Extended Deadline/CFP: Dumpster Diving and Sustainability: Managing the Limited Resources of Culture. Annual Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference (Princeton, October 17-18, 2014).

[Philip Gleissner]

New Deadline for Submissions: August 5, 2014

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 evolution: 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 science scholars. A short
selection of sample topics below indicates some potential areas 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 and Punishment, Resurrection, Interdevochka,
Wiktor Grodecki’s Czech Films)
•  Gastronomical Phenomenology (Mikhail Bakhtin, Soldier Chonkin, Soldier
Švejk)
•  Author as ‘Holy Fool’ from Venedikt Erofeev to Kirill Medvedev
•  Authorship and Pastiche (Dmitry Prigov, Ilia 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 August 5, 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.
 

Organizing Committee:
 
David Hock
Elizabeth Stern
Philip Gleissner

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