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Colloque Le mauvais goût dans la culture populaire anglo-saxonne

Colloque Le mauvais goût dans la culture populaire anglo-saxonne

Publié le par Florian Pennanech (Source : Sébastien Salbayre)

Tasteas a socio-cultural, aesthetic, sociological, economic, and anthropologicalconcept implies distinguishing, evaluating and judging, and also establishesboundaries between styles. Judging what is good or bad taste is about drawingdistinctions, and in the philosophical aesthetic tradition it pertains to auniversal attitude which is impossible to prove and which takes for granted theexistence of a sensus communis, or common understanding. ForKant, “the judgement of taste is not founded on concepts, and is in no way acognition, but only an aesthetic judgement” (Critique of Judgement). Onthe contrary, Pierre Bourdieu highlighted the sociological meaning of taste,stating that the legitimate taste of society is the taste of the ruling class (Distinction:A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste). Thus, what does not live upto the norms of the elite and which fails to recognize their criteria ofdistinction can be qualified as bad taste.

Ifbad taste is generally seen as an error, deliberately employing it can also beseen as defying or questioning social, aesthetic or ethical norms. By puttingitself on display it becomes a provocation or challenge to the dominantideology and also to the consensual values. Ironically, ostentatious,exhilarating deviance would then be created by a new elite. For Baudelaire,“What is intoxicating in badtaste is the aristocraticpleasure of giving offense” (Fusées).

Thegoal of the conference is to examine the notion of bad taste from amultidisciplinary perspective: literary analysis, film analysis, television,civilization, history and the history of ideas, sociology, economics, politicalscience, communication and media studies. The papers can be theoretical or canpresent concrete case studies. They can deal with any or all of the fieldswhich pertain to popular culture in the Anglophone world. The aim is toquestion how knowledge and practices are learned in order to extend thedefinition of cultural studies beyond a strict disciplinary approach.

Hereare a few indications of the way in which bad taste might be approached:

●The aesthetic, ethical, political, economic, sociological standards whichaccording to popular culture define the limits between good and bad taste andwhich define the incongruous, the out-of-place, the illegitimate, thediscordant and the inappropriate in relation to an imposed standard;

●The use of bad taste, its expression and its appearance in Anglo-Saxon popularculture (indecency, vulgarity, violence, obscenity, camp, kitsch, trashculture);

●The appropriation of bad taste and the emergence of a strategy or an aestheticof bad taste: the desire to shock, to clash with decorum, and to challengedecency; parody at its most outrageous;

●Using bad taste for transgressive or subversive purposes—popular culture, orthe creation of a counter-discourse and a counter-culture.

Papers should be twenty-five minutes long and shouldpreferably be in English. A selected number of papers will be published in oneof the GRAAT online publications (www.graat.fr) in December 2010.

Proposals should be around 200 words accompanied by abrief CV of the author and should be sent to both Priscilla Morin (priscilla.morin@univ-tours.fr) and Sébastien Salbayre (sebastien.salbayre@univ-tours.fr) by February 28, 2010.