Princeton University’s Annual Interdisciplinary Graduate
Student Conference will take place October 17-18, 2014 at Princeton
University. Dumpster
Diving and Sustainability: Managing the Limited Resources of Culture is an
interdisciplinary conference dedicated to marginal and outmoded art in all of
its manifestations and returns in Slavic, Eastern European, and Eurasian
cultures. The conference will feature submissions from humanities and social science graduate students.
For more information on the conference, see the Call for
Papers below:
CALL FOR PAPERS
Dumpster Diving and Sustainability:
Managing the Limited Resources of Culture
Princeton University, October 17-18, 2014
Annual Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference
Princeton University
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
Keynote Speaker: Catriona Kelly (University of Oxford)
"You can't imagine how stupid the whole world has grown nowadays. The things
that scribblers write.”
―Nikolai Gogol,Dead Souls
Dumpster Diving and Sustainability: Managing the Limited Resources of
Cultureis an interdisciplinary conference dedicated to marginal and
outmoded art in all of its manifestations and returns in Slavic, Eastern
European, and Eurasian cultures. The conference aims at exploring our repeated
turn to the afterlives of ‘bad’ or exhausted cultural forms as a way to cope
with and interpret artistic and social changes.
In his literary studies, Iurii Tynianov famously pointed out a particular
tendency of literary evolution: a literary or artistic fact that appears
worthless at one historical moment may, at another, become a productive element
of an aesthetic order. Taking Tynianov’s observation as a point of our
departure, we want to understand the overall function and impact of ‘bad art’
on contemporary artists and societies, as well as on our own disciplines, both
as a fetishized avant-garde commodity and as a recontextualization of
historical forms/norms.
Our contention is that ‘bad art’ is a ubiquitous feature of artistic production
with its own intrinsic laws. With this in mind, this conference proposes a
critical interrogation of the ‘bad.’ The goal is not so much to deconstruct or
vindicate ‘bad art’ but rather to acknowledge the ‘bad’ as an inalienable value
that continues to sustain itself through various means of cultural recycling.
We invite submissions from humanities and social science scholars. A short
selection of sample topics below indicates some potential areas of inquiry:
•On the Invention of Bad Writing (Vasilii Rozanov, Valentin Kataev)
•Art as Commodity: Lubok, Feuilleton, Pulp
•The Aesthetic Education of Men: The Prostitute as Guardian in
Literature and Film (Crime and Punishment, Resurrection,Interdevochka,
Wiktor Grodecki’s Czech Films)
•Gastronomical Phenomenology (Mikhail Bakhtin,Soldier
Chonkin, Soldier Švejk)
•Author as ‘Holy Fool’ from Venedikt Erofeev to Kirill Medvedev
•Authorship and Pastiche (Dmitry Prigov, Ilia Kabakov)
•The Importance of Being Earnest: Gogol’s"Selected Passages
from Correspondence with Friends”
•Serialized Novels, TV Series, and the Epic
•Eurovision, Balkan Beats, and the Construction of National
Identity in Post-Socialist Europe
Conference Format
The goal of the conference is to provide graduate students with the chance to
present their work to senior scholars in the field and to receive as much
constructive feedback as possible. All papers will be made available prior to
the conference through the conference website. At the conference, each
presenter will be given 15-20 minutes to present his or her paper, followed by
commentary by the panel discussant and open discussion.
Submission Details
We welcome submissions from graduate
students across disciplines. Please submit abstracts (200 words or less)
toprinceton.slavic.conference@gmail.com. In addition, please attach a short CV including current
departmental affiliation, name, and e-mail. The deadline for submissions
isJuly 20, 2014.Please submit all files as Word documents.
We will be able to provide travel
subsidies for the conference participants, as well as lodging for the nights of
October 16 and 17.
Any questions should be addressed
toprinceton.slavic.conference@gmail.com.
Organizing Committee:
David Hock
Philip Gleissner
Elizabeth Stern
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