MCLC: Aesthetics of Imprisonment--cfp

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MCLC LIST
Aesthetics of Imprisonment–cfp
American Comparative Literature Association, Annual Conference
March 17-20, 2016
Harvard University
Aesthetics of Imprisonment
http://www.acla.org/seminar/aesthetics-imprisonment
Organizer: Yenna Wu, University of California, Riverside
Co-Organizer: Adhira Mangalagiri, University of Chicago
Call for Papers:
Studying the aesthetics of political prison literature – writings by political prisoners during or about their imprisonment – is considered controversial, even unethical. Barbara Harlow, for example, has argued that “reading prison writing must…demand a correspondingly activist counterapproach to that of passivity, aesthetic gratification, and the pleasures of consumption that are traditionally sanctioned by the academic disciplining of literature.” Indeed, political prison literature has been importantly harnessed in the service of human rights and legal reform activism, particularly in the post-9/11 era. However, arguments such as Harlow’s can also too easily conflate the literary study of aesthetics with “passivity,” and assume that attention to aesthetics comes at the cost of considering the prisoners’ suffering or the injustice of totalitarian regimes. This seminar questions such views of literary studies by asking how attention to aesthetics and literary theory illuminates, rather than suppresses, the politics and ethics of political prison literature.
The prison cell, taken as a literary and theoretical site, stages complex negotiations between such foundational philosophical concepts as exteriority and interiority, public and private, and body and soul. In its ability to probe beyond content-level analysis of prison texts, a study of aesthetics can address prisoners’ stylistic, formal, and imaginative choices (or lack thereof), while analyzing politically-charged immanent and transcendent experiences within and beyond the cell.
Building on recent scholarship on the aesthetics of political imprisonment, as well as ongoing reiterations of the Humanities’ constant struggle to assert its value, this seminar invites discussion on how literary studies can in fact produce valuable understandings of prisoners’ writings. How can attention to literary detail shed new light on prison writings that have so far been read predominantly within historico-political contexts? How have prisoners implicitly or explicitly participated in and contributed to aesthetic thought, literary spheres, and poetic traditions? Can comparative approaches to reading political prison literature produce a global aesthetics of carceral experience without erasing differences?
In addition to such questions, contributors may consider:
Theoretical relationships between colonialism, capitalism, and political imprisonment in texts from pre-modern, modern, or contemporary periods
Fictional depictions of political prisons and texts by non-prisoners imagining imprisonment
Disciplinary approaches on political prison literature and aesthetics of imprisonment within Comparative Literature and “world literature”
Comparative studies of prison literatures across political, cultural, temporal, geographic, historical, or generic divides
Submissions:
If interested, we encourage you to email us with your intended paper topic at yenna.wu at ucr.edu and amangalagiri at uchicago.edu before submitting your proposal.
Proposals of 1500 characters (roughly 300 words) must be submitted through the ACLA website by 12 a.m. PST on Wednesday, September 23, 2015.
To submit a proposal, go to the seminar page (http://www.acla.org/seminar/aesthetics-imprisonment) and click “Login/Register to submit a paper for this seminar.”
Further information about ACLA’s submission guidelines can be found here: http://www.acla.org/node/add/paper.
Please address questions to Adhira Mangalagiri (amangalagiri at uchicago.edu).
by denton.2 at osu.edu on September 11, 2015
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