Reminder: Penn Slavic Grad Conference

[Maya Vinokour]

Dear Colleagues,

Slavics Without Borders, a Graduate Student Colloquium at the University of
Pennsylvania, is pleased to announce our Spring 2013 interdisciplinary
conference.  Entitled "Snippets, splinters, shreds, shards: The Fragment in
Russian Culture," it will take place at the University of Pennsylvania on
March 22nd, 2013, and feature Professor Devin Fore of Princeton University
as keynote speaker. Please share the attached Call for Papers (*submission
deadline:* *January 15, 2013*) with your department, and do not hesitate to
contact us at with any questions at slavicswithoutborders at gmail.com.

Thanks very much, and all best--

Maya Vinokour and Pavel Khazanov
Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory
University of Pennsylvania

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*Snippets, splinters, shreds, shards: The Fragment in Russian Culture*

A graduate student conference presented by

Slavics Without Borders, a UPenn Graduate Student Colloquium


With the support of


The Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory and the
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures

March 22nd, 2013

University of Pennsylvania


*Keynote speaker: Professor Devin Fore, Princeton University*

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Russian literature is famous for its monumental grand narratives: from *The
Primary Chronicle *to *War and Peace *to*The Gulag Archipelago*, Russian
works have often tended toward the epic.  Yet each of these masterworks,
far from being monolithic and complete, is actually fragmentary in its own
way: for instance, *The Primary Chronicle*, which claims to document
Russian history from the beginning of time, is by its very nature both
all-encompassing and unfinishable.



Mindful of Europe’s rich history of the literary fragment – from Schlegel’s
*Athenäum *to Benjamin’s *Arcades Project *to Blanchot and Derrida on the
aphorism – our conference investigates the fragment as a formally and
affectively multivalent object.  What does a fragment ask of its producers,
and how does it affect viewers or readers? How does the “synthetic” or
intentional fragment (like Lermontov’s *A Hero of Our Time *or Boris and
Arkadii Strugatsky’s *Definitely Maybe*) differ from the fragment born of a
creative crisis (Gogol’s *Dead Souls *or his planned but never-written
*Triumphant
Tale*), or the one forged in difficult political or social circumstances,
as were many 20th century camp memoirs – and what can we make of fragments
that span two or more of these categories, like Lermontov’s “Shtoss”?  What
types of fragments demand completion, continuation, or reconstruction?  How
have media-historical developments, such as the advent of montage in film
or the invention of the internet, affected the creation, dissemination, and
reception of fragments?



Papers from any disciplinary setting – whether literary or cinema studies,
philosophy, media studies, or art history – are welcome, but all proposals
should engage with Russian culture on some level.  We invite graduate
student submissions treating topics including, but not limited to:


   - the fragment as remnant (e.g., debris from a disaster) and as an
   inchoate form
   - the fragment and its relationship to time – is it residue of past
   time, or evidence of time’s constant motion?
   - fragments in film: close-ups, montage, narrative fragmentation
   - the fragment as an easily displaced object; fragmentation as a figure
   of diaspora and exile
   - the fragmented or fractured self
   - the fragment in architecture: ancient ruins and incomplete projects
   - the fragment in modernism: immediately pre- and post-revolutionary
   notions of Russian fragmentariness
   - the fragment in new media: comment boards, blogging, mashups, and
   other fragmentary phenomena of the cyberuniverse
   - the quoted fragment: traditions of excerpting and citation
   - the fragment in music
   - aphorisms, theses, and other fragmentary forms
   - collections of fragments: literary anthologies, police files and
   surveillance tapes, art exhibits

Please send your 250-300 word abstract in the body of an email with
“Fragment conference submission” in the subject heading to Maya Vinokour
and Pavel Khazanov at slavicswithoutborders at gmail.com by *January 15, 2013*.
Submissions should include the paper title, author’s name, affiliation, and
email address.

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