Language, Literature, and Popular Culture: Fifth International Conference on Language and Literary Studies

deadline for submissions: 
August 30, 2016
full name / name of organization: 
Alfa BK University, Belgrade, Faculty of Foreign Languages

Academic and scientific study of popular culture has only gained prominence in the 20th century, first with the Leavisites’ criticism of mass culture (as yet another form of the popular), then with the comprehensive work on the concept of ‘Critical Theory’ within the Frankfurt School. The latter half of the century saw, especially after the foundation of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, a rise in theories, definitions and approaches to popular culture so great that it occasioned Harold Bloom’s disparaging remark “that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States. … At NYU I am surrounded by professors of hip-hop. At Yale, I am surrounded by professors far more interested in various articles on the compost heap of so-called popular culture than in Proust or Shakespeare or Tolstoy.” It is not only academia that popular culture is gradually coming to hold sway over; it has for decades now been an integral part of how people perform the practices of their everyday lives, communicate with others and perceive reality. To that effect, the aim of this conference is to explore various facets of popular culture, particularly the ways it interacts with language and literature, as well as arts and society. We accept presentation proposals that focus on one or more of the following topics:

  • theoretical and practical application of aspects of popular culture in education and language teaching; 
  • historical perspectives on popular culture, various practices related and meanings attributed to it in different periods of time;
  • phenomena of popular culture as sites of negotiation between mainstream ideologies and subversive trends and, more broadly, the subversive in popular culture;
  • position and role of popular culture in contemporary neoliberal societies, and its interaction with the notions of globalism and multiculturalism;
  • position of popular culture within debates on mass culture, mass media, and mass society;
  • complex relationship between popular culture and literary canon, especially within the postmodern definition of popular culture, the main point of which is, according to John Storey, “that postmodern culture is a culture that no longer recognizes the distinction between high and popular culture”;
  • differences between popular culture and popular arts, and attempts to determine, in line with Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel’s arguments expounded in The Popular Arts, “what is good and worthwhile and what is shoddy and debased” in modern forms of communication;
  • contextualization of popular culture within gender studies and queer theory;
  • interactions between popular culture and performance studies;
  • contextualization of popular culture within the broad field of human geography;
  • language and cognition in popular culture;
  • discourses of popular culture and related language ideologies;
  • the poststructuralist turn in critical theory and related takes on linguistics, semantics, and semiology.

Proposals of presentations on any other aspect of the popular in language, literature or culture are also welcome.

NEW SUBMISSION DEADLINE!!! 

Your proposals for a fifteen-minute presentation (followed by a short discussion) should be sent in the attached application form by e-mail to fsj.conference@alfa.edu.rsby 30 August, 2016. The proposals should contain your name, affiliation and e-mail address, title of the presentation and an abstract of 200 to 250 words, together with up to 10 keywords. Proposals should be submitted in the language in which the presentation will be delivered: English or Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 10 September 2016. Conference dates: 30 September-1 October 2016.

 

Participation fee: 50 EUR