DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE, STANFORD
UNIVERSITY
2nd ANNUAL CONFERENCE
CORRUPTION IN MODERN LITERATURE & THEORY
APRIL 4-5, 2008
Click HERE for the conference schedule
Corruption
— a concept with wide array of moral, social, and
political
implications — is a recurrent trope in modern
literature. Certainly, it
is central to many of the most canonical
works of 18th, 19th, and 20th
centuries: the novels of Flaubert
and Dostoevsky; the poems of
Baudelaire and Paz; and the plays of
Kleist and Beckett (to name only a
few examples). In many
modernist and postmodernist works corruption
becomes a way to
challenge and re-imagine the governing forms of
literary creation
— thereby, in effect, corrupting them. Concomitantly,
contemporary
critical strategies, through their tendency to draw
attention to
the constitutive incompleteness of all works of art, have
embraced
corruption as normatively positive — if not ineluctable —
aspect
of artistic creation.
We are calling for
papers that
investigate the vicissitudes of the concept of
corruption in modern
literature and critical theory. Possible
topics include, but are not
limited to:
• The corruption of form
• The corrupt
character/anti-hero
• Corruption as an aesthetic
category
• Corruption as a moral, political, social,
and/or sexual category
• Corruption as an abiding
religious category resurfacing in modern
texts
•
Corruption and the possibility or impossibility of salvation in
modernist literature
• The material corruption of
literary artifacts (e.g. corruption as a
philological
category)
• Corruption as a concept in contemporary
attempts to imagine a
post-ironic aesthetics
• The
specificity of corruption as opposed to concepts like devolution
and artistic failure
• Representations of corruption
in the work of a particular writer or
genre (e.g. the marriage
plot)
• Possible homologies between theological
conceptualizations of
corruption (e.g. St. Augustine’s)
and modern approaches to structure and form
•
Corruption and the ethics of reading debate (e.g., in reference to
the
Nussbaum/Booth/Posner debate of the ethical value of reading,
or lack
thereof)
Presentations should
be approximately 20 minutes in length (about 10
double-spaced
pages)
Please submit a one page abstract
in the body of an email by January
4th, 2008 to:
Chris Donaldson (cedonald@stanford.edu)
& Nir Evron (nevron@stanford.edu)
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