CFP: Artistic and Scholarly Practice in the Digital Age (MLA 2014, Chicago)

Call for Papers: Artistic and Scholarly Practice in the Digital Age

Panel at MLA Convention in Chicago, 9-12 January 2014

In the digital era, academic and artistic work is recalibrating the interplay of aesthetics,
science, and politics. Art entails research, and research draws inspiration from art in
seeking new forms of interactive presentation, public participation, and multilocal
collaboration. Geopolitical categories such as center and periphery are dissolving, and
institutionally guarded boundaries between media, genres, and disciplines call for
transgression. Art as a site of knowledge production enables formal experiments in
documentary poetics, which may constitute political interventions in the uneven terrains
of circulation. The Internet opens for search boundless archives of data, but how do
artists and scholars use the abundance of accessible documents? What is lost and found in
the process? How do paratexts and intertexts factor into reading, viewing, and worldmaking? What is the critical purchase of terms like fiction and nonfiction, authorship and audience? We seek papers that build on historical and theoretical research in exploring the social and aesthetic potentials of digital media. Panels will be designed to expand the horizon of German literary studies by focusing on practices of art and critical writing across media, including work on film, video, Internet, and multiscreen installations as sites of engagement and, possibly, emancipation of readers and spectators.

Abstracts by March 9 to Deniz Göktürk <dgokturk@berkeley.edu>
to be published online.

Papers will be considered for publication by the journal TRANSIT