Francophone conference at Yale

[Leila Monaghan]

Please reply to frenchappearances at yale.edu if interested,

all best,

Leila


Subject: Call For Papers

Hello everyone,
I am on the Organizing and Abstracts Committees for an upcoming 
graduate conference at Yale University.  I would like to encourage any 
current graduate students who work on any area of French or Francophone 
literature and culture to submit an abstract.  I have pasted the Call 
For Papers with all relevant information below.  Please do not hesitate 
to contact me directly if you have any questions and feel free to 
forward the information to any friends or colleagues who might be 
interested.
Best,
Jessica

La volonté de paraître:

The Cult and Cultivation of Appearances
in French and Francophone Literature and Culture

23-24 February 2007, Yale University

In an appeal for interdisciplinary contributions from both literary and 
cultural horizons, our conference proposes an exploration of 
appearances, extravagance, and display.  The topic, encompassing a 
varied constellation of related social, economic, and cultural concepts 
(ostentation, vanity, excess, taste, style, fashion, sexuality, wealth, 
luxury, and social status), raises the following questions:  To what 
extent and in what ways have French and Francophone literatures and 
cultures constructed, modified, or relayed these notions?  How is 
identity communicated visually?  When and how are language, literature, 
and art themselves implicated in the cultivation of appearances as a 
cultural praxis?  In an exploration of the darker side of glamour and 
glitz, we also welcome reflections on the consequences of extravagance. 
  What are the financial, social, and personal costs of maintaining a 
public image?  What happens to the carefully crafted or groomed subject 
when he or she becomes an object on display?  In an effort to fully 
examine all that is sumptuous, sensational, sexy, or even scandalous in 
the world of appearances, we are inviting interventions across time and 
space, literature and culture, philosophy and film, gender and 
sexuality.

Presentations should be twenty minutes in length and may be in French 
or English; proposals from all periods and disciplines will be accepted.

Please submit abstract (250 words) by email to John Lytle, Chair of the 
Abstracts Committee, at the following address:  
frenchappearances at yale.edu.  Abstracts are due no later than January 
15, 2007.

Possible subtopics may include but are not limited to the following:

-        Medieval largesse.
-        Préciosité and/or persiflage.
-        Salon society.
-        Luxurious interior spaces.
-        Gossip and public reputation.
-        Le petit maître, le dandy.
-        Marie-Antoinette and the court of Versailles.
-        Les grands magasins; appearances, display, and consumption.
-        The performance of ostentation and extravagance.
-        Les maisons de couture.
-        Charcot, Salpêtrière and medical observation of spectacle.
-        Beauty and hypocrisy; glamour as mask.
-        Fashion, social class, and cultural identity in immigrant 
communities in France.
-        Splendor and style in film.
-        Backlash; the anti-extravagant; religious reactions to ostentation.


--
Leila Monaghan, PhD
Department of Communication and Culture
Indiana University
Ashton Mottier Hall
1760 E. 10th Street
Bloomington, IN 47405-9700
(812) 855-4607
monaghan at indiana.edu