CFP: Real Things Conference

REAL THINGS: MATTER, MATERIALITY, REPRESENTATION
1880 TO THE PRESENT
5-8 July 2007

Proposals for twenty-minute presentations or panels of three to four presenters are invited for a conference entitled “Real Things: Matter, Materiality, Representation, 1880 to the present,” to be held at the University of York, England and co-sponsored by the University of Sussex.

Keynote speakers: Bill Brown, Mary Ann Doane, Hal Foster, Patrick Keiller, Hermione Lee, Edmund White

This conference proposes a re-engagement with representational realism and its objects and effects across a wide range of aesthetic, critical and theoretical practices. We seek to engage cutting-edge work that raises new questions about the status of the object of representation; representations as archives of material history; the shifts in representational practices associated with modernism and postmodernism; the changing status of real bodies and lives (as opposed to their representations) as objects of analysis in the humanities; and the politics of these transitions. Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:
  • Realism as modernism/modernism as realism
  • Rethinking photographic indexicality; cinema and/as archive
  • Paintings, documents, realism: literary and visual representation
  • The turn to science
  • Postmodernism, realism and the real
  • Representation and the psychoanalytic Real
  • Evidence, document and representation
  • New philosophies of nature
  • Documentary film practices
  • Biopolitics, biopower, bodies
  • Forensics, indices and popular culture
  • Performance, theatricality and materiality
  • Success and/or failure of representation
  • Presentation vs. representation
  • New technologies, representation and embodiment
  • Anti-sublimation and resistance to metaphor
Please send 250-word paper abstracts and 1000-word panel abstracts to realthings@events.york.ac.uk by 1 February 2007. Organisers: Victoria Coulson (University of York), Jane Elliott (University of York), John David Rhodes (University of Sussex).

Comments

zoe p. said…
Finally, a CFP worth thinking about. Or maybe they only seem worth thinking about if you are already thinking about them. So to speak.
Chris Cagle said…
Clearly, I tend to post CFPs that interest me, rather than a general blanket posting of all of them out there. On one hand, I'm not sure how useful that practice is. On the other hand, those calls can linger out there without potential interested parties knowing about them, so the wider reach the better.
Anonymous said…
Wow, that does look like an interesting conference. I have a full plate right now or I'd almost certainly submit.

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