UPDATE: [Religion] Graduate Conference: Elitism, aesthetics, globalization and the future of literature

full name / name of organization: 
Michael Dery

Deadline Extended - Friday, February 6th, 2009

7th Annual Concordia University Graduate English Colloquium â€" Call for
Papers

Got class?:
Elitism, aesthetics, globalization and the future of literature
(interdisciplinary and creative submissions welcome)

Despite centuries of development in the organization of political systems
as well as the theory and practice of human rights, class remains as
complex and relevant an issue today as it has been for a multitude of
previous commentators. Globalization has reshaped our views of
historically rigid class stratifications and created an entirely new set
of class distinctions that challenge the notion of a more permeable
contemporary social reality. With an interdependent global economy
distributing culture as well as capital, questions of agency, power,
taste, and privilege are being reconfigured in multiple spheres, creating
new polarizations and dismantling old paradigms. In a globalized world,
who has access to what resources, and how is this access negotiated (or
not)? Do discussions around class erode or reify class boundaries? How
do mass media and dominant modes of cultural production impact ideas of
aestheticism and cultural value in the global landscape? Do certain forms
of literature speak directly to class, and can the seemingly “elite”
domain of literature accurately represent underprivileged or marginalized
classes? What textual strategies give social structure to a fictive
world? How do the various guises that class takes structure subjectivity,
identity, and narrative?
The 7th annual Concordia Graduate Colloquium, hosted by the English
Department, invites emerging critics to engage with the question of class
in its literary, philosophical, aesthetic, cultural and political guises.
Papers may be inspired by, but are not limited to, the following
• Performance and perceptions of class
• Renewing and/or resisting aesthetic ideology
• Writing/reading class, the author and class
• “High” art vs. commercial, lowbrow, or pop art
• Gentrification and the bourgeois
• Marginality, “alternative” culture, and the subaltern
• The canon and elitism
• Race, ethnicity, and hyphenated identities
• Gender, power, and agency

Please send a 200-300 word abstract by Friday, February 6th, 2009 to:

Graduate Colloquium
c/o Department of English, Concordia University
1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. West
Montreal, Quebec
H3G 1M8

by email: colloquiumconcordia_at_gmail.com

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Received on Thu Jan 29 2009 - 17:27:01 EST

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