Call for Papers: the United Students Society (an extracurricular reading group under the auspices of the Department of North American Literature and Culture at the University of Łódź) invites you to participate in its 9th student conference:

"Dialectics of Popular Culture"
Saturday, 30 May 2020
Venue: The Faculty of Philology, University of Łódź
Keynote speaker:
prof. Paweł Frelik
(American Studies Center, University of Warsaw)

[The pdf version of the CFP is available here: http://anglistyka.uni.lodz.pl/userfiles/Dialectics%20of%20Pop%20USS%20CFP-final.pdf]

While pop culture defines a large part of contemporaneity, some consume it eagerly while others smirk and turn to more sophisticated forms of art. Nevertheless, no matter where we stand, we should make sure that we know how to speak of pop culture before we pass judgement on it. Can popular culture be more than mere entertainment? Is commodification and consumption of culture a negative phenomenon by definition? Should pop culture be defined by its (necessary?) accessibility and assimilability? What is the role of artists’ social and ethnic background, sexual orientation, or political and religious beliefs? What is the significance of their aliases, monikers, masks and other assumed identities? Could mass culture harbor an emancipatory and self-affirmative potential?

Two possible starting points for this discussion are Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Taking a long, hard look at the artistic, metaphysical, and spiritual collapse of Western culture, the two German thinkers brought to light some of the vices of what was to become mass culture. To a certain extent, Jameson can be considered their disciple, as he accurately noted the existence of a “nostalgia mode,” embodied in our propensity to favor the familiar over the experimental, prioritizing ‘remixes’ and reworks over innovation.
Dialectics of Popular Culture is the ninth conference organized by the United Students Society, an extracurricular reading group under the auspices of the Department of North American Literature and Culture at the University of Łódź. The aim of the conference is to investigate all aspects of popular culture (including a discussion of its meta-aspects as well as specific cultural texts) in North American literature and culture.

We invite undergraduate and graduate students (including doctoral candidates) to submit abstracts on subjects related to US American and Canadian literature and culture that include, but are not limited to, the following:

 Analysis of texts / examples of popular culture.
 Dialectics of popular culture: how to speak about it, how to evaluate it.
 Theoretical tools with which to assess popular music, cinematography, and literature.
 Popular culture and tragedy: is there space for the opposition between the individual and society?
 The artist’s incarnations and their influence on the perception and tone of their work.
 Emancipation and self-affirmation in popular culture.
 False identities and their place in pop culture.
 Popular modernism.
 Popular culture and stereotypes
 The popular and the populist
 Intermediality in the context of pop
 Elitism in critical attitudes

Please send an abstract of 150-200 words and a bio of 100 words to the following address: popculture.uss@gmail.com The deadline for submissions is February 15, 2020. Please note that there is no conference fee.

dr Justyna Fruzinska (head of the organizing committee)
dr Krzysztof Majer (head of the organizing committee)
mgr Jan Moryń (conference secretary)
mgr Piotr Płomiński (conference secretary)