cfp.english.upenn.edu

CALL for PAPERS: The Open I: Decoding Exposure
Sixth Annual Brooklyn College Graduate English Conference
April 13, 2013
Keynote: Wayne Koestenbaum, Distinguished Professor of English, CUNY Graduate Center

“Instant communication mechanisms are especially gifted at spreading humiliation’s toxic cloud. Does virtual communication make desubjectification easy? The same could have been said about the telephone or the telegraph. Or the typewriter.” – Wayne Koestenbaum, Humiliation
“The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture”
– Roland Barthes, Death of the Author

Social media has reinvented the contemporary citizen. The open I is a body straddling multiple planes of existence, as strands of DNA are replaced with streams of data, multiplying selves as new codes for communication are created with each click, like and link. Like Barthes’ tissue of quotations, the social media outlet is infinitely diverse but inescapably singular, perpetually informing and constraining incidences of original voice. The spontaneous development of the digital panopticon has redefined boundaries of exposure and interiority, observer and observed. The public and private self has converged, with aliases informing identity. The reach of the lens has become so expansive it has nearly rendered itself invisible, with surveillance becoming an integral facet of millennial life. What questions does the open I raise in regards to exposure and individuality in an age of technological supplication?
The Open I: Decoding Exposure seeks to explore the ramifications of the transformation of the contemporary social milieu. We invite submissions from all, including but not limited to literary studies of authors, texts and genres.
Possible topics may include the following:
• Blogging Autobiography
• #TwitLit: Narrative in 140 characters or less
• Hash Tags and Eco's Theory of Metaphor
• Scanning, the New Reading
• Youtube and the New Celebrity
• Media and the Millennials: Reality Blurred
• Image, Music, Text: Presentations of Self
• Humiliation as Spectator Sport
• Boundary Crossing: Transnational Communication on the Web
• LiveStreaming: Protest and Digital Surveillance
• Memory, Memoir & Technology
• Gender & Digital Identity as Performance
• Intellectual Freedom and Other Dangerous Ideas
• The Future Canon: We Will Know When We Get There
• Open Access
• E-readers, Apps and iPhones: Redefining Voice
• Beyond New Wave Cinema
• Queer Identity and the Digital Sphere
• Photography and Culture
• Dystopian Literature and Systems of Control
• Simulated Realities
• Language and Digital Communications
• Digital Technology and Cognitive Functions
• Illustrating Identity: Beyond Comix
• Reconstruction of Metanarratives
• Towards a "Unified Ratio Among the Senses"
• From Missed Connections to Adult Services: Trade and Traffic
• Disembodiment and Identity Politics
• Caricatures and Social Media Selves
• The Fragmentation of the Self and Discourse
• Oversharing and Overexposure
Abstracts of no more than 300 words are due February 1, 2013. Send them by Word attachment to bcgradconference@gmail.com.