CFP: "Vox Pop" Conference--please pass along

[Alexander Ogden]

Dear colleagues:

Judith Kalb and I are organizing the conference VOX POP: Locating and 
Constructing the "Voice of the People" (Feb. 2004), and we would appreciate 
your help in spreading the Call for Papers (below).  It's already been well 
distributed in Slavdom (here and H-RUSSIA), but please pass along to 
interested colleagues in other literatures/cultures and related 
fields.  Many thanks for your assistance!

Best wishes,
Alex Ogden

***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 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: 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 Round-Table: "The Voice of the People in the 2004 Primaries," 
moderated by Charles Bierbauer, 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: 30 September 2003

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

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