CFP: ACLA 2007 (10-20-06; ACLA 04-19-06 TO 04-22-06)

[Renee Silverman]

Dear SEELANGS members,

I am particularly interested in Slavic, Eastern/Central-European, and 
comparative (East-West) perspectives for the following conference 
seminar...

Call for papers for the following seminar on avant-garde studies and 
popular culture. Paper proposals with name, affiliation, and contact 
information should be submitted to Renee.Silverman at Oberlin.edu. 
Authors of accepted proposals will be notified promptly by email.

American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) annual conference; 
Puebla, Mexico, April 19 to 22, 2006

Seminar Title: The Popular Avant-garde
Seminar leader: Renée M. Silverman, Oberlin College

While the avant-garde is customarily thought of as removed from the 
realm of the popular, in reality popular art and certain types and 
practitioners of avant-garde literature, visual art, and cinema have 
regularly drawn upon each other. Fertile exchanges between the avant-
garde and popular culture have enormous potential for political 
change, apart from elitist manipulations of mass culture from above. 
This seminar invites proposals about avant-garde works that use 
textual, visual, or musical forms borrowed from popular art to create 
their political and social edge. We will attempt to answer the 
following questions: In what ways and under what political and social 
conditions do avant-garde artists use forms peculiar to popular art? 
How can borrowing popular forms create a political edge? What are the 
cultural consequences of incorporating popular forms into avant-garde 
works? Is there life beyond mere quotation and empty gestures towards 
cultural authenticity? 

This seminar broadly construes its object of study as beyond 
the “historical” or “modernist” avant-garde, so as to include work not 
necessarily contemporaneous with modernism. We will place special 
emphasis on twentieth- and twenty-first-century experimental literary 
texts, visual art, cinema, and music, including examples of 
interdisciplinarity. Of particular interest are papers that examine 
non-Western and non-European avant-gardes as well as avant-garde work 
from geographical locations traditionally conceived as peripheral to 
Europe, such as Spain and Portugal, and Russia and Eastern Europe. 
Especially welcome are proposals that deal with Mexico, the Caribbean, 
Central and Latin America, and transatlantic Hispanic culture. 
Depending on the particular content of the papers to be included on 
the seminar, we will explore the ways in which, in these liminal 
spaces, the crossing between popular art and the avant-garde can take 
on special political urgency or become particularl
y responsive to the social needs that popular cultures fulfill. 
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