ASEEES panel proposal: The Politics of Form

[Rossen Djagalov]

Friends and Colleagues,

It may be too late now, but I'd like to propose a panel on the Politics of
Form.  Following Fredric Jameson and other Marxist literary critics, Michael
Denning distinguishes two types of relationships between art and politics:
1) cultural politics, which can be artists' pronouncements, petitions, and
allegiances but also the politics of the cultural field itself, the history
of the institutions and apparatuses inhabited by the cultural producers;
2) aesthetic ideologies, or the politics of form, the ideological
potentialities of the styles, genres, and conventions cultural producers
deploy (Michael Denning, The Cultural Front, 1997, xix-xx).

The panel I am have in mind will be devoted to the latter. I am particularly
interested in the capacity of different literary genres/ media to carry
ideology, especially of a leftist kind. I can present papers based on the
proletarian novel, guitar poetry (avtorskaia pesnia), or documentary film
and am looking for two other theoretically informed discussions of the
interplay of aesthetic form and political ideology in these or other genres.
We can concretize the thematic scope of the panel(s) and its/their title
once we have the papers. The main idea is to see how this concept drawn from
Marxist theory plays out with Slavic cultural texts.

Let me know if you are interested in discussing, chairing, or presenting at
such a panel,
Rossen

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