CFP: [Graduate] CFP: 2009 Graduate Conference at Boston College

full name / name of organization: 
Beth Tressler
contact email: 

2009 Boston College Biennial English Graduate Conference
        
Page, Stage, and Beyond: Perspectives on Performance and Theatricality

        Boston College is pleased to announce its Second Biennial English Graduate
Conference, “Page, Stage, and Beyond: Perspectives on Performance and
Theatricality”, to be held on 28 March 2009. Our keynote speaker for the
event will be Prof. Martin Puchner of Columbia University. He has published
widely on theater, philosophy, and modernism, and his most recent book,
Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes
(Princeton, 2006), was recently awarded the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize.
Drawing on Antonin Artaud’s description of theater as something “which is
in no thing, but which makes use of everything”, we are looking for
original, thought-provoking 15-minute presentations that explore the
dynamic nature of performance and theatricality. We invite papers that not
only examine performance and theater but also deal with the way performance
and theatricality are represented across time, place, and various
genresâ€"including traditional staged performance; performance and visual
art; live and recorded music; film, television, video, and the Internet;
prose and poetry; and rituals, ceremonies, and monuments. We invite
surprises and strongly encourage scholars to broadly define the nature of
theater and performance. At the same time, we welcome individual
submissions that offer a fresh focus on a text(s) through a critical lens
provided by canonical theorists such as Joseph Roach, Judith Butler, Laura
Mulvey, and Stephen Greenblatt. An ideal submission would explore one or
more of the following questions:
• How do the performative and theatrical elements of speech acts function
in politics and society? In what ways is acting always “acting out”?
• How does performance implicate its audience? What is the role and
responsibility of the spectator?
• What are the possibilities or pitfalls of using theatricality as a
metaphor to bridge historical and literary studies?
• How is performance affected by its means of transmissionâ€"whether by
stage, print, manuscript, video, or cultural phenomenon?
• How are performance and theatricality manifested in everyday life? How do
quotidian acts elevate themselves to ritual, ceremony, and rite?

Please send an abstract by 15 January 2009 to colloq_at_bc.edu.

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Received on Fri Oct 31 2008 - 13:42:52 EST