MCLC: cannibal modernisms grad conference--cfp

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Anup Grewal <anupgi at gmail.com>
Subject: cannibal modernisms grad conference--cfp
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Dear List Members,

Please circulate this CFP widely.  We are honoured that Professor Zhang
Xudong will be the keynote for this comparative literature conference.

Many thanks,

Anup Grewal

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Cannibal Modernisms
King’s College London Programme in Comparative Literature
Annual Graduate Conference
Friday, November 8th, 2013

Call For Papers Deadline: August 10th, 2013

Keynote Speaker: Professor Xudong Zhang, Professor of East Asian Studies
and Comparative Literature, New York University.

 
Cannibal Modernisms will be a one-day colloquium 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
-        Frontiers between self and other
-        Any other topics or metaphors pertaining to theme.
-         
Abstracts of 300 words  should be sent to cannibalmodernisms at gmail.com by
August 10th, 2013.  Conference details will be updated on
http://cannibalmodernisms.wordpress.com

Xudong Zhang

It is with great pleasure that we announce our keynote speaker, Professor
Xudong Zhang, Professor of East Asian Studies and Comparative Literature
at New York University, where he is also Chair of the Department of East
Asian Studies. Xudong Zhang’s teaching and research focuses on modernism
and modernity within and beyond the Chinese context. He is author of
several books, including: Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms:
Cultural Fever, Avant-Garde Fiction, and New Chinese Cinema; and
Postsocialism and Cultural Politics: The Last Decade of China's Twentieth
Century. He has also edited Whither China? Intellectual Politics in
Contemporary China. and co-edited (with Arif Dirlik) Postmodernism and
China.  In Chinese, he is the author of The Order of the Imaginary:
Critical Theory and Modern Chinese Literary Discourse, Traces of
Criticism: Essays on Theory and Cultural Politics and Cultural Identity in
the Age of Globalization: A Historical Rethinking of Western Discourses on
Universalism.  He has translated into Chinese Walter Benjamin’s Charles
Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism; co-translated
(with Ban Wang), Illuminations, and edited The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism: Selected Essays of Fredric Jameson. Professor Zhang’s visit to
King’s College is kindly sponsored by the Lau China Institute at King’s
College London.