Tuesday, September 29, 2009

CFP: "Longing in the Age of New Media"

2010 USC Comparative Literature Symposium
Call for Papers:
“Longing in the Age of New Media”
Friday, February 19, 2010

We now invite submissions for our annual symposium featuring guest speaker and respondent Timothy Murray, Professor of Comparative Literature and English, Director, Society for the Humanities; Curator, The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell University. His research and teaching crosses the boundaries of new media, film and video, visual studies, twentieth-century Continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, critical theory, performance, and English and French early modern studies. He is currently working on a book, Immaterial Archives: Curatorial Instabilities @ New Media Art, which is a sequel to Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (Minnesota, 2008).

In the current age of new media, various fields of study are experiencing a literal vanishing of the very materials that have traditionally defined them. With this disappearance of the physical material, how has our perception and interaction with the new medium altered? Does the end of the age of mechanical reproduction lead to a resurgence of the aura in older media? Is this the result of nostalgia for the tactile or other sensory experiences that no longer act together in the same way? How does the designation of spectral / material change across different media?

The authors of the papers selected for the Symposium are expected to participate in all symposium events on February 19th 2010. The symposium schedule consists of a morning seminar, led by Professor Murray. The selected symposium papers will be posted online for everyone to read in advance of the seminar. It will begin with Professor Murray’s response to the papers and then open to a discussion of their arguments in conjunction with his own published work. After a catered lunch, we will reconvene for a lecture by Professor Murray on his current research. The authors of the chosen papers are invited guests at the Comparative Literature
Symposium dinner with Professor Murray, later that evening.

Please submit an abstract by November 1st 2009 to Coltsymposium@gmail.com

Proposals should include the title of the paper, presenter's name, institutional and departmental affiliation. Due to the interactive format of the symposium, final papers are due on January 10th 2010 so that our keynote speaker and audience members can read papers and prepare comments prior to the event.

The symposium encourages the following topics or thematic combinations:

-Digital media vs. celluloid
-Spectral figures within literary texts
-Spectral figures in cinema
-The politics of ownership
-Materiality
-Preservation and decay
-Collecting and displaying art
-Public vs. private art
-The virtual museum
-The spectrality or materiality of the spectator
-The (digital) archive
-Medium and genre
-Gendered media
-The fetishization of the book

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