Hotel Cosmopolitan (ACLA Chicago Seminar—March 16th-19th)
This panel brings together diverse readings of the hotel as a peculiarly evocative transfer point in narratives of modernity and postmodernity. It examines the uncanny power of the hotel to symbolize many of the key attributes of modern and contemporary writing, cinema, art, and, indeed, subjectivity: freedom, mobility, anonymity, alienation, limitless self-recreation (to name a few).