MAKING A MUSEUM: Materializing Regimes of Value with the NYC Department of Sanitation

CFP: Talking Trash: Rethinking the Abandoned, the Recovered, and the Depraved (graduate student conference)

The Graduate Center, City University of New York
English Student Association Annual Conference
Conference Date: Friday, February 29, 2008
Abstract Submission Deadline: Friday, November 30, 2007

The earlier culture will become a heap of rubble and finally a heap of ashes; yet, over the ashes, spirits will hover. -- Ludwig Wittgenstein

What is the fascination of the devalued and discarded? Is it simply the return of the repressed – the object that returns to haunt us? Is it the terror of the void – the space we can never know? From the Christian obsession with the keystone that was once rejected to Alice Walker's rehabilitation of Zora Neale Hurston's reputation to John Waters's gleeful declaration that his work is "trash," there is a certain caché to the recovery of the devalued and discarded. Does the tastemaker need the humiliation of the trash heap from which to rescue the loved object and prove a superior palate, or is the trash heap an accident that the archive is always seeking to encompass? How do speech acts construct value? How does insult designate certain objects and people as "trash" and how do marginalized people talk back? This conference, organized and sponsored by the CUNY Graduate Center's English Student Association, hopes to stimulate a broad field of inquiry ranging from New Historical approaches to Renaissance sewage management to examinations of Lindsay Lohan's inarticulate Blackberry epistle. We seek to bring together students from a wide variety of literary, historical, theoretical, aesthetic, and political perspectives in a rigorous attempt to think trash from every angle. While academic papers are preferred, we also invite participation from practicing artists, filmmakers, and videographers.

Possible topics include, but certainly are not limited to:
Material artefacts as cultural or personal history
Bodies and Bodies in Parts
Hidden histories and Forgotten texts
Non-canonical works of literature
Canon formation
Religion
Literature of AIDS
Intercepted letters in novels and plays
Palimpsests and Textual archaeology
Marginalization of conquered subjects / Resistance by conquered
subjects
Slang and Standard English / Rhetoric of English
Speech Acts and Insults
Scatology
Dirty jokes / Playing the Dozens
Consumer culture and Planned obsolesence
Propoganda / Psychological operations (psyops)
Affluence and Waste
Sanitation Practices / Recycling
Reception histories
Aestheticist collectors
Culture of blackmail / Literature of blackmail
Multiple revisions of texts (Editions, Archives, Genealogical
editions)
Paperback culture / Trash novels
Futureless essays, unpublished works, sketches, and works-in-progress
Incarcerated subjects / War and political refugees / The culture of
dissidence
Genocide
Gossip
Humiliation
The "Dean Scream"
Performance art
Bread & Circus and Entertainment for the masses
Dominatrixes / Drag Queens / Performances of Sexuality
Pornography
Comedy and its recycling of headline news / Vaudeville
Pop Art / Recycled objects and images / "Proposals for Impossible
Monuments"
Toni Morrison's "Rememory"
Searching for the "Zulu Shakespeare"
Utopias
Ephemeral flowers
The Rehabilitation of American Literature (making an "American
Renaissance")
Oral culture/ Written culture
How to think Non-canonical authors outside the lines of influence
Undervalued texts
Always Already
Anthology expectations
Camp's sly refusals
Plagiarism and Quotation across texts
Derek Jarman's celebration of film stock's short shelf life
B-movies / Homemade movies / Movies with a twist
Zine culture and non-traditional forms of publication
The White House
Poltical campaigns
Resurfaced E-mails (Abramoff, Gonzales, etc.)
Global warming / Ecology
Ecofeminism
Cosmetic surgery / Extreme makeovers
Trailer park
Talk shows / Reality TV / Soap operas / E! channel
Decadence v. Trash

Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words to Jason Schneiderman and Linda Neiberg at TalkingTrashConference@gmail.com by November 30, 2007.