Waiting Time
New York University
Department of Comparative Literature
Graduate Student Conference
April 17-19, 2009
Keynote Speaker: Marshall Berman
Waiting Time
What are we waiting for? What awaits us? While often dismissed as a
period of wastefulness or
lost time, waiting may also intensify experience and become a
condition in which to consider
questions of modernity, aesthetic process, politics, erotics and the
tempos of everyday life.
Amid other theorizations of time, history and eventfulness, waiting
offers a thematic axis around
which conversation among scholars from a wide range of disciplines and
critical perspectives can
emerge. How can we unsettle the received divide between waiting and
action? Or given this
divide, how can we re-think the relationship between the two? Beyond
(in)activity, how might
waiting also be conceived of as a mode of attention or practice?
Possible paper topics may include, but are by no means limited to:
-Messianism & eschatology
-Event & revolution
-Fidelity & trust
-Designing patience: waiting rooms, drawing rooms, prisons, train stations
-Style and technique: the pause (in music and beyond), rest, suspense,
seriality
-Waiting Faster: technologies of convenience, speed, acceleration
-Bureaucracy: legal process, immigration, the post, (un)employment, drudgery
-Sickness & convalescence
-Ennui, anxiety, boredom, killing time
-Erotics of waiting: desire and deferral, chastity, courtly love,
chivalric romance, sexual suspense
-Gestation, inspiration, latency
-Hope, fate, & inevitability
-Progress, process, & telos
-Revenge & ressentiment
-Waiting nations: birth, belatedness, & modernization
-Military strategy: ambush attack
-Immigration & exile
Please send a 300-word paper abstracts due January 20, 2009. Please
send abstracts via email to
WaitingTime.Spring2009_at_gmail.com.
For further conference information, please see:
http://www.waitingtimenyu.blogspot.com.
--
Yemisi Ogunleye
www.iq4news.com
Head of Communications,
MeCCSA Post-Graduate Network
website: http://www.meccsa.org.uk/pgn/
Media & Communications Dept.,
Birmingham City University,
City North Campus,
Birmingham
B42 2SU
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