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:
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]
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.