The 10th Annual Conference of the Marxist Reading Group

Whither Culture?: Toward Histories, Theories, and Productions of the Social

Featuring: Michael Denning, Paula Rabinowitz, Andrew Ross, and Sergio Vega

March 27-29 at the University of Florida

Sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere
Co-Sponsored by the University of Florida Department of English and Student Government

Thursday, March 27

9:30-10:00
Welcome, Coffee, and Bagels

10:00-11:30 (Dauer 219)
Panel #1
Moderator: Paige Fowler
1) Christopher Cowley (University of Florida): Ashes to Ashes: History, Trauma, and the Ethics of Allegorical Memory in Post-9/11 Literature
2) Carl Miller (University of Florida): "The Triumph of Death": Don DeLillo's Underworld and the Periodization of Major League Architecture
3) Ryan McCormick (University of Notre Dame): Who Killed Julius and Ethel?: Culture and Crime in Coover's The Public Burning

LUNCH

1:00-2:30 (Dauer 219)
Panel #2
Moderator: Rachel Robinson
1) Seth Blazer (University of Florida): Super Power, Super Ego: The Mythology of American Identity and its Role in Globalization
2) Aron Pease (University of Florida): Revenge of the Landscape
3) Christina Van Houten (University of Florida): A Portrait of a Fascist as an American: Gertrude Stein's Global Mapping of Artistic and Political Praxis

2:45- 4:15 (Dauer 219)
Panel #3
Moderator: Katharine Westaway
1) Evan Williams (University of California Santa Cruz): Beside Enemy Lines
2) Antonio De la Pena (University of Florida): The World Bank, Social Capital, and Culture
3) Todd Thorpe (University of Notre Dame): From Cultural Materialism to Urban Materialism

4:30-6:00 (Dauer 219)
Panel #4
Moderator: Marie-Ovide Gina Dorcely
1) Dina Smith (Drake University): Reagan-era Redux and the Coen Bros.
2) Victoria Phillips Geduld (Columbia University): New Dance Group: Survival of the Fittest
3) Brennan Maier (Trinity College): "A Revolution in Culture": Migration, Bebop, and the Political Economy of Performance in Ralph Ellison's Jazz Criticism.

BREAK

8:00 (TBA)
Keynote Address by Sergio Vega (TBA)

Friday, March 28

8:00-8:30
Coffee and Bagels

8:30-10:00 (Dauer 219)
Panel #5
Moderator: Michael Mayne
1) Cagri Kasap (State University of New York at Binghamton): "Why Specters Are Not Ghosts?": On Derrida's Immigrant
2) James Royal (University of Florida): Making America's Future From Asia's Past: Hollywood Images of Buddhism
3) Bojana Videkanic (York University): The First and Last Emperor: Looking at Socialist Modernity

10:15-11:45 (Dauer 219)
Panel #6
Moderator: Raul Sanchez
1) Casey Westerman (University of Georgia ): "A Man Must Marry": Reproductive Futurism and the Organic Intellectual in Nostromo
2) Daniel R. Bell (University of Florida): The Cultural Logic of "Transness"
3) Mimi Iimuro Van Ausdall (University of Iowa): Novel Contributions: Reframing the 1970s through the Lesbian Novel

LUNCH

1:30-3:00 (Dauer 219)
Panel #7
Moderator: Julie Kim
1) Samuel Snyder (University of Florida): The Slow Food Revolution: Reclaiming Cuisine, Community, and Culture
2) Margot Finn (University of Michigan): Why Would I Want to Know My Farmer?: The Mainstreaming of Organic Food
3) Ari Adipurwawidjana (University of Louisiana at Lafayette): Resisting (Post-)Modernity, Negotiating Cultural Spaces

3:15-4:45 (Dauer 219)
Panel #8
Moderator: Aaron J Kashtan
1) Gabriel Shapiro (University of Minnesota): Hidden in Plain Sight: Cinema, Landscape, and Ideology in Hindi Films, 1950-2000
2) Velina Manolova (University of Florida): Goodbye Lenin! and the Ever-Present Specter of Socialism
3) Dragan Kujundzic (University of Florida): "Mickey Marx": Eisenstein and Disney

5:00-6:30 (Keene Faculty Center)
Keynote Address by Andrew Ross: Power to the Precarious?

DINNER

8:00 (Keene Faculty Center)
Keynote Address by Paula Rabinowitz: Epidemics of Collapse: Towards an Understanding of Postindustrial Documentary

Reception to follow at off-campus location

Saturday, March 29

8:00-8:30
Coffee and Bagels

8:30-10:00 (Dauer 219)
Panel #9
Moderator: Stephanie Boluk
1) Xavier Scott (Brock University): Labour Organization in a Communication Economy
2) Matthew Eatough (Vanderbilt University): Encoding the Public: Biological Determinism and the Exchange of Code Across Media in Ian McEwan's Saturday and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go
3) Paul Johnson (University of Florida): Murmurs, Mumbles, and Mysteries in Indie Rock and Mumblecore

10:15-11:45 (Dauer 219)
Panel #10
Moderator: Daniel R. Bell
1) Sheila Liming (Carnegie Mellon University): The Dangerous Book for Boys and the Inheritance of Empire
2) Patrick McHenry (University of Florida): "Art as a Dessert": Problems of New Formalism
3) Nicole LaRose (University of Houston-Downtown): The Chained Oak and Alton Towers: Legends, History, and Theme Park Englishness

LUNCH

1:30-3:00 (Dauer 219)
Panel #11
Moderator: Christopher J. Garland
1) Brandon Carr (University of Florida): The Legibility of the Practico-Inert: Pilnyak and Soviet Philological Anxiety
2) Eric Owens (Duke University): Everyday Life and Democracy from Below
3) Christopher Simeone (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign): Whither Collectivity? Reevaluating Collective Politics in the Past and Present

3:15-4:45 (Dauer 219)
Panel #12
Moderator: Aron Pease
1) Paul Reynolds (Edge Hill University): Culture Unchained, Culture Chained: Culture, Hegemony and Marxist Critique
2) Frank Casale (Nova Southeastern University): This Strategy of Poems: Cultural Activism, Commodification, and Mapping Global Capital in I Heart Huckabees
3) Phillip Wegner (University of Florida): The Ends of Culture; or, Late Modernism, Redux

5:00-6:30 (Keene Faculty Center)
Roundtable
Moderator: Susan Hegeman
Michael Denning, Paula Rabinowitz, and Andrew Ross: Whither Culture?

DINNER

8:00 (Keene Faculty Center)
Keynote Address by Michael Denning: The Spectre of Wageless Life

Reception to follow at off-campus location