-----Original Message-----
From: ESRCs East West Programme [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Serguei A. Oushakine
Sent: Thursday, May 01, 2014 2:33 PM
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Subject: Princeton Conjunction - 2014. Conference Program: Romantic Subversions of Soviet Enlightenment: Questioning Socialism’s Reason (May 9-10, 2014, Princeton)

 

May 9-10, 2014

 

PRINCETON CONJUNCTION – 2014. AN ANNUAL INTERDISCIPLINARY CONFERENCE

 

http://sotsromantizm.princeton.edu/

 

While many  recent studies of late socialism are structured around metaphors of absence and detachment, we want to shift attention to concepts, institutions, spaces, objects, and identities that enabled (rather than prevented) individual and collective involvement with socialism. Sotsromantizm offers a ground from which to challenge the emerging dogma that depicts late Soviet society as a space where pragmatic cynics coexisted with useful idiots of the regime. The romantic sensibility sought to discover new spaces for alternative forms of affective attachment and social experience; it also helped to curtail the self-defeating practices of disengagement and indifference. The conference aims at analyzing the double nature of sotsromantizm, understood both as a critique of the Soviet Enlightenment and as an alternative form of Soviet socialism.

 

ROMANTIC SUBVERSIONS OF SOVIET ENLIGHTENMENT: QUESTIONING SOCIALISM’S REASON

 

CONFERENCE PROGRAM

Friday, May 9, 2014

 

9.00 – 11.00

Panel 1.       DEVILS, GHOSTS, MAGICIANS, AND PROMETHEUS

Moderator: MARK LIPOVETSKY (University of Colorado at Boulder)

 

ILONA KISS (Russian Institute for Advanced Study / Sholokhov State University in Humanities, Moscow)

Prometheus vs. Woland: Transacting Sotsromantizm between Hungary and the USSR

PHILIP GLEISSNER (Princeton University)

The Art of Wandering while Standing Still: Romantic Delusions in the Prose of Stagnation

YVONNE HOWELL (University of Richmond)

From Sots-Rom to the Rom-Com: How “Ponedel’nik nachinaetsia v subbotu” Became “Charodei”

ALAINA LEMON (University of Michigan)

After “Kinoglaz,” post “Ochi Chernye”: the Magical Gaze in Late Soviet Worlds

 

11.30 – 13.30

Panel 2.      ROMANTIC SPACES & ORGANIC ORDERS

Moderator: DEVIN FORE (Princeton University)

 

ILYA KALININ (Saint Petersburg State University/Neprikosnovennyi Zapas)

Russian Cosmism in the Depths of the Soviet Cosmos

JULIANA MAXIM (University of San Diego)

Socialist Pastoral: Intersections between the Folk and the Modern

JOHANNA CONTERIO (Harvard University)

Developed Socialism on Rest: Spiritual Pleasures and Landscapes of Health in the USSR

OLIVER SUKROW (University of Heidelberg / Central Institute for Art History Munich)

Subversive Landscapes: Wolfgang Mattheuer’s Landscape Paintings and the Romantic Tradition in the Visual Arts of the GDR

 

14.30 – 16.30

Panel 3.      SPIRITUAL HEROES

Moderator: VICTORIA SMOLKIN-ROTHROCK (Wesleyan University)

 

ELENA GAPOVA (Western Michigan University)

Castles, Princes and Other Aristocrats of Late Soviet Belarus: Gentrifying the Nation

THOMAS ROWLEY (University of Cambridge)

Modelling Mayakovsky: Sacrifice, Self-fashioning and Dissent in the 1960s

SONJA LUEHRMANN (Simon Fraser University, Canada)

Religious Revival or Sotsromantizm? Reconsidering the Dynamics of Brezhnev-Era Spiritual Culture

ELEANOR PEERS (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, in Halle/Saale)

Surpassing The Romantic: The Shaman in the Poetics of Sakha’s National Revival

 

17.00 – 19.00

Panel 4.    AFFECTIVE ASSEMBLAGES

Moderator: SERGUEI OUSHAKINE (Princeton University)

 

ALEXEY GOLUBEV (University of British Columbia)

Affective Machines or the Inner Self? Drawing the Borders of the Female Body in Late Soviet Culture

ANNA FISHZON (Williams College)

Time and the Romantic Sensibility in Brezhnev-Era Animation

ALEKSANDR MERGOLD (Cornell University)

Ensemble Koh-I-Noor: The Unlikely Cultural Chronicle of the Late Soviet Epoch

JULIANE SCHICKER (The Pennsylvania State University)

Romanticism at the Gewandhaus? Masur, Mahler, and the Socialist Canon in the GDR

 

Saturday, May 10, 2014.

 

9.30 – 11.30

Panel 5.    FIERY REVOLUTIONARIES

Moderator: MICHAEL KUNICHIKA (New York University)

 

IVAN PESHKOV (Adam Mickiewicz University)

Dreaming about Wild  Cossacks: Ataman Semenov and Memory Work in Transbaikalia

IGOR GULIN (Kommersant Weekend)

Gleb Panfilov’s “No Path Through Fire”: Reinventing Revolution for the “Thaw”

POLLY JONES (University of Oxford)

Romantika with(out) Romantizm?: “The Fiery Revolutionaries” Biographical Series in Late Socialism

SERGEY TOYMENTSEV (Rutgers University)

Revolutionary Sublime, Romantic Ennui and the Crisis of the Soviet Action-Image

 

12.00 – 13.45

Keynote Address:

BORIS GASPAROV (Columbia University),

Conquering the Present: Soviet Culture in the Wake of the Stalinist Epoch

 

14.30 – 16.00

Panel 6.   ROMANTIC POETICS

Moderator: MARIJETA BOZOVIC (Yale University)

 

GALINA RYLKOVA (University of Florida)

A Poet Must Suffer: Attempts at Re-Romanticizing the Life of a Russian/Soviet Poet in the 1950s-1970s

RAISA SIDENOVA (Yale University)

From Pravda to Vérité: “Poetic Schools” in Post-Stalinist Documentary Cinema

KEVIN M. F. PLATT (University of Pennsylvania)

Latvian Documentary Cinema: from Lyrical Socialism to Singing Revolution

 

16.30 – 18.30

Panel 7.   SOCIALIST ROMANTICS?

Moderator: VADIM BASS (European University, St. Petersburg)

 

KATARÍNA LICHVÁROVÁ (The Courtauld Institute of Art, London)

Viktor Pivovarov: Romanticizing Loneliness, Conceptualizing Socialism

DANIIL LEIDERMAN (Princeton University)

What Happened to the “Romantic” in “Moscow Romantic Conceptualism”?

MATTEO BERTELE’ (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice)

“The Builders of Bratsk” at the 1962 Venice Biennale: A Missed Connection

COURTNEY DOUCETTE (Rutgers University)

Sotsromantizm in the Age of Perestroika

 

18.45- 19.30

Roundtable: SOTSROMANTIZM: WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?

Participants: Mark Lipovetsky, Marijeta Bozovic, and Vadim Bass.

Moderator: Serguei Oushakine.

 

Program committee:

Serguei Oushakine, Chair (Princeton University)

Marijeta Bozovic (Yale University)

Helena Goscilo (The Ohio State University)

Mark Lipovetsky (The University of Colorado at Boulder)

Vera Tolz-Zilitinkevic (The University of Manchester)

 

Sponsored by Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies; Program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies; Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.

 

Contacts: Kathleen B. Allen, Program Manager, Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, 210B Aaron Burr Hall, Princeton Univeristy, Princeton, NJ  08544, 609-258-5978 (office), 609-258-3988 (fax). [log in to unmask]