CFP: Pleasure and Responsibility: What's at Stake? (12/1/06; 2/9/07-2/10/07)

full name / name of organization: 
tachtco_at_umich.edu
contact email: 

CFP: "Pleasure and Responsibility: What's at Stake?" 12/1/06; 2/9-2/10/07

11th Annual Comparative Literature Intra-Student Faculty Forum (CLIFF)
Conference:

February 9-10, University of Michigan

CLIFF is pleased to announce a conference devoted to an examination of
the role of aesthetics in what appears to be an increasingly
politicized academic world. How do you define intellectual pleasure
and political responsibility? Do aesthetics still have a role in
politics and ethics or has it become an obsolete concept that cannot be
salvaged? We want to probe the definition of such terms as aesthetics,
pleasure, responsibility, ethics, politics, intellectual--considered on
their own, as well as in various combinations and relationships to
each other; and to explore what is at stake when such definitions are
so elusive.

What role, if any, do style and aesthetics play in literary criticism?
What role do style and aesthetics play in your own literary criticism.
  Are there aesthetic criteria according to which we can judge works
of art? Or would such criteria merely be the meretricious playthings
of ideologies?

The CLIFF conference will address the question of ends. What is the
ultimate purpose of your work? In your writing, teaching and
research, do you hope to pursue aesthetic, political, or ethical ends,
or some combination of these? Why and in what way? If you aim to make
a political and/or ethical intervention, why do you choose to do so
through the arts (and not, for example, direct political involvement)?
  What is the relationship between aesthetics and citizenship in a
democracy? Might aesthetic judgment itself strengthen democratic
participation?

The primary goal of this conference is to share our work and ideas with
each other while sparking debate centered on the topics of aesthetic
pleasure and political responsibility. The conference hopes to
provide participants with a forum in which to present their current
research while explaining how their research contributes to political
and/or aesthetic ends.

Possible subtopics include:

Revolution and aesthetics
History of aesthetics
History and aesthetics
Ethics and aesthetics of translation
Aesthetics, citizenship and democracy
The aesthetics and ethics of reading
Technology and aesthetics
Anti-aesthetics
Aesthetics of war

Please submit abstracts of 250 words maximum to CLIFF07_at_umich.edu by
December 1, 2006.
Direct any questions to the organizing committee at CLIFF07_at_umich.edu.

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Received on Fri Nov 10 2006 - 18:43:47 EST