Call for papers: Getting Obsessive
Graduate student friends: please think about submitting a paper for this and/or pass it on to people you think might be interested in submitting (and also, please attend). I really think it will be very intellectually stimulating, and very fun.
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Getting Obsessive: Culture and Excess
An Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Symposium, March 28 and 29, 2008
Sponsored by USC’s Assocation of English Graduate Students and the USC Center for Feminist Research
Keynote Speaker: Tavia Nyong’o, NYU Performance Studies.
Everyone’s a little bit obsessive; academics are usually more than a little. But what consitutes our obsessions and what work do they do? What is the relation between obsession and knowledge production; and what about less legitimate obsessions, the things, places, people and cultural forms about which we feel excessive love or hate?
Thinking about the subjects and objects of obsession raises crucial questions about knowledge and culture. How do literary and cultural texts provoke and represent obsession? Whose investments get defined as excessive and obsessive and whose are seen as justifiable (in) moderation? What politics underlie obsession? Who gets to say when enough is too much?
We invite 20-minute papers, panels or performances, from all disciplines and interdisciplinary locations, on any aspect of obsession and excess. These might include:
• ideologies of excess
• excess and obsession in literature
• affect in theory and theories of affect
• fandom and antifandom
• sexual obsession and excessive sexualities
• how race and gender contour understandings of excess
• work/overwork and academic labor
• class, excess and restraint/moderation
• excessive femininities and masculinities
• dressing to excess; fashion and drag
• paranoia
• ‘cult’ objects and the canon
• obsession, time and memory
300-word abstracts are due January 14, 2008. Please email .doc or .rtf files to uscaegs@gmail.com.
We invite all participants to share their obsessions and find new ones at a music and poetry event in the evening of March 29, organized in association with USC’s Pop Music Project.
***
Getting Obsessive: Culture and Excess
An Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Symposium, March 28 and 29, 2008
Sponsored by USC’s Assocation of English Graduate Students and the USC Center for Feminist Research
Keynote Speaker: Tavia Nyong’o, NYU Performance Studies.
Everyone’s a little bit obsessive; academics are usually more than a little. But what consitutes our obsessions and what work do they do? What is the relation between obsession and knowledge production; and what about less legitimate obsessions, the things, places, people and cultural forms about which we feel excessive love or hate?
Thinking about the subjects and objects of obsession raises crucial questions about knowledge and culture. How do literary and cultural texts provoke and represent obsession? Whose investments get defined as excessive and obsessive and whose are seen as justifiable (in) moderation? What politics underlie obsession? Who gets to say when enough is too much?
We invite 20-minute papers, panels or performances, from all disciplines and interdisciplinary locations, on any aspect of obsession and excess. These might include:
• ideologies of excess
• excess and obsession in literature
• affect in theory and theories of affect
• fandom and antifandom
• sexual obsession and excessive sexualities
• how race and gender contour understandings of excess
• work/overwork and academic labor
• class, excess and restraint/moderation
• excessive femininities and masculinities
• dressing to excess; fashion and drag
• paranoia
• ‘cult’ objects and the canon
• obsession, time and memory
300-word abstracts are due January 14, 2008. Please email .doc or .rtf files to uscaegs@gmail.com.
We invite all participants to share their obsessions and find new ones at a music and poetry event in the evening of March 29, organized in association with USC’s Pop Music Project.