Call for Papers Announced!

 17th Annual French & Francophone Studies Graduate Student Conference at UCLA

 October 11-12, 2012

Keynote speaker: Professor Jean-Marie Apostolidès

Plenary session: TBA

Deadline for Submission: April 30, 2012

Spectacle and Spectator: Ways of Seeing and Being Seen

SPECTACULUM [Latin, 13thc.]: “un ensemble de choses qui s'offre au regard”

Spec : to look, to watch (spectre, speculum, spectator)

 In 1969, the French President Georges Pompidou initiated a project for a national arts museum in the historical center of Paris. Architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers won the competition to design the world’s first transparent museum. Their concept depicted the museum design itself by exhibiting the entire infrastructure of the building. According to Rogers, transparency in architecture “is comparable to the concept of transparency in the

organization of a society, and therefore to democracy and openness, to the rupture of ancient hierarchies traditionally hidden behind masonry walls.” A further important element was the architects’ intention to create a meeting space for the museum-goer as well as for the local residents at the piazza in front of the museum. Le Centre Pompidou represents the architecture of seeing.

Competition drawing by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano. [http://www.archdaily.com/64028/ad-classics-centre-georges-pompidou-renzo-piano-richard-rogers/competition-drawings/]

For the 17th annual Graduate Student Conference, the UCLA Department of French

and Francophone Studies invites submissions that explore the relationships between spectator and spectatorship in literature and arts. How do we organize ourselves en masse to experience culture? One way to provide answers to this question is to examine the nature of perception and presentation of various aesthetic experiences ranging from literature, theater, and cinema to bandes dessinées and artist’s books. We welcome submissions on French and Francophone topics from a variety of disciplines. Please email a 300-500 word abstract (in English or French), along with your paper title, affiliation and contact information to uclafrenchgradconference2012@gmail.com. Papers should be no more than 20 minutes in length. Deadline for submission is April 30, 2012. 

Possible topics might include but are not limited to:

PERSONAL SPECTACLE

-­‐ La mise en scène du moi, autobiography, life-writing, testimony

-­‐ Vision, hallucination, blindness

-­‐ Travel narrative, migration, flanerie

-­‐ Romanticism and “le spectacle de la nature,” the scenic

-­‐ Personnage versus persona, masks, mirrors, portraiture, theatricality

POLITICAL SPECTACLE

-­‐ French Revolutions (1789, 1848, 1871), interwar France, May 68

-­‐ Violence, protest, state terror, war, 17 octobre 1961, lieux de mémoire

-­‐ 2012 French election, political scandal, mass campaigns, satire, parody

-­‐ Myth, ritual, (trans)nationalism, nationhood

SPECTACLE AND SOCIETY

-­‐ Theories of the individual, theories of the collective

-­‐ Court society, salons, festivals, street-theatre

-­‐ Industrial and post-industrial consumerism and display, mass media

-­‐ Critics, the senses, synaesthesia, aesthetics, virtuality

-­‐ Medieval theatricality and spectatorship

N.B.:   A selection of papers presented during the conference will be edited into a published collection of essays in the UCLA French Department's graduate journal, Paroles gelées.  To view previous issues, visit us at: http://gsa.asucla.ucla.edu/services/publications/paroles-­‐gelees.