REAL THINGS: MATTER, MATERIALITY, REPRESENTATION
1880 TO THE PRESENT

University of York, 5-8 July 2007

Proposals for twenty-minute presentations or panels of three to four
presenters are invited for a conference entitled \"Real Things: Matter,
Materiality, Representation, 1880 to the present,\" to be held at the
University of York, England and co-sponsored by the University of Sussex.

Keynote speakers:
Bill Brown
Mary Ann Doane
Hal Foster
Patrick Keiller
Hermione Lee
Edmund White

This conference proposes a re-engagement with representational realism and
its objects and effects across a wide range of aesthetic, critical and
theoretical practices, from 1880 to the present day. We seek to engage
cutting-edge work that raises new questions about the status of the object
of representation; representations as archives of material history; the
shifts in representational practices associated with modernism and
postmodernism; the changing status of real bodies and lives (as opposed to
their representations) as objects of analysis in the humanities; and the
politics of these transitions. Topics of interest include but are not
limited to the following:

--Realism as modernism/modernism as realism
--Rethinking photographic indexicality; cinema and/as archive
--Paintings, documents, realism: literary and visual representation
--The turn to science
--Postmodernism, realism and the real
--Representation and the psychoanalytic Real
--Evidence, document and representation
--New philosophies of nature
--Documentary film practices
--Biopolitics, biopower, bodies
--Forensics, indices and popular culture
--Performance, theatricality and materiality
--Success and/or failure of representation
--Presentation vs. representation
--New technologies, representation and embodiment
--Anti-sublimation and resistance to metaphor

Please send 250-word paper abstracts and 1000-word panel abstracts to
realthingsevents.york.ac.uk by 1 Febraury 2007. For more information,
please contact realthingsevents.york.ac.uk.

Co-organizers
Victoria Coulson, University of York
Jane Elliott, University of York
John David Rhodes, University of Sussex