CFP: Extended deadline: Mediating the Modern: Sound/Image/Text, University of Michigan (1.7.2017)
Please note the extended deadline for the following conference at the University of Michigan.
Mediating the Modern: Sound/Image/Text
2017 Graduate Student Conference
Germanic Languages & Literatures at the University of Michigan
September 29-30
Keynote Speaker: Sean Franzel (University of Missouri)
Presented in Conjunction with the Ann ual Grilk Lecture: Celia Applegate (Vanderbilt)
Extended Submission Deadline: July 1
During the 1980s German media theorist Friedrich Kittler published a series of highly influential
books and essays outlining a materialist approach to literary and cultural history, one freed from
hermeneutic fantasies of immediacy and focused instead on the medial conditions that made
thought possible in the first place, the hardware that enabled it to be recorded, processed, and
transmitted. Over the last few decades, scholars in German, Film, Music, and Literary Studies,
and beyond, have continued to expand on Kittler’s initial insights into the material nature of
sound, image, and text, and the medial operations they entail. Both borrowing from and looking
beyond Kittler, this conference seeks to explore productive points of contact between
contemporary media theory, on the one hand, and the literary and cultural histories of
mediation, remediation, and intermediation, on the other.
From Herder’s origins of language and Kant’s public sphere to Nazi propaganda and Siegert’s
Kulturtechniken , media and mediation have remained central concepts for understanding
German modernities. Social and political transformations, in conjunction with technological
innovations around 1800/1900/2000 exerted pressure on existing notions of sound, image, and
text and vice versa: this feedback loop serves as the springboard for our conference, “Mediating
the Modern: Sound/Image/Text.”
Sean Franzel of the University of Missouri will give the conference keynote address on Friday
afternoon, September 29. Preceding the conference, participants will also have the opportunity
to attend the annual Werner Grilk Lecture in German Studies, given by Celia Applegate, on
Thursday evening, September 28. Professor Applegate will conduct a workshop for University of
Michigan graduate students and conference participants on Friday morning.
We invite graduate students working in all fields of German studies and related disciplines in the
humanities and social sciences to submit proposals for papers. Possible topics include:
- The technicity and/or historicity of listening, seeing, and reading
- The times and spaces of sound/image/text
- Medial inscription and identity (race, religion, gender, sexuality)
- Aesthetic boundaries and boundary-crossings of music and sound
- Mediumship and the occult
- Literature as media technology
- Romantic techniques of reading and writing
- The Gesamtkunstwerk
- War, violence, and media
- Intermediality and remediation of literature in the age of electronic technology
- Technology and mass culture
- Economies of media labor, production, and consumption
- Sound/image/text and screen cultures
- Medial Eigensinn and aesthetic form
- Avant-garde conceptualizations of sound/image/text
- Media as practice, process, and event
- Digital and computer-based media
Please send abstracts (300 words max.) to mediatingthemodern@gmail.com by July 1.
Presentations should not exceed 20 minutes.
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