------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
Date: Sun, 28 Feb 1999 00:18:28 -0400
From: "C.Lorey" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
CALL FOR PAPERS
Articles needed for
GERMANS AT THEIR BEST
MAKING USE OF MATERIAL AND MASS POPULAR CULTURE
a scholarly edition which seeks to provide an exacting and revealing
understanding of the obsessions, habits, and desires of modern German
society by investigating the very German relations to German produced
and/or consumed popular culture artifacts.
RATIONALE
All objects of (mass) popular culture are invested with messages that
provide an understanding of the society in which they appear. Popular
culture takes risks, plays with meaning, and determines behavior. Everyone
is involved in popular culture, particularly the inhabitants of an
industrialized nation such as Germany. In fact, Germans seem to be at their
best when creating, consuming, and dealing with popular culture.
The study of popular commodity consumption promises to expose critical
dimensions of a highly complex, material-based dialogue in and on German
society via its images and forms. We propose that the traditional academic
division between 'high-brow' and 'low-brow' culture - perpetuated to this
day by the German academy - is reductive, inadequate, and misleading for
understanding the Germans as a people. While it is well known that Germans
are good at producing Beethoven and Faust, the symbolic cultural uses to
which Germans put material items or systems, such as mass-consumed
chocolate bars, organized tourism, or environmentally friendly mail order
catalogs, etc., have remained largely unexamined. An applied analysis of
objects and their material nature, as keys to the way Germans configure
their world, comprises an essential, yet currently missing, component of
German cultural studies.
Our aim is to enrich the traditional study of German culture by offering an
interdisciplinary forum that gives room to the treatment of nontraditional
textual forms such as everyday commodities, artifacts, and cultural events.
We invite papers that discuss the shape, design, fabric, material,
distribution, marketing, consumption, myths, connotations, and intentions
of specific objects that enable their use as representations of social
standards, goals, and beliefs. We invite papers that combine theoretical
approaches with the consideration of objects as text; that discuss the
symbolic power and materiality of objects along with the social
organization about them.
We also encourage investigations into the aesthetic practices of the items
of commodity culture as a means of unpacking the everyday resolution of
encounters between global and local systems, collective and individual
beliefs. In short, we ask: How have Germans spoken as producers, consumers,
and users of popular commodities since the beginning of the Industrial
Revolution?
PARTICULARLY WELCOME
are papers (original contributions only) investigating :
* Film, photography, advertising, magazines and the press, TV and radio,
the Internet, postcards, graffiti, sci-fi, pulp fiction, comics, cookbooks,
exhibitions, trade fairs, and other forms of popular media;
* dance halls, cabaret and pop songs, cafes and bars, carnival, Love
Parade, sports, travel and tourism, theme parks, toys, comedians and
satire, icons and celebrities, popular thinkers;
* food, drink, smoking, drugs;
* sex, love, romance, pornography;
* furniture and appliances, ornaments and kitsch, nature parks and gardens,
monuments, street signs, the architecture of private homes and public
buildings;
* Green products and labels, Heimatkultur, Ostalgie.
Contributions may endeavor to reflect upon the following questions:
** Which objects are emphatically engaged in the material communication
processes of cultural values in Germany?
** How does the pleasurable consumption of commodities inflect the broader
social and symbolic relations between German consumers and German or
international producers?
** How do the nature and content of manipulative messages sent from 'above'
find form? How does consumer choice intercept or dispute these messages?
** How does the perspective of a material focus interlock with ongoing
debates on national and class histories, feminist, gender, and queer
concerns, and matters related to ethnography and pedagogy?
** How are boundaries and stereotypes negotiated by the social dialogues
contained in material and mass popular culture items?
** How does popular culture construct or deconstruct stereotypical national
identifiers (such as Germans as serious, organized, hardworking people) in
the cycle of production and consumption?
** How do popular culture artifacts uphold or bridge the gaps between
mainstream and minority cultures?
Abstracts and papers in English.
Deadline for ABSTRACTS: July 30, 1999
Deadline for PAPERS: February 10, 2000
Send abstracts and inquiries to:
Chris Lorey / John L. Plews
Department of German and Russian
University of New Brunswick
Box 4400
Fredericton, NB
Canada E3B 3V8
[log in to unmask] / [log in to unmask]
Phone (506) 458-7715
Fax (506) 453-4659
Please post / forward this call
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The editors are pleased to announce the publication of their recent volume
"Queering the Canon: Defying Sights in German Literature and Culture"
(Camden House, 1998), 500+ pp., ill., index, ISBN 1-57113-178-7.
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* Chris Lorey, Associate Professor of German
* Department of German and Russian
* University of New Brunswick
* Box 4400
* Fredericton, N.B.
* Canada E3B 5A3
*
* phone (506) 458-7715
* fax (506) 453-4659
* e-mail: [log in to unmask]
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