CFP: "Vox Pop" Conference--expanded program, extended deadline

[Alexander Ogden]

Dear colleagues,

The program for next spring's conference VOX POP: Locating and Constructing 
the "Voice of the People" (Feb. 2004) has been expanded, and Judith Kalb 
and I would appreciate your help in spreading the Call for Papers 
(below).  Please post  and pass along to interested colleagues. The 
deadline for abstracts has been extended to 31 October 2003.

Many thanks!
Alex Ogden

--------------------------------
Dr. J. Alexander Ogden
Assistant Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature
Dept of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC 29208
(803) 777-9573; fax: (803) 777-0454


***CALL FOR PAPERS***

VOX POP: Locating and Constructing the "Voice of the People"

6th Annual University of South Carolina Comparative Literature Conference
26-28 February, 2004
Columbia, SC, U.S.A.

Building from a millennia-old maxim--the voice of the people is the voice 
of God--the desire to locate, fabricate, and appropriate the vox populi has 
been especially pervasive for at least the last two centuries.  What 
defines this voice of the people?  Is it a voice charged with lore from the 
ancient past or one as new as today's poll numbers?  How is it mediated: 
who speaks on behalf of the "grass roots," "the American people," the "Arab 
street"?  The concept can challenge authority, promoting populist 
subversions of hierarchy (carnival, protest, revolution), yet it also feeds 
an age-old temptation to construct a monologic Voice of a monolithic 
People, silencing heterogeneous, dialogic voices.  Whether sought in 
man-on-the-street interviews, the "voices of the People in song" (for 
Herder these included everyone from Homer, to Shakespeare, to Ossian), or 
contemporary advertising trends, the consensus of popular sentiment remains 
as elusive (and deceptive) an ideal as ever.

The VOX POP conference will consider the multitudes of peoples and voices 
that have come under the heading of vox populi, from the ancient populus or 
hoi polloi to the various "Peoples" of modern nationalism (das Volk, le 
peuple, narod), and from folksong to political discourse to "the writing on 
the wall."  The conference invites a wide-ranging interrogation of the idea 
of the voice of the people by scholars from a range of fields.

A few possible points of orientation and approaches:
* populisms: literary, political, religious, etc.
* lines of transmission: "through the grapevine," via writers, politicians, 
and prophets, or--if the voice is silent/silenced--through transformations 
into other forms of expression (literature "written for the drawer," 
graffiti, visual arts, etc.)
* national and ethnic identity; heritage as tradition or invention
* issues of (dis)enfranchisement, literature and democracy, representation 
in government
* questions of power and authority: what gives the vox pop legitimacy?
* information technologies and the ways they have inflected ideas of 
popular expression
* relations between ideas of "gender" and "the people"
* "pop," folk, and country music, jazz and blues, "world" music, etc.
* modalities/tone/intonation of the vox pop: appealing, commanding, 
mythopoetic, imperative
* orality/literacy, national epics (authentic or fabricated)

Keynote Speaker:
Russell Berman (Stanford), "Literacy, Literature, and Democracy"
Russell A. Berman is Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford 
University (German Studies and Comparative Literature).  He specializes in 
the study of German literary history and cultural politics and is the 
author of numerous articles and award-winning books, including 
Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture; The Rise of 
the Modern German Novel: Crisis and Charisma; and Cultural Studies of 
Modern Germany: History, Representation and Nationhood.

Plenary Speaker:
Debra Castillo (Cornell), "Who Knows?  Thoughts on Postcoloniality and 
Latin American Literary Culture"
Debra A. Castillo is Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow and Professor of 
Romance Studies and Comparative Literature at Cornell University, where she 
has also directed Latin American Studies.  She specializes in contemporary 
narrative of the Americas, Women's Studies, and post-colonial literary 
theory.  Among her recent books are Talking Back: Strategies for a Latin 
American Feminist Literary Criticism; Easy Women: Sex and Gender in Modern 
Mexican Fiction; Border Women: Writing from La Frontera (co-author); and 
Latin American Literature and Mass Media (co-editor).

Plenary Speaker:
Morag Shiach (University of London), "Modernism and Linguistic 
Authenticity: Constructing the Voice of the People, 1910-1935"
Morag Shiach is Professor of Cultural History in the School of English and 
Drama, Queen Mary, University of London.  Her research is 
interdisciplinary, drawing on theoretical approaches and research 
methodologies from literary studies, cultural studies, history, and 
political theory.  Her publications include Modern Labour: Modernism, 
Labour and Selfhood in British Literature and Culture, 1890-1930; Hélène 
Cixous: A Politics of Writing; Discourse on Popular Culture: Class, Gender 
and History in Cultural Analysis 1730 to the Present; several edited 
volumes; and numerous articles.

Affiliated Roundtable:
Charles Bierbauer (South Carolina), moderator, "The Voice of the People in 
the American Political Process"
Charles Bierbauer is Dean of the College of Mass Communications and 
Information Studies at the University of South Carolina.  A distinguished 
broadcast journalist, Bierbauer was for twenty years a correspondent for 
CNN in Washington, where he covered the Supreme Court, the Bush and Reagan 
administrations and the presidential campaigns from 1984-96.  From 1977-81, 
he was an overseas correspondent for ABC News, first as Moscow Bureau Chief 
and later as the Bonn Bureau chief.

Abstracts: Please send one-page abstracts for twenty-minute papers to the 
conference organizers, Judith Kalb and Alexander Ogden, Comparative 
Literature Program, Humanities Building, Columbia, SC 29208, or e-mail them 
to ogden at sc.edu.  Broadly interdisciplinary presentations are 
encouraged.  We plan to publish a volume of selected papers from the 
conference.  Updated conference information will be available on the web at 
http://www.cla.sc.edu/CPLT/activities/index.html

Deadline for proposals: 31 October 2003

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