Literature After Literature: 21st-Century Re-readings
Sunday, April 22
Standish Room, Science Library, Uptown Campus
Keynote Address: Dr. Peggy Kamuf, "Thinking with Literature" Peggy Kamuf’s principal research interests are in literary theory and contemporary French thought and literature. She has written extensively on the work of Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, and Jean-Luc Nancy, and has also translated a number of their texts. Her earlier work was on 18th-century French fictions of the feminine (Fictions of Feminine Desire: Disclosures of Heloise [1982]), the signature and authorship, especially in Rousseau, but as well Stendhal, Baudelaire, and V. Woolf (Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship [1988]), and the institutionalization of literary studies, specifically in France (The Division of Literature, or the University in Deconstruction [1997]). Her most recent work, Book of Addresses (2005), gathers essays on fictionality, sexual difference, psychoanalysis, and literary theory around the figure of the address of speech and writing. She has also edited several collections of work by Jacques Derrida: A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds (1991), Without Alibi (2002), and Psyche: Inventions of the Other (forthcoming 2006). In Spring 2006, she will return to teach at the Centre de Recherches en Études Féminines at the Université de Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis). Conference Theme: The English Graduate Student Organization at the University at Albany (SUNY) seeks papers for its annual graduate student conference that is being held in April in conjunction with a visit by and conference on Helene Cixous, the world-renown French feminist scholar, novelist, and playwright. This year's topic, "What does it mean to read in the 21st century?, is inspired by Cixous' politically-charged work across various genres. The conference will explore an array of questions relating to the reading of literature today. It seems that we live in an era where reading advertisements and tabloids has become just as important, if not more crucial than, what has come to be known as the canon. Today, there is a large public who choose not to read literature (in the classical sense) at all, literacy without literature, but with Internet, television, advertisements, magazines, tabloids, etc. It can be argued that very little of our reading today is of the 'literary type' as it was understood in previous centuries (as recent as the 'literary type' of readings performed by New Critics). The 21st century finds us reading after the text has opened its borders to countless interpretive modes. Contemporary critical theory has shown that no reading occurs in isolation - the same theories and ideologies equally inform the novel and television advertisement. Whether the act of reading takes place in seclusion or in public-under a reading lamp in one's study or on a train whirring past a billboard, the moment of reading is always influenced by cultural conditioning and social and linguistic theorizing. The result is that theory, ideology, and politics emerge today in places where they may not have before. The Victorian novel has become mired in a Marxist critique of bourgeois ideology, the daily newspaper can deconstruct itself, and language poetry purports, in many ways, to be "theory," leaving us to reconsider the definitions of literature. We are begged to ask, "What is literary in the 21st century?" Papers on the following topics will be reviewed for consideration: o Can we treat literature as theory unto itself? o How does living in the 21st century affect our practices of reading? o How do pop-culture phenomena condition us to read throughout our lives? o How do literary trends like celebrity authorship, book clubs, popular novels, web blogs, etc., affect our conception of the literary and the process of reading itself? o In what ways has post-structuralism contributed to the notion of being post-literature? o How do we teach literature in the 21st cenutry? o Are current educational standards and methods compatible or antithetical to the requirements of approaching the text in this manner? o What is the role of English Departments in investigating the post-literature question? o How does genre fit into the question of reading in the 21st century? Schedule:
Panel 1: Acts of Reading
12:30-1:45
Thomas Jordan, SUNY Binghamton
Teaching Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake: The Necessity to Study Literature in the 21th Century
Alifair Skebe, SUNY Albany
Tributaries of Meaning: HD Reading her Blameless Physician
Deborah Poe, SUNY Binghamton
The Sound of the Lyric, The Urge of Language: Intersections of Lyric and Language in the Poetry of Jane Miller, Bruce Beasley, and Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge
Christopher Rizzo, SUNY Albany
’Was That A Real Poem or Did You Just Make It Up Yourself?’: Countercultural American Poetics, the Rise of the Information Age, and the Post-Literary Condition
Lunch
1:45-2:20
Panel 2: Class and Hegemony
2:30-3:45
Robert Faivre , SUNY Albany
Reading is a Class Act
Melissa Dennihy, SUNY Binghamton
Reforming Connectivity: Toward a De-commodification of Higher Education
Christine Battista, SUNY Binghamton
Literary Counter-Culture in the Age of Global Hegemony
Kimberly DeFazio, SUNY Stony Brook
Class and the Affective Humanities
Panel 3: Post-Structuralism
4:00-5:15
Devon Branca, SUNY Binghamton
A Bio/Cultural Approach to Literature/Life: Derrida, Necessary Violence, the Supplement and the Possibility of ‘Perhaps'
Daniel Gremmler, SUNY Albany
Mnēmosynē Bound: The Politics of Memory and Classical Myth
Michael Podolny, UC Riverside
Reading the Flat Multiplicities: Rhizomatic Analysis of great Fiction in the 21st Century
Michael Jonik , SUNY Albany
Exposing the Subject—Derrida, Nancy
Keynote Lecture, Dr. Peggy Kamuf, University of Southern California: “Thinking with Literature”
5:45
Staying in Albany:
Courtyard by Marriott
1455 Washington Ave. Albany, NY 12205
(518) 435-1600
http://marriott.com/hotels/travel/albws-courtyard-albany-thruway/
Holiday Inn Express
1442 Western Ave.
Albany, NY 12203
(518) 438-0001
1-800-465-4329
TownePlace Suites
1379 Washington Ave.
Albany, NY 12206
(518) 435-1900
http://marriott.com/property/propertypage/ALBTA
Red Carpet Inn
1385 Washington Ave.
Albany, NY 12206
(518) 459-3100
Best Western Sovereign Hotel
1228 Western Ave.
Albany, NY 12203
(518) 489-2981
1-800-528-1234
http://book.bestwestern.com/bestwestern/
CrestHill Suites Hotels
1415 Washington Ave.
Albany, NY 12206
(518) 454-0007
http://www.cresthillsuites.com/
Links: Peggy Kamuf: USC Faculty Website Cixous ConferenceEnglish Department, University at Albany, State University of New York Map of the Campus:
http://www.albany.edu/maps/uptownmap.html
Contact: egsoalbany@yahoo.com
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