ACLA 2014: on the intersection of media studies and lit
Good morning!
I've been sick for almost a week, after both Q and J came down with this uber-cold. But I have to teach today and go to meetings, so it's back on the horse!
Provided Console-ing Passions accepts at least one of the two things I proposed, it's going to be a very conference-heavy spring for me. I'll be at NeMLA in Harrisburg as well as CP in Missouri, and now I'm thinking that I won't skip ACLA after all, as someone else has picked up the mantle of carving out a space in Comparative Literature to talk about new media:
CfP: "Little Data and the Big Picture: What Everyday Literature Can Do for Comparison" organized by Scott Kushner, full CfP here.
Scott began emailing me a couple of months ago to talk about the panel I ran at last year's ACLA "Remapping the Path of Narrative in the Age of the Internet." He was giving a paper at ACL(x), which is supposed to be a conference of cutting-edge issues in comparative literature. Of course, they didn't accept my paper on vids as textual criticism (which, I know, is not news to any of you, but these people don't even know what vids are) because the panel chair was looking for "more developed" projects, which I took as code for "not graduate students."
Anyway, I ended up being present in absentia as Scott told of the ways in which my panel personified the lack of acceptance of work in new media in the comparative literature mainstream. Yes, the panel existed (as did the one I chaired the year before that, and the one I participated in the year before that), but they room we were assigned was changed at the past minute, we were given a room in an unfinished building, with no internet access (in a panel about internet narratives!), down a weird twisty hallway so that no one could find us. Of course, the fact that 6 out of 10 of my panelists were no-shows didn't help. But when Scott talked about it, his audience tittered nervously, and he says they got the point.
This is largely to say that I believe Scott's panel has the potential to bring more attention to the intersection of media studies and comparative literature, and although I wasn't going to do ACLA this year, now I think I have to. I'm thinking about doing something about the literariness of Yuletide. If anything is going to convince the complit folks that fic counts as literature, some of the stuff that comes out of Yuletide will do it.
Many of you, I know, would have awesome things to contribute to this panel. If you can be at NYU at the end of March, please consider submitting something. I'd really love to strt pushing harder on the boundaries of what complit considers lit. For all that we're often perceived as an "anything goes" kind of field, there's still an awful lot of hideboundness left in the reality of the discipline.
Also posted at http://kouredios.dreamwidth.org/254322.html ; feel free to comment there if you so choose: add comment/
comments.
I've been sick for almost a week, after both Q and J came down with this uber-cold. But I have to teach today and go to meetings, so it's back on the horse!
Provided Console-ing Passions accepts at least one of the two things I proposed, it's going to be a very conference-heavy spring for me. I'll be at NeMLA in Harrisburg as well as CP in Missouri, and now I'm thinking that I won't skip ACLA after all, as someone else has picked up the mantle of carving out a space in Comparative Literature to talk about new media:
CfP: "Little Data and the Big Picture: What Everyday Literature Can Do for Comparison" organized by Scott Kushner, full CfP here.
Scott began emailing me a couple of months ago to talk about the panel I ran at last year's ACLA "Remapping the Path of Narrative in the Age of the Internet." He was giving a paper at ACL(x), which is supposed to be a conference of cutting-edge issues in comparative literature. Of course, they didn't accept my paper on vids as textual criticism (which, I know, is not news to any of you, but these people don't even know what vids are) because the panel chair was looking for "more developed" projects, which I took as code for "not graduate students."
Anyway, I ended up being present in absentia as Scott told of the ways in which my panel personified the lack of acceptance of work in new media in the comparative literature mainstream. Yes, the panel existed (as did the one I chaired the year before that, and the one I participated in the year before that), but they room we were assigned was changed at the past minute, we were given a room in an unfinished building, with no internet access (in a panel about internet narratives!), down a weird twisty hallway so that no one could find us. Of course, the fact that 6 out of 10 of my panelists were no-shows didn't help. But when Scott talked about it, his audience tittered nervously, and he says they got the point.
This is largely to say that I believe Scott's panel has the potential to bring more attention to the intersection of media studies and comparative literature, and although I wasn't going to do ACLA this year, now I think I have to. I'm thinking about doing something about the literariness of Yuletide. If anything is going to convince the complit folks that fic counts as literature, some of the stuff that comes out of Yuletide will do it.
Many of you, I know, would have awesome things to contribute to this panel. If you can be at NYU at the end of March, please consider submitting something. I'd really love to strt pushing harder on the boundaries of what complit considers lit. For all that we're often perceived as an "anything goes" kind of field, there's still an awful lot of hideboundness left in the reality of the discipline.
Also posted at http://kouredios.dreamwidth.org/254322.html ; feel free to comment there if you so choose: add comment/
comments.