[Bilimsel Haber] UPDATE: Propaganda and its Discontents (grad) (6/30/06; 9/22/06-9/23/06)

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

***DEADLINE EXTENDED TO JUNE 30***


Propaganda and its Discontents

Second Annual University of Ottawa English Graduate Conference


Power, according to Michel Foucault, is productive, simultaneously
producing and produced by discourse. This may, in fact, be one way of
understanding propaganda: a discursive promotion of the interests
and agenda of an overarching or specific power regime. If, as Foucault
and many other theorists argue, power always already resides in every
discourse via language, can propaganda only be seen as a site of
expressive power? Or is there room for a propaganda of resistance? From
the state propaganda of Virgil's writings to the pamphleteers of the
Puritan Revolution to the Soviet cultural project to the current "War on
Terror," propaganda has long been an important motive and motivator in
the production of cultural texts.

Likewise, culture has been equally integral to the dissemination of
propaganda. We would like to consider texts (film, music, art,
literature) as propaganda both for and against political, religious and
social power. How is power expressed in these texts? How does
resistance make itself heard? How do we re-read, recuperate and revise
the propaganda of previous historical periods? Is there an outside of
propaganda? How do we evaluate propaganda ? through causes, motives, and
effects, or is it possible to examine these texts as autonomous
aesthetic artifacts?

Possible topics for consideration include:
- Literary genres and their adaptability for propaganda (for example,
Lukacs touting of realism over naturalism)
- Library and museum collections: archiving and curatorial selection,
cataloguing and ordering as discursive acts
- Religion and the Medieval pageant play
- Tory and Whig literature of the 18th-century
- Fascist film making
- Brecht's alienation effect
- The war poster
- News media, the "War on Terror," and other contemporary
socio-political issues
- Abolitionist literature (for example, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin)

The conference will take place September 22 and 23, 2006 at the
University of Ottawa.

Send 250-300-word abstracts to
uottawa.conference_at_gmail.com
by June 30, 2006.



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