[Discussion] CFP: In the City and On the Road: Stasis and Mobility (1/6/06; 3/25/06-3/26/06)

[gpultar@cstgroup.org]

From: TODD Kennedy <kennedt2@gwm.sc.edu>

ATTENTION: CALL FOR PAPERS

In the City and on the Road: Stasis and Mobility in the Twentieth Century
An Interdisciplinary Conference

http://www.cla.sc.edu/engl/20thcenturyconference

Saturday, March 25 - Sunday, March 26, 2006
Department of English
University of South Carolina, Columbia (USA)

The twentieth century witnessed enormous shifts in patterns of mobility and the
meanings bound up with "moving"¯shifts that went hand in hand with new
definitions and associations for "stasis." These changes were bound up with a
range of social factors: the massive expansion of industrial capitalism, the
growth of the modern city, new communication systems, etc. The changes gave rise
to intense artistic debates about the value of a new, highly mechanized, and
often urban, mobility on one hand, and an older, rural conception of organic
communities and stasis on the other. Working within the modern city, therefore,
Walter Benjamin divides street walkers into two categories: the "flaneur" who
meanders aimlessly and the "pilgrim" who seeks a destination. These same ideas,
in a broader sense, have dominated the works of writers, poets, essayists,
sociologists, filmmakers, musicians, politicians, and others as they sought to
represent the city and the road as a means of answering questions about human
identity. Artists, such as Joyce, Cela, and DeLillo, to name a few, have
explored ideas of mobility within cities while Steinbeck, Dennis Hopper, and
Baudrillard have similarly created an aesthetic of travel. Meanwhile, this
mobile century saw widespread migrations, such as rural African Americans to
Northern cities, rural Spaniards to Madrid, and other movements towards wartime
and post-war industrial opportunity. Contrarily, artists, such as Kerouac and
Picasso see the city as that which dwarfs and thwarts autonomy as it reflects,
in the words of Alfred Kazin, the "trauma of modern man." Following the success
of the previous two years' conferences we invite papers that not only examine
and build upon these issues, but encourage the analysis and exploration of
multiple types of literature such as hypertext, film, art, and music, in
addition to poetry and fiction. We strongly encourage cross-genre discussions.

Topics may include, but certainly are not limited to:

environmental literature
Blues music and mobility, Jazz music and the city
migration, miscegenation, hybridity
the city as destroyer
the postcolonial, or "imagined" city
religious and spiritual journeys
community versus individuality/alienation
communities in exile
existential ideas of the city and the road
wilderness versus civilization
the romanticization of the American West
e.g. Joyce's Dublin, Cela's Madrid, Dos Passos' Manhattan
the road-buddy film or song
immigration and assimilation
mapping the postmodern city
historicizing the modernist city
the hobo or vagabond as hero
the loss of rural space
urban and rural responses to war, terrorism and dictatorship
racial/ethnic and environment
urban vs. rural communities
the city or the road as sexual landscape
flaneurship
relationship of gender to travel and/or stasis
travel literature

The deadline for submission is Friday, January 6, 2006.
Please submit 500-word abstracts at
http://www.cla.sc.edu/engl/20thcenturyconference .

Information on our Keynote Addresses:

Professor Gordon Ball, Virginia Military Institute
Gordon Ball, Professor of English and Fine Arts at the Virginia Military
Institute, is a renowned independent film maker, photographer, and scholar on
the Beat Generation and film. Ball was a close friend of Allen Ginsberg, about
whom he has written extensively, and has edited two volumes of Ginsberg's
journals, including Journals: Early Fifties, Early Sixties (1977). His book
Allen Verbatim: Lectures on Poetry, Politics, Consciousness (1974) was nominated
for the Pulitzer Prize. Ball has also published a memoir titled 66 Frames (1999)
and a book of prose poetry. Ball earned his Ph.D. from the University of North
Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Professor Priscilla Wald, Duke Univeristy
An internationally respected critic and scholar, Priscilla Wald is Associate
Professor of English and Women's Studies at Duke University. In addition to her
notable work on Theodore Dreiser, Wald employs an interdisciplinary approach to
analyze popular media as a site for a socially constructed vision of science. 
The author of Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form
(1995), Wald is also the Associate Editor of American Literature, and serves on
the editorial board of Literature and Medicine. She is a member of PMLA's
advisory board. Wald earned her Ph.D. from Columbia University.


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