[Bilimsel Haber] CFP: "Unpopular Culture, " Munich, October 31 - November 2, 2013.

[Gonul Pultar]

from: poehlmann at lmu.de


Call for Papers:

Unpopular Culture
October 31-November 2, 2013
Amerika-Haus Munich

www.amerikanistik.uni-muenchen.de/uc

Organizers: Martin Lüthe (John F. Kennedy Institute, Berlin) & Sascha
Pöhlmann (LMU Munich)



Despite ongoing attempts to cross borders and close gaps, popular
culture is still often construed in opposition to high culture in
contemporary academic and non-academic discourses.

Partly indebted to what could be labeled a ‘Birmingham-School-tradition’ 
of the study of the popular, scholars have repeatedly attempted to 
‘deconstruct’the popular by problematizing various binaries the study of 
popular culture might summon; especially with regard to processes of 
identity formation, agency, and political positionalities.

Yet the concept of popular culture itself also implies a dichotomy of
a very different kind, and this conference seeks to explore the
implications of this Other, an excluded middle that seeks to provide a
new angle on popular culture: the unpopular. As an adjective, it can
be used to describe either popular or high culture (and one might even
define high culture by it), depending on one’s ideological
perspective, but as a concept it offers a third term that complicates
the other two, and that accordingly deserves more critical attention.

The notion of the unpopular is as crucial to an understanding of popular 
culture as it is marginalized in the discourse on the subject. For 
example, significant parts of what is classified as popular culture rely 
on self-definitions of unpopularity, for example “underground” or 
“independent” movements or subcultures opposed to the “mainstream.”

Furthermore, a theory of the unpopular provides a way of analyzing the
aesthetic value judgments that are integral to the study of popular
culture but are not often made explicit. This conference seeks to
explore and theorize the manifold implications of the unpopular from a
variety of different angles, for example addressing questions such as:

• How does unpopularity come about? How is it constructed and defined, 
how are such constructions maintained, and by whom?
• How do the mechanisms of the unpopular change in time? What histories 
of the unpopular could we tell?
• How does unpopularity relate to popular and high culture? Can there 
even be such a thing as unpopular culture, or is the unpopular at odds 
with culture itself? Is the unpopular rather a mark of high culture than 
popular culture, or vice versa?
• What are the politics of the unpopular? What is its importance as a 
category of inclusion and exclusion, for ‘subcultures’ and ‘the mainstream’?
• How do particular cultural artifacts represent unpopularity, and to 
what end? Can we describe an aesthetics of the unpopular?
• What particular fields of popular and high culture distance themselves 
from or embrace the unpopular?
• How do particular cultural artifacts themselves become unpopular, and 
why? How is the unpopular related to value judgments such as 
‘offensive,’ ‘controversial,’ ‘cool,’ ‘ugly,’ ‘(un)fashionable,’ or ‘bad’?


We invite scholars from all academic disciplines to submit a proposal
on their variety of unpopular culture of choice — whether it be on Edgar
Allan Poe or Stephenie Meyer, on Justin Bieber or Black Metal, on camp
or hipsterism, on New Criticism or Queer Theory, on Atari’s E.T. or
Duke Nukem Forever, on Birth of a Nation or Django Unchained, on
_Finnegan's Wake_ or _50 Shades of Grey_, or on anything that is 
unpopular or should be (or shouldn’t).

Please send abstracts (or topical rants) of no more than 300 words, as 
well as a brief bio statement, to poehlmann at lmu.de by April 26, 2013.


Dr. Sascha Pöhlmann
Amerikanische Literaturgeschichte
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Schellingstraße 3 /VG
Zimmer 212
80799 München
Tel.: 0049 89 2180 2847
www.amerikanistik.uni-muenchen.de





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