP: READ 2004 (Grad) (08/13/04; 11/5/04-11/06/04)
CALL FOR PAPERS
READ : Critically Approaching the Practice of Reading Across Literatures,
Screens and Cultures
"The unreadable is not the opposite of the readable but rather the ridge
[aręte] that also gives it momentum...if we say that the unreadable gives,
presents, permits, yields something to be read, this is not a compromise"
~Jacques Derrida
"Before you can read me / you've got to learn how to see me"
~ En Vogue
"To read as if your life depended on it—but what writing can be believed?"
~ Adrienne Rich
"Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative
pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls
into lazy habits of thinking."
~ Albert Einstein
Graduate students must read, whether it is text, image, sound, visual art,
bodies or spaces. We read, in Adrienne Rich's words, "as if our
livelihoods depended on it," but not always "as if our lives depended on
it." We are aware that reading is not an innocent practice, that it has
been used (and continues to be used) as an organizing principle behind
global imperialisms and hegemonies, that it is drenched interminably in
questions of race, class, gender, sexuality and power—acting as a border to
those realties, but also as a flashpoint. As scholars, we attempt to offer
critical and innovative readings of texts, be they visual, aural or
print-based. But as graduate students, specifically, our reading practices
are linked with pedagogy, professionalization and surveillance. We learn to
read and think within our specific institutional settings and these
experiences are written into our lives beyond the classroom just as "real"
life can be read into and through our academic life. These intersecting
sites of reading form our writing in essays, presentations, or conference
papers. Regardless of the form they eventually take, these readings become
our commerce; they become, in effect, our signed bodies. We are reading as
if something depended on it...but what? Our bodies? Our jobs? Our
politics? What do our readings protect, and what do they endanger?
The English Graduate Students of Simon Fraser University invite proposals
for their upcoming interdisciplinary conference: "Read: Critically
Approaching the Practice of Reading Across Literatures, Screens and
Cultures" to be held November 5-6, 2004 at Simon Fraser University in
Burnaby, British Columbia. We invite 15 minute presentations that explore
(but are not limited to) the following ideas, and especially papers that
draw meaningful connections between reading and graduate studies:
* the challenges of "reading" non-print media, such as televisual or
cinematic texts, or mixed-media, reading graffiti, flesh anatomy, body,
sculpture, performance, mathematical equations, atomic structures,
architecture, artifacts, technologies, reading silence/noise, nature,
animals, humanity
* (mis)reading in the everyday: maps, signposts, slang, instruction
manuals, e-mail, spam, traffic laws, civil ordinances
* reading as disengagement, as avoidance, over-theorization
* the idea of "unreadability" (quoted above) as an entrance into, rather
than a foreclosure of, meaning construction, identity-formation, etc.
* canon formation and its relationship to (or, in some ways its dependence
upon) transgressive and deconstructionist readings
* reading as an imperial vehicle, an instrument of hegemony, an
erasing-tool of sexual and cultural difference, etc., vs. reading as a
strategy of survival, a space of resistance, a mimetic or transgressive
"talking back"
* how can we, as scholars, as students, be "read like an open book?" Can a
book be read like an open body? Where do flesh and text intersect, and why
are those intersections (messy as they are) culturally and historically
significant?
* how is reading different from seeing? What blindnesses, exclusions,
inequities might reading enact, and what strategies of invisibility do
academic readers often practice in order that they might not be "read like
an open book?" By extension, then, what threat to subjectivity does reading
pose?
Abstracts will be accepted via email until August 13, 2004.
Please limit abstracts to 250 words, and include relevant contact info.
Please email submissions to Greg Sutherland at read2004@sfu.ca
www.sfu.ca/english/gradconf
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