Master dialectician Fredric Jameson is giving the plenary address at this
coming weekend's Historical Materialism conference at SOAS in London, a rare
public appearence in the UK. Jameson has lent his considerable academic
capital to the editorial advisory board at ImageText.
Though he hasn't written directly about comics, as the author of The Political
Unconscious; Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism; and
Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson's materialist critique remains an
important cultural resource for all of us wherever we position ourselves and in
whatever field. Famous for periodising the postmodern, his theorising on the
subject (along with Jean Baudrillard and Donna Haraway) is quite simply
uncircumventable, and his focus on issues of space, allegory and
representation links his work to questions of form and history in the comics
medium.
Fantasy/SF author/critical theorist China Mieville is also speaking. Mieville has
recently written a story for Hellblazer, and the graphic novella (with Liam
Sharpe) 'On the way to the front' appears in his short story collection 'Looking
for Jake'.
See attachment and link for details:
http://mercury.soas.ac.uk/hm/conference2009.htm
Thanks to Maggie Gray for updating me on this...
Best etc.
Tony Venezia
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