Boston College English Department Graduate Colloquium

Call for Papers

Reading in a Material World:
Culture, Objects, and Identity

The Boston College English Graduate Colloquium invites submissions for our fall event, "Reading in a Material World: Culture, Objects, and Identity," to be held at Connolly House the evening of Friday, November 21st. There is a longstanding critical discussion about the relationship between texts and the cultures in which they are embedded--a relationship in which, to borrow Donne's phrase, the two "interinanimate" each other in generative processes of representation. We seek to continue this fruitful conversation, which has produced a range of responses, including formalist approaches, Marxist or cultural materialist readings, questions of authority and authorship, and studies of various forms of textual circulation. As a way into the topic, presentations might respond to such questions as the following:

-How does textual analysis of material culture--especially the objects it embraces, rejects, or is ambivalent toward--help us better understand identity (whether communal or individual)?
-How are the identities of authors and readers shaped by means of textual circulation, whether this refers to medieval or early modern manuscript culture, nineteenth-century "penny dreadfuls," the New York editions of Henry James, Facebook-linked YouTube videos, or anything in between?
-What is the impact of considering the human body as an object within subject/object relations? How do issues such as embodiment and prosthesis shape literary treatments of the material world?
-Is identity "performed" through objects, possessions, or things? Can we ever separate the tools (objects) we use to make identity from a "pure" sense of who we are without them?
-How could aesthetic theory help to re-imagine "commonplace" as well as "artistic" objects?

Papers should be conference-length: 8-10 pages and readable in approximately 20 minutes. Submissions are due by e-mail to colloq@bc.edu before 4 p.m. on Friday, November 14th. Inquiries may be sent to the same address. Selection is by blind committee, and the committee will notify submitters of its decision early in the week of November 17th.