Seminar on Fred Jameson
Do you have a beef with literary marxists who use Jameson without paying attention to his weird gender politics? Do you feel like you might be able to rescue Jameson from his ‘it’s a man’s world’ economo-hermeneutic? Or, maybe you just like raining on the parade of dudes who think that the most exploited group of people is white dudes, who are so poorly represented in books as the bourgeoisie? THEN HAVE I GOT AN OPPORTUNITY FOR YOU!
But, in all honesty, below is a seminar that I was involved in two years ago (back then on Walter Benjamin). I got an excellent paper out of it (on capitalism as an ontotheological crisis of the male sensorium), and was able to add gender and race into a conversation that was so desperately in need of it. It was a great learning opportunity, and I would recommend it to anyone.
2012 Rhetoric and Public Culture Summer Institute at Northwestern – Call for Papers
Location: Illinois, United States
Call for Papers Date: 2012-07-23
Date Submitted: 2012-05-27
Announcement ID: 194789
The annual one-week summer institute in Rhetoric and Public Culture for graduate students will be held at Northwestern University (Evanston, IL) on July 23-27, 2012.
http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=194789
This year’s institute theme is: “Fredric Jameson and the Cultural in Media Theory/Studies”. The Institute will focus on Fredric Jameson’s work on film and media in the context of his overall approach to the interpretation of culture. In his seminal work, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, film and other media occupy a central place in Fredric Jameson’s account of the formal features of postmodernism, and in his analysis of the relationship of postmodern culture to the social and economic forms of “late capitalism.” In such other works as Signatures of the Visible and The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System, film is the focal point of Jameson’s reflections on the fate of critical and utopian thought in postmodern culture, and for his explorations of the relationship between high and mass culture, as well as for his analysis of various narrative and representational forms for imagining the place of individual experience in an uneven global system. In this Summer Institute, we will focus on Jameson’s writings on film and media in these and other works in order to explore the possibilities and limits of Jameson’s approach to the analysis of media and other cultural texts.
The seminar, directed by Professors Scott Durham and Dilip Gaonkar, will consist of five days of presentations and discussions led by four distinguished group of visiting faculty. We will announce the list of visiting faculty shortly. Each faculty member will deliver an afternoon lecture, lead a seminar discussion on selected readings (assigned in advance) the following morning, and attend a colleague’s presentation that afternoon. The overlapping format enables both student and faculty participants to continue informal scholarly discussion during group lunches and dinners. Participating faculty in this year’s institute include:
Colin MacCabe, Distinguished Professor of English and Literature/Film Studies, University of Pittsburgh and Professor of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London; Caren Irr, Professor of English, Brandeis University; and Phillip Wegner, University Research Foundation (UFRF) Professor of English, University of Florida, with others forthcoming.
The seminar is sponsored by the Center for Global Culture and Communication, an interdisciplinary initiative of Northwestern University School of Communication. The Center will subsidize transportation (up to $250), lodging, and some meals for admitted students. Applicants should send a letter of nomination from their academic advisor, along with a one-page statement explaining their interest in participating in this year’s institute, to the summer institute coordinator Jaime Merchant (jmercha@gmail.com). We will adopt a policy of rolling admissions. Priority will therefore be granted to strong applications that are submitted in a timely fashion, preferably by June 15th. All inquiries should be directed to Jamie Merchant (jmercha@gmail.com).
Jamie Merchant, jmercha@gmail.com
Thanks!
Jamie Merchant
1815 Chicago Ave.
Evanston, IL 60208
Email: jmercha@gmail.com
