"Rethinking Reception" Conference

Durham, NC, March 24-26,2005

This conference both proposes, and interrogates the utility of the concept of reception for understanding audience interaction with texts in all their various forms — be it readers and novels, readers and critical theory, viewers and films, viewers and television, web-users and the internet, listeners and radio, consumers and products, and nations and the trans-national flow of cultural objects. Thus the conference proposes to bring together work on readership, spectatorship, and consumption under the broader analytic of reception, and to initiate a dialogue between work in film studies, literary studies, cultural studies, critical theory, philosophy, and cognitive psychology. The conference aspires to shed light on different aspects of reception and to develop and to refine trans-disciplinary avenues of approach to questions of audience interaction with texts.CALL FOR PAPERS

The Graduate Program in Literature at Duke University will host the conference.

Potential panels or areas of specification within the broader theme of reception could include the following:

ONTOLOGY, AFFECT AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE SUBJECT

What is the agency of receivers in relation to objects? To what extent are subjects determined or even constituted in different ways by the objects with which they interact?

PERCEPTION, RECEPTION AND TECHNOLOGIES

How do different technologies — media, transportation, medical, architectural etc. — create different frames for reception, or practices of reception — if these can still be thought of as discrete areas at all?

RECEPTION AND THE POLITICAL

How is the concept of reception useful for theorizing the constitution of political discourses and hierarchies of power in a public sphere dominated by the media — videos and photographs of violence committed in wartime, beheadings broadcast on the internet, endless TV and internet replays of spectacular events?

RECEPTION, THE NATION AND SOVEREIGNTY

What does reception as an analytic reveal about the concepts of the nation, sovereignty, regionalism and trans-nationalism? What do reflections on reception at a trans-national level reveal about the ontogenesis of forms of political sovereignty in the 20th century?

Papers of 20 minutes might address any aspect of reception and proposals for panels not listed above are also welcome. Submissions should ideally address the specificities of the receivers in question, or the specific circumstances or practices of reception, or, alternatively, justify why such attention is not relevant in the case(s) considered. The organizers also hope to initiate a fruitful dialogue among conference participants through workshops for discussion of texts related to reception. Conference participants are encouraged to propose specific articles, books, studies or even works in progress that could be discussed.

The deadline for submission of 250-500 word paper abstracts is January 1, 2005. Please include your name, institutional affiliation, e-mail address, and phone number. Email abstracts to rethinkingreception@yahoo.com. Please see here
for a more detailed call for papers and additional information.