Call for Papers: Undergraduate Seminar "Revisiting the City" -- ACLA Annual Conference, March 16-19, 2023 ( Sheraton Grand, Chicago). (original) (raw)

ACLA Undergraduate Seminar "Revisiting the City" Since antiquity, cities have been pivotal elements in collective and personal histories. As physical and imagined spaces, they have fostered narratives of grandeur and downfall, center and periphery, democracy and imperialism, temporality and spirituality. The conception and depiction of the city have evolved across time and space, providing different models of social and cultural relations, influencing aesthetic conventions, and generating particular emotions and values, often in contrast with other geographic settings or forms of communal living. This seminar invites submissions from **undergraduate students** addressing the relation between cities and aesthetic representation (in literature, visual arts, film and other medias, literary, cultural, and critical theories) in any historical period or area of the world. How has the city helped define civilization? In what ways does the urban framework shape characters and events? How are the form and genre of a work of art influenced by the city? What social, political, ethical issues does the representation of the city raise? What contradictions emerge from the depiction of urban life? Comparative papers may engage with ways in which the city as an image, setting, or subject enables an investigation of the following or similar topics (but not exclusively): Community vs society Real and ideal cities Ancient and modern cities The city in detective fiction, thrillers, noirs Languages, genres, and narrative perspectives shaped by cities Utopias and dystopias The city and the countryside Nature and culture Tradition and modernity The “civilized”/”primitive” dichotomy Progress, industrialization, technology, and their discontents Social order and disorder Urban crowds and revolutions Gangs, protest, and violence Class struggle, gender, racial, and economic disparities Slums, banlieues, and other sites of social and spatial marginalization Freedom vs alienation Work and capitalism Cities and avant-gardes Capital cities Port cities Imperial cities Colonial and postcolonial legacies Monuments, ruins, and collective memory Travel narratives Wars and natural catastrophes Environmental challenges East and West, North and South Local, national, and transnational identities Metropolises, megalopolises, globalization, and cosmopolitanism Migration, borders, multiculturalism Paper proposals should be submitted through the ACLA portal at the following link: https://acla.org/22-23-undergrad-seminar-paper-submit For information please contact Prof. Nicoletta Pireddu, ACLA Program Committee Chair, pireddun@georgetown.edu