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"Arresting the Flow", the first annual Comparative Literary Studies graduate conference at Northwestern University, seeks to provide a platform for the formulation of a cohesive understanding of flow. The terms flow, flux, and fluid are ubiquitous in the history of Western thought—and its polemics. From Heraclitus to Plotinus, Augustine to Leibniz and Kant, Hölderlin to Heidegger, Benjamin to Deleuze and Derrida, flow has been variously defined: “fluid” have been the borders between self and other, “fluctuating” the “influences” of the uncontrollable and uncreated on organized space and time, “flowing” the conditions—and metaphors—of exchange and transmission, knowledge and self-consciousness, circulation and infection. One thing, though, has remained constant: that flow incorporates a concern for the overflowing of certain limits of being and experience, whether those be placed between man and God, mind and body, self and world, neurotransmitter and memory, eye and screen, place and journey. And yet, “flow” seems to demand its own, conceptual arrest.
Keynote addresses will be given by Bernhard Siegert (History and Theory of Cultural Technologies, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar) and
Jules Law (English and Comparative Literary Studies, Northwestern University), with Peter Fenves (Joan and Sarepta Harrison Professor of Literature, Northwestern University) as respondent.
Fields as diverse as psychoanalysis, film and media studies, philosophy, theatre, religion, the history of science, geography, urban studies, law, political science, economics, literary studies, architecture and art history, among others, continue to be marked by the effects of flow. Papers are invited to address, but are not limited to, topics such as:
The ebb and flow of thought
Flow and interruption
Flow at the source of permanence
Flow as negativity
Flow and the concepts of home and shelter
Rivers and bends, streams and eddies
Autoimmunity, law and politics
Volition, flow, resistance
Circulation(s)
Currents
Modeling flow and the impact on design
“Flow” as a paradigm of social theory
The metaphor of flow
Rethinking “influence”: local, national, global, cross-disciplinary
Fluencies
Temporal flow and perception
Wandering, migration, and the production of space
Liquid space
Political states and states of flux
“Uneven flow” and the transgression of borders
“Total flow”, streaming, and the subject of media
Landscape, fluidity and viscosity
Body fluids at the crossroads of the histories of medicine, religion, literature
Fluidity of identity and concept: race/gender/ethnicity, genre/form/structure
The primary language of the conference is English. Presentations should last roughly 20 minutes. Please send an abstract of 250-300 words as a Word attachment to Julia Ng (j-ng@northwestern.edu). On a separate cover page please list the proposed title, author’s name, affiliation, brief biographical statement focusing on academic work (approx. 100 words) and contact information. Please indicate if you will require technological support (overhead, slide projector, etc.). Visit our website for more information: http://www.wcas.northwestern.edu/complit_arrestflow/
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