Rethinking Crisis & Status Quo

In Literature and Evil, Bataille argues for a close connection between literature and "Evil" as a sovereign and productive value, which is defined against an oppressive use of reason that "flattens" all knowledge into a reductive uniformity. Bataille finds in Blake's A Marriage of Heaven and Hell "agitations", "poetic violence" and "lacerations" that occur in Blake’s drive towards human totality and death. At the same time, Bataille observes that this violence and Evil also "raise us to glory" in Blake's attribution to Evil of "the wisdom of Hell that heralds ... truth” --albeit a truth irreducible to representation, priority of the logos, and assimilation by reason.

Every community craves a sense of identity in this world, and continuity with the cultural past. This is more so with the communities whose language, literature and culture are on the verge of extinction on account of multiple factors. Literature and culture can offer indigenous communities a sense of belonging and promote social cohesion, respect for diversity, human creativity as well as help people connect with each other. Hence, the call to preserve endangered folk cultural heritage of communities such as the Jetor, an indigenous nomadic community of Paschim Medinipur and Jhargram settled on the edges of Kangsabati and Subarnarekha. UNESCO has declared 2022-2032 as the decade of indigenous languages.

Call for papers. We are inviting submissions for a special themed issue of Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. 

Every year, Dalhousie’s Graduate History Society hosts a conference to foster critical thinking and meaningful discussion on the discipline. This year’s theme of consilience hopes to spark discussion on the importance of interdisciplinary research. The importance of consilience is fostering a dialogue between disciplines that traditionally have little interaction. In this case, the more we know, the more we grow, and this year’s conference intends to highlight how interdisciplinary approaches to history should be celebrated, providing a sense of unity in knowledge. The 25th annual conference will be a hybrid event in Halifax at Dalhousie University. Consilience will consider graduate-level papers in any area of study featuring an overlap with history.

Culture and Conflict

“In the struggle between tradition and innovation, which is the basic theme of internal cultural development in historical societies, innovation always wins. But cultural innovation is generated by nothing other than the total historical movement—a movement which, in becoming conscious of itself as a whole, tends to go beyond its own cultural presuppositions and toward the suppression of all separations.”

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

The Linda Hall Library is now accepting applications for its 2024-25 fellowship program. These fellowships provide graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and independent scholars in the history of science and related humanities fields with financial support to explore the Library’s outstanding science and engineering collections. Fellows also participate in a dynamic intellectual community alongside in-house experts and scholars from other Kansas City cultural and educational institutions.

“The Gothic Imagination of Walt Disney Studios: Fear, Horror and the Uncanny in the ‘Happiest Place on Earth’.”

Editors A/Prof Allison Craven (James Cook University, Australia) and Dr Diana Sandars (University of Melbourne)

Named Time magazine’s ‘Person of the Year’ and Spotify’s ‘Artist of 2023,’ Taylor Swift has dominated the music scene with re-recordings, a global tour and billions of streams. Singer, songwriter, performer and film director, Swift has excelled across genres, categories and artistic mediums. Bringing together academics, students and ‘Swifties,’ this conference will consider Taylor Swift as a major feminist voice and performer in the 21st century. Coinciding with the European leg of ‘The Eras Tour,’ the conference will offer a space to explore Swift’s feminist Reputation.

Topics under consideration might explore (but are not limited to): 

Calling All Rhetoricians! 

For the 14th Annual Midwest Winter Workshop 

The University of Wisconsin-Madison departments of Communication Arts and English, in coordination with our RSA student chapter, are thrilled to be hosting the 14th annual Midwest Winter Workshop on February 17, 2024. We cordially invite graduate students interested in any rhetoric, rhetoric-adjacent, or rhetoric-ish topics to participate! 

CFP: THE FUTURE OF MASCULINITIES: THEORY & PRAXIS
Deadline for proposals: February 10, 2024

For this seminar as part of the ESSE conference 2024 in Lausanne, 26-30 August 2024, we invite abstracts on the topic/narrative structures/media conditions of the scandalous (in the 19th-21st centuries) through the lens of  in_visibilisation. Scandals – in the context of sex, money or power – tend to involve obfuscation, an audience that is in the dark, but willing to see, agents who have an interest either in disclosure or in concealment. These interests are shot through with power that can be gendered, often contains a class-imbalance, is sometimes racialized, and not infrequently centres on non-normative desires. One area in which these dynamics of scandalization become particularly obvious are the cultural practices of fame and celebrity.

Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada
2024 Biennial Conference: Migrations

19-22 June, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario

The strings accentuating Norman Bates's stabbing of Marion Crane in Psycho (1960); the simple, albeit extremely effective two-note ostinato representing the shark in Jaws (1975); the sinister atmosphere established by Ennio Morricone's The Thing (1982) theme; the critique of pop music to the (diegetic) tune of Huey Lewis & The News' song "Hip To Be Square" in American Psycho (2000); the poignant use of Lynyrd Skynyrd's song "Free Bird" in the concluding scene of The Devil's Rejects (2005); the pieces of classical music accompanying Hannibal Lecter's preparation of dishes containing human ingredients in Hannibal (NBC, 2013–2015); sounds of chainsaws cutting off human limbs, alligator jaws snapping h