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italian-studies: Scholarly discussions in any field of Italian studies Dear list members, Please find below the call for papers for the upcoming graduate conference of the University of Pittsburgh's Department of French and Italian, with an announcement of our keynote speaker. *Mosaics: Difference, Diversity and Assemblage* An Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference February 24, 2017 Pittsburgh, PA (USA) In *A Thousand Plateaus*, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari theorize the rhizome as a model for organizing knowledge that is unstructured and flows out in multiple, unforeseeable directions – the rhizome privileges notions of patchwork, multiplicity, and interaction between parts. In light of continuing approaches to artistic production that draw on rhizomatic thought, this conference proposes a reconsideration of difference and diversity in French and Italian literature, film and theory. How are representations of difference formally and textually mediated? What kinds of artistic forms suggest a conceptualization of the mosaic, and how might we think formally about aesthetic production as experimental and contestatory? From cinematic adaptations of Boccaccio’s frame tale *Decameron* to the assemblic structure of Diderot and d’Alembert’s *Encyclopédie*, from the combinatorial structure of Italo Calvino’s *Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore* to Édouard Glissant’s *créolisation*, we invite presentations that consider difference and multiplicity in textual, cinematic and theoretical terms. How can the mosaic provide a model of experimentation and innovation in literature and film, and what are the stakes when we take difference as our object of study? Possible topics include but are not limited to: - Games, puzzles and literary experimentation - Créolisation/créolité - Environmental poetics; ecocriticism - Approaches to sexual difference; materialist feminism; trans*; queer theory - Theories of space; mapping and cultural cartographies - Frame tales and *mise en abyme* - Interaction between text and image - Techniques and theories of montage and assemblage in cinema - Transtextuality; linguistic exchanges - Bodily difference; flexibility and plasticity of bodies - Affect theory, phenomenology and sensory experience - Literary and cinematic networks; production, distribution and circulation of texts - Aesthetic diversity in visual arts, performance and music - The politics of adaptation - Diversity and the global/transnational - Imagined communities and contact zones Presentations will be limited to a reading time of 15-20 minutes (8-10 pages). Please send abstracts of *200-250 words*, including department/affiliation in a Word document to [log in to unmask] by *January 4, 2017*. Papers can be in English, French or Italian (English preferred). Please include “Submission: FRIT Graduate Conference” in the subject line of your e-mail. Open to undergraduate students. We are pleased to announce *Dr. Alison James*, Associate Professor of French Literature at the *University of Chicago*, as our keynote speaker. Dr. James specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first century French literature, focusing in particular on questions of form and formalism, the everyday and documentary, and the intersections of text and image in experimental literature. -Pitt FRIT Committee, [log in to unmask] ********************************************************************** To join the list, send the message: subscribe italian-studies YOUR NAME to: [log in to unmask] To send a message to the list, address it to: [log in to unmask] To leave the list, send the message: unsubscribe italian-studies to: [log in to unmask] In order to report problems or to contact the list's owners, write to: [log in to unmask] For further information, visit our web site: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/italian-studies