Crisis Carnival 2010 @ SDSU | literature.sdsu.edu
Spectacle! The Seduction of Illusion

FRIDAY
April 30, 2010


hit the image to your right for your SPECTACLE program!


Program
Welcome: 8:00-8:30

CRISIS CARVINAL COORDINATORS:
Rose Burt and Erica Aguillon

Session A: 8:30-10:00        
Seven Seductive Spectacles: Poets and Critics

•    Lisa Tattoli: “Seductive Spectacle in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights as Fallen Eden”
•    Kaitlin Leach: “Seductive Spectacle of the Dark Lady in Shakespeare's Sonnets and Zorba's Idea of Woman,” plus original artwork
•    Adrian Aguayo: “Seductive Spectacle in Gertrude Stein's ‘Miss Furr and Miss Skeene’”
•    Don Rugg: Beat poetry inspired by Moderns
•    Brandon Tate: LGBT Poetry
•    Kelsey Zeran: Original film
•    Sarah Todd: Original poetry

Session B: 10:00-11:15        
Gender, Sexuality, and Self-Definition

•    Lily Kelting, "Performing Femininity, Performing Veganism"
•    Sean Printz, "Reconciling Lack: Masculinity in Oz"
•    Megan Morris, "Becoming the Monster: the Life, Loves, and Revenges of a She-Devil"
•    Emily Heebner, "The Spectacle of 'Virtual Speculum': A Look at Spielberg's A.I. via Haraway's Primatology Studies"
•    Heather Yeo, "Circus Performance of the 19th and early 20th Centuries as a Reflection of Post-Industrial Era Anxieties"

Session C: 11:30-12:30        
Fictions

•    Leigh Pollack (SDSU): “Me and Julia”
•    David Kammerzelt (SDSU): “The Play in the Park”
•    Diana Ferrell (SDSU): “Ersatz City”
•    Rebecca Hershberger (SDSU): “Evolution and Illusion of Language”

---------------- 12:30-1:00 Lunch ----------------

Faculty Panel: 1:00-2:00        
Spectacle across Disciplines

•    Dr. Phillip Serrato (SDSU): Monsters and Children’s Literature
•    Dr. Emily Hicks (SDSU): Boundaries, Baudrillard, Debord, Heidegger, Nietzsche and religious rituals
•    Professor Burman (Mira Costa): Teacher as Entertainer
•    Dr. John Putman (SDSU) Star Trek, Culture, and History

Session D: 2:15-3:15        
Reconciling Constructions of Truth

•    Bridget Malaney, "Political Affairs and Performances"
•    Stephanie Padilla, "Bob Dylan and the Political World of the 1960s"
•    NaToya Faughnder, "The Mirror Self and the Dream Self: Recognizing Disparity between Psychic and Performed Identities"
•    Don Tresca, "Lying to Reveal the Truth: Pseudo-Documentaries and the Illusion of Reality"

Session E: 3:30-4:45        
Monstrosity and the Other

•    Jenni Liu, "Disneyland: The Sterilized Circus"
•    Jeff Wilson, "Giving Up the Ghost: Naturalizing the Supernatural and Staging the Causal Interpretation of Richard's Deformity, 1777-1899"
•    Ryan Willingham, "Gothic Social Subversion in Burton's Sleepy Hollow and Sweeney Todd"
•    Neal Fischer, "The Movement of Modern Imperialism: Border Politics and Transgressions in From Dusk till Dawn"
•    Dr. Mark Irwin, "A Constructed Image: Response to Panelists"

Keynote Address: 5:00-6:00    
Mark Irwin, Ph.D.




2010 CALL FOR PAPERS
Crisis Carnival 2010 @ SDSU | literature.sdsu.edu
Spectacle! The Seduction of Illusion


Photo FunWhat do the Olympic opening ceremony, drag queens, and Shakespeare have in common?

Linguistic theorists such as Judith Butler, Jean Baudrillard, and Guy Debord have all conjectured that we engage daily in performances that obscure the line between illusion and reality. These performances both re-affirm and challenge society’s values, boundaries, and taboos. By analyzing these spectacles, we can question the relationship between performance and the “real,” with the hopes of discovering the motivations behind these seductive visions.

In a society dominated by media constructions of our cultural values, it is more important than ever to evaluate the role that spectacle plays. What is the social significance of illusions – to inspire change, to help us distinguish the values most important to us, or to help us escape?

The goal of this conference will be to bring the conversation into a contemporary context. How are social anxieties personified in the spectacle of monstrosity? What role do today’s avatars, clones, and digital doppelgangers play in our conceptions of our “real” selves? How has the relationship between performance and the real changed since Shakespeare?

We encourage paper and panel proposals with a broad interpretation of spectacle across disciplines. Some possible areas of inquiry:

AVATARS
CINEMA
CLASS
FAN CLUBS
FANTASY
GENDER
GLADIATORS
GRAPHIC MEDIA
MAGIC
MONARCHY
MYTHS, MONSTERS, and GHOSTS
PANOPTICISM (AUDIENCE INFLUENCE)
PERFORMANCE ART
PERFORMATIVITY
PERSONA (INTERNATIONAL TRAVEL, ACADEMIA, SOCIAL NETWORKING)
POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS
REALITY TV
RELIGIOUS RITUAL
SCIENCE FICTION
SPORTS (OLYMPICS, WORLD CUP, DANCE)
STOCK MARKET (IMAGINARY MARKERS OF PERFORMANCE)
TEACHING (SAGE ON A STAGE, THE POWER OF A PODIUM)
THE UNDEAD

Submission Procedures

This conference is open to graduate students everywhere, from all fields and disciplines. Creative works are welcomed. Each submission should include: One cover page and one 250 word abstract for a 10-12 page paper, short story, selection of poems, art object, or 15 minute film. Please include your title, contact information, and area of study on your cover page. Artwork should be submitted as photos with the titles written on the back. Each performance piece is limited to 15 minutes; please send a DVD.

The deadline for submissions is March 25, 2010.

Electronic submissions and/or questions may be sent to: sdsu.grad.conference@gmail.com

Send physical submissions to:

Crisis Carnival/Erica Aguillon
The Department of English and Comparative Literature
5500 Campanile Drive
San Diego, CA  92182-6020











Old, 2009, Crisis Carnival INFO
{Saved here as a Virtual Archive!}


Conference PROGRAM! Get it while it's HOT!!!!
We are pleased to announce the 2009 Crisis Carnival keynote speaker, Derek Pell.  While his work is featured on the cover and in the pages of the latest issue of Fiction International (Issue #41: Freak), Pell, and his alter-ego Norman Conquest, have been active with experimental writing and arts groups since the late-sixties. After leaving Chicago's Art Institute, Pell started publishing numerous parodic text-and-collage pieces, including the commercially successful "Doktor Bey" books.  In the eighties, Pell moved to Los Angeles, became a proponent of correspondence art, and founded the international anticensorship art collective Beuyscouts of Amerika, creating nearly 100 mixed-media books.

Of his more extraordinary texts are Assassination Rhapsody (1989), a  humorous commentary on the great modern mystery of John F. Kennedy's death; X-Texts (1994), a punster's paradise of meta-pornographic vignettes; Little Red Book of Adobe Livemotion (2001), a satirical guide to Flash animation modeled after Mao.

In recent years Pell has worked as editor of the online technology review, DingBat, and is currently Editor in Chief of a photography magazine, Zoom Street. Last year he published a collection of  absurdist texts called Lost In Translation & Other Works (2008), and is currently working on a book called Shoot To Thrill: A Hard-Boiled Guide to Digital Photography.
crisis carnival 2009



THE ECSTASY OF SPEED
April 10, 2008

New deadline for Proposals! March 1, 2009

The Ecstasy of Speed: SDSU’s Annual Graduate Conference 2009

What do Gillette’s Mach 3 Turbo razor, Instant Oatmeal/Coffee/Messaging/ Diets, Wikipedia, V12 motor engines, ready-made products (pre-assembled, pre-packaged, pre-washed, pre-cooked), freeways, and the Fastpass option for ‘beating the line’ at Disneyland have in common?

A culturally legitimized, capitalistically promoted, technologically induced need for SPEED.

Ours is an age in which the rate at which a process or operation is executed (production, consumption, acceleration, modification, termination, recuperation) seems to stand alone as the definitive measure of its value. An increase in such rate, then, is directly proportional to the increased worth of that process or operation, let alone product; the faster, the better!

Right?

Moreover, the capacity to affect such an increase in SPEED presupposes a technological mastery of both space and time. Having as one’s goal the capacity to cover “X amount of ground in X amount of time” both relies upon a necessarily abstract, yet quantifiable type of thinking, and thereby reduces time and space into standards for the estimation of organized motile force.

How does this widespread increase in rate (aka SPEED) affect the experience of human existence? For the better – seeing as ‘life-quality’ rates are also on the rise – or for the worse – as the world’s supposed shrinkage arguably entails such effects as global warming and so-called public isolation? Moreover, does speed presuppose a movement out-of one’s self, an ecstatic motion?

If so, and if ecstasy in its Greek derivative sense (ecstasis) can be taken as being "beside oneself," or being-thrown (even if such is self-motivated), then an ECSTASY of SPEED intensifies the rate of such a movement out-of. Such an increase in motion out-of can be characterized in regard to the individual (among other ways) either as a positive basis for a voluntary action (a way of relating to the world) or as a negative rupture which founds the fragmentation of human identity and society.  
Heidegger optimistically suggests that each being “projects itself upon possibilities into which it has been thrown […] To be its own thrown basis is that potentiality-for-Being which is the issue for care” (Being and Time 330). In this case, would an intensified ek-stasis merely augment such potentiality, or rather stymie its openness to the Being of beings?   

Other prevalent questions may include:

Are we moving with too much SPEED and in too close a proximity? Can/should/will the world get smaller, and every-thing become a standing-reserve for our proliferating purposes? Does a contemporary obsession with rate of movement (the need for SPEED) intimate that utility and efficacy determine the manner of human relations to the world, rather than a criterion of worth which rejects the making of all things into objects for ready-made, and disposable, human use? If the latter, what would such a criterion be? Would it involve a decrease in SPEED, a slowing and moving in-to, rather than out-of?
How do our perceptions of time and space change with SPEED? How can an obsession with speed – regarding the transportation of both informational and biological bodies – be reconciled with a diminished emphasis on spatiality and temporality (‘get there in no time’)? What becomes of locality when a hyper-mobility (especially among the economically elite) is valued above all? Can this privileged mobility be characterized as a non-teleological tendency toward an incessant exitus (departure) lacking an accordant and (in regard to the formation of communities) responsible reditus (return)? Is this hyper-mobility an elitist fetish, or a necessary aspect of modern existence? 
Does a far-reaching need for SPEED contribute toward a technologically advanced nation’s disordered and tireless self-erosion, or its success, however measured? How should SPEED be understood in the context of globalization, wherein a crate of soda (or any type of goods) can circle the planet overnight, but a refugee in a camp cannot be safely moved for months? Who has access to the privilege of SPEED, and what are its effects? In a similar light, does the increase in SPEED conceal the disappearance of a destination? If SPEED is becoming, toward what do we move?

This year's Crisis Carnival will examine the essential and accidental aspects of speed and will engage in interdisciplinary discussions around this theme.  We encourage paper and panel proposals with a broad interpretation of SPEED in any of the following areas of inquiry:

ANTHROPOLOGY
ART HISTORY                                            ECONOMICS
EDUCATION
FILM/MEDIA STUDIES
GENDER STUDIES
HISTORY
LITERATURE
MUSIC THEORY
POLITICAL SCIENCE
PHILOSOPHY
PSYCHOLOGY
RELIGIOUS STUDIES

Too broad?  Possible topics can explore issues of SPEED in relation to:

AESTHETICS
BLOGOSPHERE
CYBERSPACE
ECOLOGICAL EFFECTS
FAST/SLOW FOOD
GLOBALIZATION
HYPERTEXTS/HYPERMEDIA
INSTANT MESSAGING
MEMORY
MIGRATION
OBSOLESCENCE
ONLINE/OFFLINE ARCHIVES
PHENOMENOLOGY
SIMULACRA
SPATIALITY
SURVEILLANCE
TECHNOLOGY
TEMPORALITY
TRANSNATIONALISM
TRANSPORTATION
VIOLENCE
VIRTUAL REALITY

Each submission should include: One cover page and one 250 word abstract for a 10-12 page paper, short story, selection of poems, art object, or 15 minute film. Please include your title, contact information, and area of study on your cover page. Artwork should be submitted as photos with the titles written on the back. Each performance piece is limited to 15 minutes; please send a DVD.

The deadline for submissions is January 31, 2009!

Send electronic submissions and/or questions to:

sdsu.grad.conference@gmail.com

Send physical submissions to:

Crisis Carnival/Kevin Gossett
The Department of
English and Comparative Literature
5500 Campanile Drive
San Diego,
CA 92182.6020
old call for papers!



"Speed is the form of ecstasy the technological revolution has bestowed on man" (Milan Kundera, Slowness)

Paul Virilio devoted much of his career to the concept of dromology (the science of speed), which he introduced  in Speed and Politics(1977).  Asserting that speed "is used above all to see, hear, to perceive, and, thus to perceive more intensely the present world,"Virilio also insists that the products of this need for SPEED are both enabling and limiting, that every technical invention has a built-in
accidental outcome.  "Each time a technology is invented, a technology of transport, of transmission, or of information, a specific accident is born."  Trains derail, stock markets crash, social networking sites stymie social contact, etc.

If ECSTASY in its Greek derivative sense is taken as being in a state outside of oneself, of being "beside oneself," thrown into a frenzy or a stupor, then the ECSTASY OF SPEED is a movement outside of itself, filled with anxiety, astonishment, fear and passion.

Are we moving too fast and in too close a proximity as the world gets smaller?  How do our perceptions of time and space change with SPEED? Does the increase in SPEED attempt to conceal the disappearance of a destination?   SPEED is becoming; but toward what do we move?

This year's Crisis Carnival will examine the essential and accidental aspects of speed and will engage in interdisciplinary discussions around this theme.  We encourage paper and panel proposals with a broad interpretation of SPEED in any of the following areas of
inquiry:

ANTHROPOLOGY
ART HISTORY
EDUCATION
FILM/MEDIA STUDIES
GENDER STUDIES
HISTORY
LITERATURE
MUSIC THEORY
POLITICAL SCIENCE
PHILOSOPHY
PSYCHOLOGY
RELIGIOUS STUDIES ...

Too broad?  Possible topics can explore issues of SPEED in relation to:

AESTHETICS
BLOGOSPHERE
CYBERSPACE
ECOLOGICAL EFFECTS
FAST/SLOW FOOD
GLOBALIZATION
HYPERTEXTS/HYPERMEDIA
INSTANT MESSAGING
MEMORY
MIGRATION
OBSOLESCENCE
ONLINE/OFFLINE ARCHIVES
PHENOMENOLOGY
SIMULACRA
SPACE & TIME
SURVEILLANCE
TECHNOLOGY
TEMPORALITY
TRANSNATIONALISM
TRANSPORTATION
VIOLENCE
VIRTUAL REALITY...

Each submission should include: One cover page and one 250 word abstract for a 10-12 page paper, short story, selection of poems, art object, or 15 minute film. Please include your title, contact information, and area of study on your cover page. Artwork should be submitted as photos with the titles written on the back. Each performance piece is limited to 15 minutes; please send a DVD.

The deadline for submissions is January 31, 2009!

Send electronic submissions and/or questions to:

sdsu.grad.conference@gmail.com

Send physical submissions to:

Crisis Carnival/Kevin Gossett
The Department of
English and Comparative Literature
5500 Campanile Drive
San Diego,
CA 92182.6020


more info? Send Crisis Carnival
Grand Speedmaster Kevin Gossett
an email!

past crisis carnival archives? Click here.