cfp.english.upenn.edu

48th Annual Comparative Literature Conference
California State University, Long Beach
April 25th –April 26th, 2013
Popular Culture(s)

Plenary Speaker: Hillary Chute
Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of English, University of Chicago
Call for Papers ~ Abstracts due December 28th, 2012

Popular culture has been defined as everything from “common culture,” to “folk culture,” to “mass culture.” While it has been all of these things at various points in history, popular culture is undeniably associated with commercial culture and all its trappings: movies, television, radio, cyberspace, advertising, toys, games nearly any commodity available for purchase, many forms of art, photography, games, and even group “experiences” like collective comet-watching.

This interdisciplinary conference aims to examine and critically engage with issues related to “Popular Culture” across various time periods, cultures, concerns and mediums. The conference hopes to explore the ongoing analysis of the varied creative trends and alternative cultural movements that comprise popcultures and subcultures within both cultural and political contexts. Of particular interest are papers that pertain to the various forms of popular culture, including literature, music, film, television, advertising, sports, fashion, toys, magazines, video games, games and comic books, and the medium in which this message moves, cyberculture.

“Popular Culture(s)” is the 48th Annual Comparative Literature Conference, an interdisciplinary gathering of scholars, artists, and practitioners from all walks of popular culture, the arts and the academy, that aims to consider Popular Culture in a broad scale across time periods, disciplines and languages. It seeks to examine literature, images, visual objects and mechanisms, the political and social events from diverse cultures, across national boundaries, and within global contexts.

Among the questions to be explored are:
* Digital Cultures and/or Community
* Videogames and Narrative
* Folklore, Mythology and Popular Culture
* Film
* Sports
* Television
* Comix/Anime/Manga
* Videogames
* Science Fiction & Popular Culture
* Popular Culture & the Classical
* Medieval, Renaissance & Early Modern Popular Cultures
* The Political & the Popular (i.e. Class, Ethnicity and Race)
* Gender, Queer Studies & the Popular
* Popular Culture & Censorship
* Popular Culture & Visual Representation

We invite proposals for papers that deal with the role of Popular Culture, popular mediums and its relationship to the written and/or spoken word and other disciplines and methodologies.
Participant from different fields — literary theory and philosophy, political science, history, creative writing, aesthetics, film studies, art history and theory, theater, fine arts, graphic design, culture studies, visual and media studies, digital media and electronic arts, sociology, psychology, and cognitive science — are invited to submit an abstract.
To propose a PAPER, please send an electronic 250-word abstract along with an attached brief one-page c.v. no later than December 28th, 2012, to Dr. Nhora Serrano at the conference email: 48thcomplitconf@gmail.com.

* Official Conference webpage:
http://www.csulb.edu/colleges/cla/departments/complit-classics/comp-lit-...