CFP: Historicizing Aesthetics/Aestheticizing History (grad) (2/1/06; 4/7/06-4/8/06)
Graduate students of the University of Pittsburgh Department of English invite the submission of abstracts for papers and preconstituted panels, along with works of poetry and prose, for an interdisciplinary conference, April 7-8 2006:

Historicizing Aesthetics/Aestheticizing History:
Theory, Practice and Pedagogy of (Un)Making History
We need history, certainly, but we need it for reasons different from those for which the idler in the garden of knowledge needs it… We need it, that is to say, for the sake of life and of action…
- Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations
deadline - Aprile, 1
As film, literature and composition scholars, and as teachers and writers, we understand artistic and literary production and their scholarly investigation as sites of contest for making and unmaking histories, consolidating or rupturing historical forces. We believe that literature, film, poetry, and essay demand the reconsideration of the relationship between presentness, pastness, and the production of future alternatives.

This conference focuses on questions at the intersection of “history” broadly conceived and “aesthetics” revisited, and aims to provoke generative interdisciplinary discussion on the uses and disadvantages of history for theory, for practice, for pedagogy, for life and for the possibilities of Becoming.

In the spirit of interdisciplinary inquiry, this conference will include a poetry and prose reading, welcome and keynote address by professors/poets Lynn Emanuel and Paul Kameen of the University of Pittsburgh, and a live
performance of “The Living Nickelodeon” by renowned film scholar, pianist
and singer Dr. Rick Altman of the University of Iowa.

We seek papers and pre-constituted panels engaging with theory, practice and pedagogy of history/histories and the aesthetic. We also invite creative works in the forms of poetry and prose that engage with the conference’s themes.

Possible topics may include:
• The History of Aesthetics
• Aesthetics of History
• The End of History
• The End of Art
• Aesthetics after historicity
• Histories of Representation: book, film, new media
• Masterworks and Canonicity
• Transcendent Beauty and the Historical Subject (Enlightenment, post-enlightenment, the persistence of Romanticism and the Modern)
• Melodrama and the Operatic
• Allegory and Myth
• Linear and nonlinear conceptions of History: Reversal, the Eternal Return
• Determinacy and Radical Contingency
• History, Aesthetics and the Body
• Historical Preservation and/as Self Preservation
• Local and Alternative Histories
• Post-coloniality and globality as alternate forms of historicizing
• Aesthetics of the Essay
• Histories in Composition and Creative Writing Classrooms
• Irrelevance, Irreverence and the Counterfactual
• Forgetting and Remembrance
• Memory and Memoir

Please submit a 300-500 word abstract for individual paper, 750 word abstract for pre-constituted panel, or full text of works of poetry and prose, and a brief biographical sketch (50 words or less) of all participants to englgso@pitt.edu by February 1.
Papers should be 15-20 minutes in length.
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