Actualité
Appels à contributions
Facebook Before Facebook (ACLA 2016)

Facebook Before Facebook (ACLA 2016)

Publié le par Sabrina Roh (Source : Sophia Mizouni)

Seminar at American Comparative Literature Association

Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts

March 17-20, 2016.

The environment before Facebook was ripe for the entrance of this social media. How did Facebook emerge from a milieu in which individuals were ready to share one’s personal life to a quasi-invisible public? Facebook can be interpreted as “commodifying (or ‘pornographying’) personal relationships by recasting them in the logic of voyeurism and exhibitionism”. Departing from this assessment by the University of Leipniz Conference (2011), this seminar suggests that literature can be used to explore this social medium by drawing analogies between several driving forces found in fiction and in Facebook.  

To understand the broader implications of the frenzy over Facebook, this seminar will examine voyeuristic and exhibitionistic tendencies in fiction prior to the birth of this social medium. It will explore the trends lurking in literature and existing in an environment avid for this type of digital networking. We invite proposals for papers that investigate the literature before Facebook came into being in the broader context of consumerism and related notions such as spectacularization, voyeurism and exhibitionism. As a platform to examine how some modern literature may depict similar devices found in Facebook, our seminar invites all interested scholars to contribute to a broader understanding of our attraction for voyeurism and exhibitionism and the roots of that attraction by exploring how pre-Facebook literature deals with those themes.

Accordingly, contributions could address, but are not limited to, the following questions and themes:

  • To some degree, the concepts of both “private” and “public” are social constructs that shift and change over time. How do literary texts show how the line between public and private has become more permeable? What methods, theories, or modes of thoughts in literature encouraged the (re)construction of privacy?
  • As pointed out by Bumgarner (2007), “voyeurism would not be possible without the existence of exhibitionism or self-disclosure”. How does literature depict the forces in society that encourage exhibitionism and drive us to demonstrate superiority in order to build a desirable self-image? Papers addressing the gaze and voyeurism could focus on topics ranging from the investigation of the visual commodification of ideas to a discussion of the objectification of fictional characters as commercial goods within the confines of a novel.
  • Westlake (2013) argues that members of the Facebook community use an online space “to define the boundaries of normative behavior through unique performances of an online self ” to an unseen audience. To what extent are characters in literature, similarly to the Facebook behaviors stressed by Westlake,  “willing to offer themselves up for surveillance through performance and to act as the mechanism of surveillance in a way” reminiscent of Foucault’s panoptic gaze?
  •  Some Facebook users connect through group forums. What qualities do these communities share with social cliques depicted in literature, such as the coteries and salons of the 18th century?
  •  Facebook enables the expression of taste. To what extent can the expression of taste used as way to boost social status be traced in literature of the industrial revolution era? What does it teach us about the way Facebook operates within a society of consumption and the way we view privacy today?
  • Facebook, as a narrative tool, creates a need to document our activities. Arguably, Facebook users’ activities do not seem real until they are shared with a public avid to consume them. How have shifting understandings of consumption shaped the content of individual narratives aimed at a broader public?

 

Abstracts should be submitted online between September 1st and the 23rd. We seek participants across all academic career stages. The seminar format meets for two or three days over the conference weekend and is a convivial, dynamic space for discussions.