CFP: The Cultural Logic of Brad Pitt (6/10/05; WLA, 10/19/05-10/23/005)

CFP: The Cultural Logic of Brad Pitt

For the 2005 Western Literature Association Conference in Los Angeles,
we plan to organize a panel on the film icon, Brad Pitt. Why Brad Pitt?
As one of this generation's most popular actors, Pitt has explored many
of the cultural tensions of our emerging postmodern era. Depicting
masculine American whiteness in various states of crisis, his characters
generally enact complex postmodern agencies; they are never wholly
coherent, they are often self-destructive, and they generally rely on a
certain amount of play--between stability and instability, between life
and death, between autonomy and alter-dependency, between control and
abandon. Simultaneously reifying and challenging hegemonic codes of
race, class, gender, and regional or national identity, his characters
explore the complex and changing postmodern cultural landscape. Tracing
his performances through a variety of films and theoretical texts we
hope to explain Brad Pitt's multi-dimensional postmodernity by
exploring: 1) the cultural logic of his performances, showing how they
dramatize postmodern cultural tensions, and 2) the kind of cultural or
political work that his performances accomplish, or the difference that
they make and the impact that they have on the audiences who watch them.
Some of the kinds of issues that we hope to explore include:

* Brad Pitt's West: From A River Runs Through It and Legends of the Fall
to Thelma and Louise and Kalifornia, many of Pitt's performances explore
the physical and cultural landscapes of the American West? How do Pitt's
performances both reenact and revise more traditional western narratives
and identities?

* Brad Pitt's postmodern subjectivity: How do Pitt's performances,
especially in films such as Fight Club and 12 Monkeys, explore new
postmodern constructions of race, class, gender, and national identity?
What makes these characters compelling or illuminating for contemporary
audiences, and what do they tell us about how American culture is
changing in response to new postmodern economic and historical contexts?

* Marketing Brad Pitt: While Brad Pitt has clearly emerged as a
mainstream Hollywood star and box-office favorite, his characters
frequently bristle with an undeniably rebellious and countercultural
energy? But do his characters really explore radical or marginal
locations outside the boundaries of the dominant culture, or are they
only pseudo-revolutionaries-posing as rebels, but ultimately conforming
to privileged, white, male, heterosexual, and American cultural norms?
What do his performances teach us about the complex relationship between
the culture and the countercultures of the postmodern, especially in the
popular media? How is his revolutionary persona used as a marketing
device to sell movies and/or postmodern culture?

Please send a 1-page proposal and 1-page CV to Robert Bennett by Friday
June 10, 2005.
Proposals may be sent either by email (preferable):
bennett_at_english.montana.edu
or by regular mail: Robert Bennett / 2-270 Wilson Hall / English
Department / Montana State University / Bozeman, MT 59717

More info about the conference is available online:
www.usu.edu/westlit/conference2005.html

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Received on Sun May 08 2005 - 08:44:14 EDT