CfP call for paper
This Way Down: Discourses of Decline and Degeneration in Germany and Beyond
05.03.10-06.03.10
Columbia University, New York
Ninth annual Columbia University German graduate student conference
Keynote Speaker: Prof. Jennifer Kapczynski (Washington University)
Narratives of decline and degeneration have long pervaded political,
cultural, and aesthetic discourses in the West. Alongside utopian
fantasies of technological progress, the gradual perfection of mankind,
and teleological philosophies of history, modernity in particular has
frequently inspired conceptualizations of art, culture, and the human
being, articulated in terms of contamination, regression, and decay.
Such accounts are typically coupled with nostalgic romanticizations of
the past that devalue the future, or regard it merely as a path to
inevitable extinction, while perceiving in the present only that which
has disappeared or been lost over the course of history. Yet,
pessimistic pronouncements of cultural decline and the assumption that
things are, for the most part, perpetually getting worse have also been
understood as a productive and necessary
precondition for theorizing and engaging with
the present. In this way, the boundary between
rigorous critique and cynicism is often unstable and difficult to distinguish.
This conference seeks to explore the rhetorical strategies and
discursive elements constitutive of narratives of decline, focusing on
issues related to the production and interpretation of art, race and
ethnicity, gender, the family, new media, science and rationalization,
the body, generational conflicts, politics, and the emergence of the
modern metropolis, among others.
We invite papers from all disciplines approaching the subject from a
variety of critical perspectives.
Topics may include but are not limited to:
-Theories of Language and its Contamination
-Decadence and the Arts in the Late Nineteenth Century
-Kulturpessimismus and the Philosophy of Decline: Schopenhauer ?
Nietzsche ? Adorno
-The End of Ancestral Lines: Representations of the Family in Realism
and Naturalism
-Effeminization, Changing Gender Relations, and the Decline of
Masculinity
-Insanity, Criminality, and the Healthy/Sick Binary in Aesthetic
Discourse
-Eugenics and Disability
-Poverty, Disease, and Decay in Urban Spaces
-Max Nordau, Zionism, and Jewish Identity around 1900
-Degeneration and the Third Reich
-Intergenerational Conflicts
-Nostalgia
-New Media, Mass Culture, and the High Arts
-Animals and Humans: Darwin, Evolution, and Discourse of Species
Please submit a 300 word abstract for a 15-20
minute paper by January 1st to
<(germangradconference /at/ columbia.edu)>. Proposals
should include the title of the paper,
presenter's name, institutional and departmental affiliation.
See the conference website for updates and further information.
<http://www.columbia.edu/cu/german/decline/>
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Kári Driscoll
Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
Columbia University
