Parties conference

Posted on | November 8, 2004 |

This sounds great!

INTERDISCIPLINARY CONFERENCE ON PARTIES/SHARED SPACE

University of Southern California
18th Annual AEGS (Association of English Graduate Students) Conference
April 2-3, 2005
Los Angeles, CA

You are invited to submit papers or panels in all disciplines including literature, film, history, psychology, technology studies, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, and performance studies responding to the conference theme of Parties/Shared Space.

Parties are generally thought of as fun places to gather, environments for celebrating around a certain theme or merely as occasions to socialize. Parties
provide a context in which to question and examine shared space. Describing the “party-like atmosphere,” or the carnivalesque, which is infused into everyday society, Mikhail Bakhtin writes that in the carnival there is a leveling of performers and spectators, a kind of de-hierarchization, and that “all distance
between people is suspended, and a special carnival category goes into effect: free and familiar contact among people.” Although Bakhtin primarily discusses the influence of the carnival on literary discourses, theories of parties can be extended well beyond the literary, into many areas of modern thought. For
example, Elizabeth Grosz, in reflecting upon virtuality, writes that Cyberspace links “disparate physical spaces and individuals through a shared virtual space.” What are the limits to imagining parties and shared space?

Topics may include, but are certainly not limited to, the following:

- Literary/Artistic gatherings (i.e. Bloomsbury Group, Beat Poets, Warhol’s
Factory)
- Masquerade
- 18th-Century Salons
- Coteries/Renaissance Poets
- Subcultures
- Celebrations (i.e. Early Modern Period, Greco-Roman Feasts)
- Harlem Renaissance
- Prohibition/Speakeasies/Blind Pigs
- Films centering around parties (i.e. Hitchcock, Kubrick)
- Rituals
- Weddings/Wakes/Funerals
- Performance/Dance/Theater
- Political Activism/Protests/Grass-roots organizations
- Negative conceptions of parties (i.e. The Mob, Riots)
- Crowds and claustrophobia
- Collective vs. Individual Identities (gendered, raced, sexed, and/or ethnically constructed notions of shared space)
- Cyberspace/Chat rooms/Internet communities
- Audiences
- Geographically specific or classed spaces/gatherings (i.e. urban vs. rural, gangs)
- Public Sphere (i.e. according to Habermas)
- Schizophrenia

Keynote speaker and after party information TBA

Come to our party! Please submit a working title and a 500-word abstract by December 15, 2004 to:
Laura Scheurer, lauralon_at_usc.edu and Yetta Howard, yettahoward_at_yahoo.com

Please paste submissions into the body of the email
rather than send as an attachment. Include “Parties Conference” in the subject heading.

Proposals should also include name, institutional affiliation, address, phone number, and email address of the presenter. If proposing a panel, please include the above information for all participants.

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