Call For Papers : Fictions of the Machine
The Department of French and Romance Philology at Columbia announces its
Tenth Annual Graduate Student Conference of University, Saturday, March
24, 2001.
>From Descartes' mechanistic vision of the world to Zola's coal-mines,
from the plates of the Encyclop=E9die to the uncanny automata of the
Romantic period, from the printing-press to the present-day machinery of
textuality, we are a culture obsessed with-and possessed by-machines.
The nexus that binds humans and machines together has never been more
pronounced than it is now, in the age of cyberspace and robotics, when
bodies acquire prostheses and machines are endowed with artificial
intelligence.
As we advance into the new millennium, a re-examination of our relation
to machines becomes a timely project, in light of recent social and
cultural trends, the explosion of the internet, and developments in
contemporary theory. The spaces and social frameworks surrounding
us-cultures, networks, cities, ecosystems, bodies-that can be thought of
as machines are constantly multiplying. How can we think the machine, in
an age of thinking machines? Does the cultural prehistory of its
successive images help shed any light on its contemporary role?
We welcome literary and interdisciplinary contributions that explore the
history of our images and fictions of the machine-in art, literature and
culture, from the era of medieval warfare to the modern landscapes of
cyborgs. Papers engaging with French cultural texts are especially
encouraged. Topics include, but are not limited to:
a.. Writing machines
b.. Encyclopedie
c.. Print culture, hypertext, internet
d.. Robots, automata, cyborgs
e.. Optical devices, perspective & poetics
f.. Factories, bodies, labor
g.. The world as machine
h.. Mechanization & dehumanization
i.. Oulipo, rhetoric, textuality
j.. The clinic and the penitentiary
k.. Deleuze and machines
l.. Warfare and battle machines
m.. Mechanized transportation
n.. Cyberspace and cyberbodies
o.. Inventions, science, progress
p.. The mechanical and the organic
q.. The mechanics of theatrical illusion
r.. Architectural machines
Please send all questions and abstracts for papers (not to exceed twenty
minutes) to fgsu@columbia.edu by January 15, 2001. Abstracts can also be
submitted by regular mail to: French Graduate Student Union, Department
of French and Romance Philology, MC 4906, Columbia University, 1150
Amsterdam Ave., New York, NY 10027. Tel.: (212) 854-2500, fax: (212)
854-5863.
AG (source : CFP)