What Are You Reading 2013 - Page 149

The 16th Annual Conference of the Marxist Reading Group

*“Art in Interesting Times”*

Keynote Speakers: Nicholas Brown, Fredric Jameson, and Kim Stanley Robinson

27-29 March 2014 at the University of Florida

Submission Deadline: 10 January 2014



As Mathias Nilges and Emilio Sauri argue in their recent collection
/Literary Materialisms/ (2013), art, in general, and literature and
literary study, in particular, is experiencing a moment of severe
crisis. They situate this crisis within the larger apocalyptic turn that
comes with, in the words of Slavoj ®i¾ek, living in the end times. Some
take this crisis as an opportunity to retreat into traditional practices
of aesthetic appreciation. However, ®i¾ek alternately calls these end
times “interesting times," less a moment of closure than a confluence of
new possibilities. We contend that to make and study art in interesting
times requires a fundamental rethinking of the relations between
cultural production and politics. Thus, this conference proposes that we
move toward a fuller understanding of the material consequences of
cultural production and how cultural production might respond to, rather
than retreat from, crisis.



The MRG invites scholars to join us in rethinking the intersections
between politics and art. We would like to clarify and explore questions
such as: How can art help us imagine a postcapitalist future? How does
art register or reflect social struggle, and how can art help us think
totality in the timespace of full globalization? How can art be more
than a commodity under the conditions of postmodernity? How can we read
structures of feeling in art work? How can different aesthetic forms be
periodized within different historical moments? In the current context
of the crisis of the university, what are the stakes of abandoning
political engagement in art? How do narrative and non-narrative forms
work as strategies for reflecting, engaging, and thinking beyond capitalism?



Fredric Jameson is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at
Duke University. His many books include /Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism/, /The Modernist Papers/, /Archaeologies of the
Future/, /Valences of the Dialectic/, /The Hegel Variations/,
/Representing Capital/, and most recently /The Antinomies of Realism/.



Kim Stanley Robinson is a Hugo, Nebula, and Locus award-winning science
fiction author whose books include the The /Mars /Trilogy, The /Three
Californias /Trilogy, /The Years of Rice and Salt/, The /Science in the
Capital /Trilogy, /2312, /and /Shaman. /He is also the author of /The
Novels of Philip K Dick/. //



Nicholas Brown is Associate Professor in the Departments of English and
African American Studies at University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the
author of /Utopian Generations: The Political Horizon of
Twentieth-Century Literature/.



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



* Intersections of aesthetics and politics

* The gendered politics of art

* Political commitment in postmodernity

* Artistic representations of politics, economics, and crisis

* The crisis of the humanities

* Utopia

* Politics of the affective turn

* Globalization and art

* Nostalgia v. futurity

* Periodizing such aesthetic and political movements as realism,
modernism, etc.

* Postcolonial and transnational aesthetic forms

* Posthumanist conceptions of art

* Art and Identity



Please submit a 250-word abstract with 3-5 keywords for a 20-minute
presentation along with contact information to theufmrg@gmail.com
<mailto:theufmrg@gmail.com> by 10 January 2014. Please indicate any a/v
requests (data projection and DVD player available). Authors of accepted
papers will be notified by 3 February 2014. For questions concerning the
conference, please contact us at theufmrg@gmail.com
<mailto:theufmrg@gmail.com>. For more information, visit our website:
http://www.english.ufl/mrg/.