Ninth annual Columbia University German graduate student conference
March 5-6, 2010
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. How, for example, have psychological
conceptions of insanity, hysteria, and physical illness been taken up
within modern art, and how have new modes of representation within the
arts been analyzed by cultural critics as an extension and clear
manifestation of illness or degeneration? How have the body, ethnicity,
and race been used as explanations or evidence for cultural decline? How
has literature and the visual arts responded to and critically commented
on strategies of representation employed by new media, and in what ways
have these new technologies been discussed in terms of a broader
intellectual decline? In what ways do concepts such as ‘decline’ and
‘degeneration’ shed light on intergenerational conflicts?
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@columbia.edu>. Proposals should include the
title of the paper, presenter's name, institutional and departmental
affiliation.
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Kári Driscoll
Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
Columbia University
Columbia University, New York