Schedule of Themes and Directors
Preliminary Call for Papers
33rd Annual Film and Literature Conference
Cyborg Science and Virtual Materialities in Literature and Film
January 31-February 2, 2008
The central question of this conference is whether or not some kind of nuanced “translational” model that grapples with the increasing gulf separating C. P. Snow’s “three cultures” of science, the humanities, and technology is possible, in the light of contemporary critiques of science. Invited speakers include: Stephen Prince, Patricia Melzer, Lev Manovich, Judith Kerman, and Scott Bukatman.
This conference is based principally on recent scholarship that attempts to forge a metaphor for the postmodern condition of multiple hybridities in the figure of the cyborg. As Donna Haraway puts it, the cyborg, a “condensed image of both material reality and imagination,” signals the end of myths of purity because it does “not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.” Haraway’s framework thus enables discussions that juxtapose the rhetoric and narrative forms used by film, literature, and painting, as well as biology, medicine, and technology, which are informed by gender as well as postcolonial and transnational issues that get at the intertwined issues of objectivity and translationalism. Other authors who have addressed similar issues include Evelyn Fox Keller, Sandra Harding, Londa Schiebinger, and Susan Bordo.
There are other related points of entry into this conference theme. For example, the new paradigms that call for non-positivist, non-linear movements within science easily segue with cutting-edge critical work in feminism and postcolonialism, yielding new movements, such as an emergent one called “Afrofuturism.” Afrofuturism is a nascent sub-cultural movement made up of novelists, filmmakers, critics, cultural theorists, experimental musicians, and scientists, who explore the new cultural spaces for the African diaspora that have been opened up by technology. These thinkers and artists see the potential of science, cyberspace, and science fiction narrative as a means to investigate/interrogate the black experience and find new strategies to overcome oppression. As psychologist, scholar, and "cybershrink" Sherry Turkle writes: "Watch for a nascent culture of virtual reality that is paradoxically a culture of the concrete, placing new saliency on the notion that we construct gender [and race] and that we become what we play, argue about, and build."
Many fiction writers with ties to this movement follow from the work of Octavia Butler - including authors such as Samuel Delaney, Nalo Hopkinson, Ngugi Wa Thiongo, Ben Okri and Steven Barnes, who use figures such as the cyborg and the hacker, and literary devices such as the alternate timelines, utopia and dystopia to articulate new non-linear possibilities for liberation from the oppressive nature of the traditional positivist model of science and history.
In the world of cinema/television/digital studies, cyborg science and virtual materialities have been analyzed by scholars such as Vivian Sobchack, Henry Jenkins, Annette Kuhn, Thomas Elsaesser, Claudia Springer, Scott Bukatman, Anne Balsamo, Umberto Eco, Janet Bergstrom, J. P. Telotte, Constance Penley, Stephen Prince, Robert Kolker, Cynthia Fuchs, Lev Manovich, and Judith Kerman. These issues have also been thematized in films such as A.I., Android, Bladerunner, Cyborg 2 and 3, Demon Seed, Gattaca, The Matrix, Metropolis, Robocop 1 and 2, Terminator 1 and 2, The Stepford Wives, The War of the Worlds
- Anthropomorphizing the Other
- Philosophies of Beauty in the Visual and Verbal Arts
- The Posthuman
- Metamorphosis as Translation
- Alterity and Technology
- The International Cyborg: The Human-Machine in Non-U.S. Cinema
- Digital Special Effects and Virtual Materialities
- CGI: Theory and Practice
- Television (Star Trek: The Next Generation; The $6 Million Man, among others)
- Japanese Anime
- Cyberpunk literature and film
- The Body and the Machine
- Science and/or Fiction in Literature and Film
Refereeing of conference panel proposals and abstracts begins in Fall 2007. Please email kpicart@english.fsu.edu or kbearor@mailer.fsu.edu for further developments. A website will be set up in conjunction with Florida State University’s Academic and Professional Program Services by summer 2007.
Conference Organizers:
Caroline “Kay” Picart (English)
Karen Bearor (Art History)
Plenary Speakers:
Stephen Prince is a Professor of Communication at Virginia Tech, teaching film history, theory, and criticism for the past 17 years. He has done much research on violence in film, Japanese cinema and Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, American film, and political cinema. His various essays and book excerpts have appeared in a variety of publications, including Film Quarterly, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Cinema Journal, and the Quarterly Review of Film and Radio. He is the President of The Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the largest organization of film enthusiasts encompassing professionals, academics, and students. He has published nine books including: Visions of Empire: Political Imagery in Contemporary Hollywood (1992); Screening Violence (2000); and most recently, The Horror Film (2004).
Patricia Melzer is the co-director of the Womens Studies Program at Temple University, where she teaches a variety of courses studying the roles of women in different aspects of society, such as technology and film. She earned her Ph.D. from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts and spent a few years at Free University in Berlin, Germany doing feminist academic and activist work while receiving her Masters in North American Studies. Her published work includes Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought (2006).
Lev Manovich is a Professor at the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) where he teaches new media art and theory. He received his M.A. in Cognitive Science at New York University (1988) and went on to receive his Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester (1993). His various essays and books, including Soft Cinema (2005), The Language of New Media (2001), and Tekstura: Russian Essays on Visual Culture (1993) have been translated into Spanish, Polish, Latvian, Slovenian, Greek, and Korean and have been publsihed in 28 countries.
Judith Kerman is the author of eight books and chapbooks of poetry, including Galvanic Response (2005) and the bilingual collection Plane Surfaces (Plano de Incindencia, 2002). Her well known book length prose-poem Mothering earned Kerman an Honorable Mention in Poetry in the New Writers Award of the Great Lakes Colleges Association in 1978. In 2002 Kerman was a Fulbright Senior Scholar to the Dominican Republic, where she translated the prose and poetry of several Dominican women writers. She is currently the Dean of Arts and Behavioral Sciences at Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan, where she is also a Professor of English.
Scott Bukatman has been an Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University since 1997, where he teaches course on film aesthetics and theory. He holds his Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from New York University (NYU) and has been published in many journals such as Camera Obscura and October. He has also written three books: Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction, one of the first in-depth studies of cyberculture; a monograph on Blade Runner; and Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century, a collection of essays. He has previously taught at NYU, Yale, Free University in Berlin, Germany, and the University of New Mexico before coming to Stanford, where he has greatly contributed to the development of the Film and Media Studies Program.