Ever since 'Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture' announced its open research program, it has been hard to dismiss its excellent line-up of speakers, both academics and artists. Amongst the names is that of Akira Mizuta Lippit, whose presentation "Like Cats and Dogs - Cinema and Catastrophe" at The Museum of Kyoto on 21 June 2013 was expanded into an essay published digitally in both Japanese and English.
Broaching such classic subjects as mixing metaphors, catastrophe and kitlers, Lippit performs his hallmark critical analysis with gusto on the films of D. W. Griffith, Leni Riefenstahl and Alain Resnais, quite cheekily linking catachresis, cats and filmic representation, and suggesting by the end, "Isn't every film image ultimately a cat?"
"But does a real cat (and cats are always real, it seems) have to be in every scene of catachresis? Is this the way to underscore the rhetoric as if there were some natural and thus non-catachrestic relation between the image of the cat and the trope of catachresis? Are cats the real figures of catachresis? Is a scene of catachresis without a cat incomplete, a catalexis?"
The essay can be found on the Parasophia website, available for download in ePub and pdf formats.
Jonathan Kemp's new book The Penetrated Male, published through open-access outfit Punctum Books, takes a discursive tour through key texts of early twentieth century literature to locate and unpack the lurking concept of the penetrated male body filling their pages.
From Daniel Paul Schreber through to James Joyce, The Penetrated Male assembles an argument which pushes against the binary reduction of the penetrated male with the feminine and its consequent threat of its erasure. Kemp draws together the threads of this incomprehensibility and inarticulability, outlining the struggle and the tantalising/terrifying failure of the logic of language to circumscribe the rupture posed by the penetrated male body. What he also finds in this pursuit is "a profoundly productive aspect of discourse, generating ways of opening up the male body":
"The penetrated male body ... is capable of not only exposing the gendered structuration of language, but of destroying the entire structure and using the pieces to build something else entirely: a form of representation more grounded in the shifting realities of flux and sensations, more geared towards registering the intensities of material bodies."
The Penetrated Male is available for free download from the Punctum Books website. You may also want to take some time to browse their catalogue of books, and journals published (not to mention their associated titles), many of which are open-access or print-on-demand if required in hard-copy.
For the brave amongst us, April 2013 presents a cornucopia of UK conference choices to whet the appetite of the serious horror buff. On 13 April, Plymouth University hosts a one-day symposium entitled Zombies: Walking, Eating and Performance, designed "to explore, interrogate and celebrate zombies as a cultural phenomenon through the paradigms of performance, as well as models of performance through the quintessential zombie activities of eating and walking". Contributors are asked to focus on the contemporary (rather than historical) zombie mythos, and are encouraged to take an interdisciplinary approach to a wide range of topics from the ethics of survival in zombie landscapes to zombie gaming and acting dead.
The deadline for proposals to this symposium is set for 30 November of this year. All delegates will also be invited to a zombie film festival which takes place the evening of 12 April and will have the option to participate in an "early morning performance, Just after Dawn of the Dead, in the streets of Plymouth, followed by a conference breakfast".
Manchester-based creative writing and literature collective Hic Dragones follows up zombie marches with a like-minded conference focus, Cannibals: Cannibalism, Consumption and Culture, on 25-26 April 2013. Not quite as specifically concentrated on contemporary modes, this two-day conference seeks papers from all disciplines which address cannibalism in any setting, "from contemporary horror film to Eucharistic devotion, from Freudian theory to science fiction" and beyond. It seeks proposals on topics such as theorisations of cannibalism, maternal infanticide and eating the enemy. The deadline for proposal submission is set at 31 December 2012.
The Bodies in Movement Seminar Series, with the support of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), is excited to present Stuart Elden, Professor in the Department of Geography at Durham University, as our third and last guest speaker for our Spring-Summer 2012 series of seminars. The afternoon seminar will take place on 2 July at IASH in Edinburgh.
Elden's challenging and interdisciplinary work in human geography and geopolitics has garnered him international recognition in a broad range of research fields. His present interests now turn towards Shakespearean geographies, "territory" and its definitional entanglements, and a critical revisioning of the forces at play in both text and territory when each informs the other. At this BiM Seminar, Elden turns a scrutinising eye on Coriolanus (the text and its recent 2011 cinematic counterpart starring Ralph Fiennes and Gerard Butler), then we open the floor to intimate discussion of his recent related work.
This is a free event, but booking
is essential. Participants are asked to read the following texts in advance,
which will be provided by the organisers upon confirmation of attendance:
- "Land, Terrain, Territory."
Progress in Human Geography 34.6: 799-817.
- "The Geopolitics of King Lear:
Territory, Land, Earth." Law and Literature
25 (forthcoming).
To secure a place at the seminar,
please email one of the conference organisers. Further details on the BiM
Seminar Series is available here.
Lena Wånggren (l.e.wanggren@sms.ed.ac.uk)
Kamillea Aghtan (kamillea@hotmail.com)
Karin Sellberg (k.j.k.sellberg@gmail.com)
Seminar Timetable
- 2:00-2:15pm Introduction
- 2:15-3:15pm Key Speaker
- 3:15-3:45pm Tea and Coffee
- 3:45-4:45pm Responses
- 4:45-6:00pm Open Discussion
Held at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, 2 Hope Park Square, Edinburgh EH8 9NW.
On 2 June 2012, a certain seminar room of the Humanities Institute of Ireland at the University Colleges Dublin campus saw a star-studded lineup of speakers and guests to honour the life and work of legendary literary critic J. Hillis Miller. The event, "Sign, Sealing, Sailing: The Life and Work of J. Hillis Miller", involved speakers such as Martin McQuillan, Nicholas Royle and Miller himself, as well as the first Irish screening of the feature-length, The First Sail: J. Hillis Miller (2012), introduced by the director, Dragan Kujundžić.
The interview with Miller which closed the event has been recorded and archived online at the UCD Humanities Institute of Ireland website; the podcast is also freely available via iTunes. Delightfully conversational and crowded with Miller's charming personal anecdotes, the interview is conducted by the organisers Michael O'Rourke and Éamonn Dunne, and is comprised of a selection of questions formulated beforehand by the speakers. Stay tuned to the end to hear Miller's recollections of Barbara Johnson and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and a curiously (and self-acknowledged) evasive reply on the subject of his mother.
"Which philosopher would I chose to be my mother? ... It wouldn't be Derrida or de Man or Kant or Hegel. I think I would have like to have had J. L. Austin, the author of How to Do Things with Words ... I never met him - and I don't think he was particularly motherly - but, nevertheless, it's a nice fantasy."
In a two-day conference hosted by Birkbeck (University of London) and the Serpentine Gallery on 27-28 April of this year, Homi Bhabha will lead what will no doubt be a challenging and completely absorbing discussion on W. H. Auden's The Age of Anxiety and Hannah Arendt oeuvre.
Due to its popularity, the venue of the conference has been shifted and as a result further places are available for reservation through the Birkbeck website. Kicking off with a performances, readings and a keyote by Homi Bhabha on the evening on the first day, this will be followed by another keynote and a fairly scholarly schedule of speakers on the second day. And, best of all, the event is free of charge.
"participants will investigate ... in particular the links between the works, the relevance of poetry and the wider issue of security. This multi-disciplinary event will include lectures, discussions, screenings, poetry readings and performances to examine essential questions about the relationship between poetry, politics and art."
The London Conference in Critical Thought host their inaugural conference on 29-30 June of this year, supported by the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. Engaging with the "critical" tradition, the LCCT is especially seeking out those who fall within the fringes and margins of their academic disciplines in the humanities and social sciences to share their work within a collaborative, interdisciplinary setting.
The conference is divided into sixteen streams (and one catchall, "general" stream), which focus on, inter alia, law and culture, objects and time, Deleuze, animality, cosmopolitics, critiquing critical theory and the ethics of radical politics. Further stream descriptions can be found on their website.
"The LCCT aims to provide an opportunity for those who frequently find themselves at the margins of their department or discipline to engage with other scholars who share theoretical approaches and interests. Interdisciplinary and inter-institutional, the conference hopes to foster emergent critical thought and provide new avenues for critically orientated scholarship and collaboration."
Held at Birkbeck College (University of London), the conference is free to all participants. Their call for papers and panels ends on 19 February, so those interested should send in their proposals very soon.
Rachel C. Lee delves into the techno-textural and spices it with a literary turn in her new article, "Haptics, Mobile Hendhelds, and other 'Novel' Devices: The Tactile Unconscious of Reading across Old and New Media" for CTheory's Theory Beyond the Codes.
An analytical reading of Monique Truong's The Book of Salt (2003) is embedded in the heart of Lee's article, but one which is provokingly framed by consideration of new media's haptic concerns - from the "stretch-and-pinch" of the iPhone to the sticky "glaze" of the immersive console gaming experience. By repositioning literary analysis within a web of "multipoint tactilities", Lee seeks to highlight the affective possibilities of literature's ludic interactivity.
"...my point has been not so much to align Truong's novel with the console game's flashing images that the user now putatively physically controls ... as much as to provoke, through the analysis of the novel's tactile devices, recognition of new media's emphasis on interactivity (that narrower meaning of tactility) as thoroughly caught up in a cognitive challenge. Cognitive challenge is at the core of immersion..."
