CFP: Princeton Graduate Student Conference (October 2014)

[Philip Gleissner]

CALL FOR PAPERS:

 

Dumpster Diving and Sustainability: Managing the Limited Resources of
Culture 

Princeton University, October 17-18, 2014


Annual Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference

Princeton University

Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures

 

Keynote Speaker: Catriona Kelly (University of Oxford)

 

“You can't imagine how stupid the whole world has grown nowadays. The things
that scribblers write.”

― Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls

 

Dumpster Diving and Sustainability: Managing the Limited Resources of
Culture is an interdisciplinary conference dedicated to marginal and
outmoded art in all of its manifestations and returns in Slavic, Eastern
European, and Eurasian cultures. The conference aims at exploring our
repeated turn to the afterlives of ‘bad’ or exhausted cultural forms as a
way to cope with and interpret artistic and social changes.

 

In his literary studies, Iurii Tynianov famously pointed out a particular
tendency of literary evlotion: a literary or artistic fact that appears
worthless at one historical moment may, at another, become a productive
element of an aesthetic order. Taking Tynianov’s observation as a point of
our departure, we want to understand the overall function and impact of ‘bad
art’ on contemporary artists and societies, as well as on our own
disciplines, both as a fetishized avant-garde commodity and as a
recontextualization of historical forms/norms.

 

Our contention is that ‘bad art’ is a ubiquitous feature of artistic
production with its own intrinsic laws. With this in mind, this conference
proposes a critical interrogation of the ‘bad.’ The goal is not so much to
deconstruct or vindicate ‘bad art’ but rather to acknowledge the ‘bad’ as an
inalienable value that continues to sustain itself through various means of
cultural recycling.

 

We invite submissions from humanities and social sciencescholars. A short
selection of sample topics below indicates some potentialareas of inquiry:


* On the Invention of Bad Writing (Vasilii Rozanov, Valentin Kataev)
* Art as Commodity: Lubok, Feuilleton, Pulp
* The Aesthetic Education of Men: The Prostitute as Guardian in Literature
and Film (Crime an Punishment, Resurrection, Interdevochka, Wiktor
Grodecki’s Czech Films)
* Gastronomical Phenomenology (Bakhtin, Soldier Chonkin, Soldier Švejk)
*  Author as ‘Holy Fool’ from Venedikt Erofeev to Kirill Medvedev
* Authorship and Pastiche (Prigov, Kabakov)
*  The Importance of Being Earnest: Gogol’s Selected Passages from
Correspondence with Friends
* Serialized Novels, TV Series, and the Epic
* Eurovision, Balkan Beats, and the Construction of National Identity in
Post-Socialist Europe
 

Conference Format

The goal of the conference is to provide graduate students with the chance
to present their work to senior scholars in the field and to receive as much
constructive feedback as possible. All papers will be made available prior
to the conference through the conference website. At the conference, each
presenter will be given 15-20 minutes to present his or her paper, followed
by commentary by the panel discussant and open discussion.

Submission Details

We welcome submissions fromgraduate students across disciplines. Please
submit abstracts (200 words orless) to
princeton.slavic.conference at gmail.com. In addition, please attach a short CV
including current departmental affiliation, name, and e-mail. The deadline
for submissions is July 20, 2014. Please submit all files as Word documents.

We will be able to provide travel subsidies for the conference participants,
as well as lodging for the nights of October 16 and 17.

Any questions should be addressed to princeton.slavic.conference at gmail.com.

 

 




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