MCLC: Cannibal Modernisms program

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Anup Grewal <anupgi at gmail.com>
Subject: Cannibal Modernisms program
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Dear List Members,

Please find below information about a King’s College London Comparative
Literature graduate students conference. There are a number of papers
related to modern Chinese literature, and Professor Zhang Xudong of NYU
will be the keynote speaker.  Registration information is below (no cost).
 Everyone, whether student or not, is welcome to the keynote lecture.

 Thank you.
Anup Grewal

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Cannibal Modernisms

King’s College London Programme in Comparative Literature Annual Graduate
Conference,  7th-8th November, 2013.

Keynote Speaker: Professor Xudong Zhang, Professor of East Asian Studies
and Comparative Literature, New York University.
"Politics of the Flesh:  The Animal in Redefining the Human in Modern
Chinese Literature and Ideology"

 Cannibal Modernisms will be two-day conference exploring the metaphorical
implications of cannibalism in relation to literature. Taking as a
starting point  poet and polemicist Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto
Antropófago (1928), which uses the metaphor of cannibalism to describe
Brazilian artists’ capacity to absorb and reconstruct a dominant European
culture, we will expand the scope to encompass a wider investigation of
cannibalism as a metaphor for literary practices. Literature as form is
one that thrives on autophagy as a means of regeneration; in fact, we
could say that literature has always had the capacity to imbibe, reinvent
and “make new” even before the advent of modernism codified these terms in
ways now familiar. Thinking about literature, and by extension, critique,
through the lens of these cannibalistic tendencies offers an array of
possible approaches, ranging from literary, artistic, or theoretical
cannibalism as a strategy of political resistance, recuperation,devouring
genres, the text as Corpus, textual mutilation, regurgitation and
plagiarism, book materiality and decay, mimicry, “trash” theory,  immanent
or absorbed readings, self-erasure and anonymity, allegories of the human,
the post-human and trans-human conditions, and frontiers between self and
other.  Conference details will be updated on
http://cannibalmodernisms.wordpress.com
<http://cannibalmodernisms.wordpress.com/>.

Registration: Please send an email to cannibalmodernisms at gmail.com confirm
a place by October 28th, 2013. There is no charge to attend.

Provisional Schedule

Thursday, 7th November, 2013; Virginia Woolf Building 6.01

12.30pm – 1.20pm Registration and Lunch (provided)
1.20pm Welcome
1.30pm – 3.00pm
Panel 1: A Recipe for the Modern: Constructing Modernities
Veronica Frigeni (Kent), Between redemption and justice: Walter Benjamin’s
parasitical modernity
Jennifer Dorothy Lee (NYU), Cannibalizing Beauty: Gu Cheng’s Bildung and
the New Poetry in 1980s China
Mary Horgan (KCL), Money Made New: Ali Smith’s Cannibalistic, Numismatic
Modernism
3.00pm – 3.15pm Coffee Break
3.15pm – 4.45pm

Panel 2: Phagic Frontiers: Boundaries Between Subject and Object
Tiffany Yun-Chu Tsai (Irvine), The Melancholic Consumption of the Object:
Cannibalism in Republic of Wine
Mahruba Mowtushi (KCL), Title TBC
Jimmy Packham (Bristol), Cannibal lector: Herman Melville and
Cannibalistic Inscriptions
5pm Courtauld Gallery Tour
 

Friday, 8th November, 2013; River Room, Strand Campus
9.00am – 9.45am Breakfast and Registration
9.45am – 11.15am
Panel 1: Cooking the Books: Cannibalistic Creative Strategies
Teodor-George Borz (Edinburgh), Deconstruction as a Practice of Sparagmos
Mario Semiao (ULICES/Dalarna), ‘Good artists copy, great artists steal’:
On the Pictorial Cannibalism of Gabriel Josipovici
Patricia Silva McNeill (QMU/CES Coimbra): Brazilian Modernism as
Alternative Modernism: a Case Study in Modernism as a Transcultural
Phenomenon
11.15am – 1.30pm Coffee Break
11.30am – 1.00pm

Panel 2: Self-Determination or Self- Destruction?-(Re)Imagining
National/Cultural Identity
Olayinka Agbetui Fifl (Indiana), Osirism: Self Erasure and Reassemblage in
Christopher Okigbo’s ‘Labyrinths’
Todd Foley (NYU), Cannibal Cats: Animality and National Salvation in Lao
She’s Cat Country
Stewart Sanderson (Glasgow), Cultural Cannibalism and the Modern Scottish
Renaissance 
1.00pm – 1.45pm Lunch
1.45pm – 3.15pm 

Panel 3: Sick to the teeth: Cannibalistic Forms of Resistance and Rejection
Mason Golden, Catastrophe and Betrayal in Heiner Müller and Bertolt Brecht
Sasha Panaram (Duke), Underground Men: Spatial and Racial Intersections in
Invisible Man and ‘The Man Who Lived Underground’
Julian Suddaby (NYU), (In)digesting the English: Lao She’s ‘Little Po’s
Birthday’ and the malabsorption of a literary mode
3.15pm – 3.30pm Coffee Break
3.30pm – 5pm

Panel 4: The Purgation of the Self: Literary Auto-Erasure
James Bainbridge (Liverpool), ‘The bird, the fox, the quarry, the kill’:
self-erasure and anonymity in the works of A.S.J. Tessimond
Tom Geue (Trinity, Oxford), Starving the author: cannibalism and
self-erasure in Juvenal, Satire 15
Final Paper TBC
5pm – 6.30pm Keynote Lecture, JKTL Nash Theatre

Prof. Xudong Zhang (NYU), Politics of the Flesh:  The Animal in Redefining
the Human in Modern Chinese Literature and Ideology
6.30pm – 7.30pm Wine Reception, River Room
 Sponsored by the King’s College London School of Arts and Humanities, the
Comparative Literature Programme, the Lau China Institute, and the Centre
for Modern Literature and Culture.