Post45@The Rock Hall
April 29-30, 2011
Keynote speakers: Steve Earle, Kim Cooper, Rick Moody, Kevin Young
Post45’s 5th anniversary conference will be held in Cleveland, the birthplace of Rock and Roll. Keynote addresses and the grand reception will be at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum while earlier panels will be hosted by the Renaissance Cleveland Hotel.
This conference will host a mix of academics, creative artists, and public intellectuals for a series of panels on media, the archive, film, literature, creative writing, and popular music.
The registration fee covers the usual access to panels and performances; coffee and box lunch on both days of the conference; transportation to and from the Rock Hall and the final reception at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum on the second night of the conference. Panelists who received travel funding from their home institutions this year should pay $200; those whose institutions did not provide any funding this year should pay $150. Your bank statement will show a charge to PAYPAL*POST45.
The conference hotel is the Renaissance Cleveland Hotel. To make reservations follow this link or call 1-800-HOTELS-1 or 1-800-468-3571.
Post45 extends its sincerest thanks to the Rock Hall for its remarkable support, and to Brown University, Kent State University, the University of Missouri—Columbia, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Yale University for generous funding.
Final Schedule
Friday
8:00-9:30
Case
States of Damage
Curator: Richard Godden
States of Damage: Modelling Cultures of Neoliberalism in USonian Writing and Culture
Stephen Shapiro (Warwick)
Premediated Violence: Cartoon Abstraction and C21 Cultural Form
Nick Lawrence (Warwick)
Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park and the Exquisite Corpse of Finance Capital
Richard Godden (University of California, Irvine)
Garfield
Post45 Live
Electric Arguments: Poetry, Proselytizing and the Phonograph
Michael S. Hennessey (Editor, PennSound & Jacket2)
Race, Space and Representation at Rock Festivals
Gina Arnold (Stanford University)
"Build a Fort/ Set that on Fire": Kevin Young's Ekphrasis
Stefanie Wortman (University of Missouri, Columbia)
Holden
Post/Apocalypse
Curator: Abigail Cheever (University of Richmond)
Robinson's Crusoe: Housekeeping's Post-Apocalyptic Aspirations
Mary Esteve (Concordia University)
Black Screens, Lost Bodies: The Cinematic Apparatus of 9/11 Horror
Laura Frost (The New School)
I ♥ Universal Breath: Post 9-11 Poetry and Theory
Lisa Siraganian (Southern Methodist University)
Halle
Literature and Leisure
Discussant: Deak Nabers (Brown University)
A Man of Leisure: Tom Ripley's Good Taste and the Anti-humanist Novel
Scott Daniel Dill (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
John Berryman's Leisurely Hour
Ben Rogerson (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
Water, Malaise, Leisure: Cheever's "The Swimmer" and Dickey's Deliverance
Zackary Vernon (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
Van Aken
Media Theory as Biohistory
The Biology of Revolution: Diane Arbus & Herbert Marcuse
Robin Blyn (University of West Florida)
The Flesh of Time
Aaron Kunin (Pomona College)
Reading Race, Reading Comics: Incognegro and the Discourse of Racial Legibility
Jennifer Glaser (University of Cincinnati)
9:45-11:15
Case
A Simple Twist: Dylan's Niche
Curator: Loren Glass (University of Iowa)
"I Can't Sing Anyway": On Wee Willie Shantz and Doing It Yourself
Justin St. Clair (University of South Alabama)
The Singer-Songwriter: A Post-68 Phenomenon
David Shumway (Carnegie Mellon University)
Patti Smith's Invasion of the Singer-Songwriter
Barry Shank (Ohio State University )
Garfield
“I Have A Scream”: Janelle Monae’s Millennial Insurrection
Curator: Daphne A. Brooks (Princeton University)
Janelle Monae and Cinema: A Slideshow
Tavia Nyong’o (New York University)
"I Sing the Body Electric": Janelle Monae and the Joys of the Robotic
Jayna Brown (University of California at Riverside)
Dostoevsky’s Epilogue: The State of Black Art in the 21st Century
Chuck Lightning (Creative Director of the Wondaland Arts Society)
“Born to Run": Janelle Monae and the Sonic Art of the Fugitive Slave Narrative 2.0
Daphne A. Brooks (Princeton University)
Holden
The Post: Literary Culture Remade 1938-1949 (discussion)
Curator: Deborah Nelson (University of Chicago)
Discussants: Trysh Travis (University of Florida) on American Book Publishers Council
Richard So (University of Chicago) on The US State Department
Jeremy Braddock (Cornell University) on The Library of Congress
Halle
Falling
The Falling Body and the Imperial Future
Kameron Austin Collins (Princeton University)
Merce Cunningham and the Metapolitics of Dance
Catherine Gunther Kodat (Hamilton College)
Falling Man, Survivor's Stairway: Time, Descent, and 9/11 Memorialization
Justin Neuman (Yale University)
Van Aken
Theory Post45
Curator: Michael Clune (Case Western Reserve University)
The Scale of Post45
Mark McGurl (University of California, Los Angeles)
From Representation to Creation
Michael Clune (Case Western Reserve University)
How Do I Know What I'm Doing?
Jami Bartlett (University of California, Irvine)
11:30-1:15
Case
Mediated Texan-ness: Progressive Country Music in 1970s Austin
Curator: Travis Stimeling (Millikin University)
"The God Who Now Abandons Texas": Country Culture, Counter Culture, and Handwringing Regionalism in the Media of 1970s Texas
Jason Mellard (Clements Center for Southwest Studies)
Austin City Limits and the Progressive Country Moment
Tracey E.W. Laird (Agnes Scott College)
Doug Sahm and the Creation of "Texas Music"
Travis D. Stimeling (Millikin University)
Garfield
Edges and Hedges: Academic Journals Now (discussion)
Curator: Amy Hungerford (Yale University)
Mark Greif (Eugene Lang College) on n+1
Amy Hungerford on Post45.org
Oren Izenberg (University of Illinois at Chicago) on nonsite.org
Gordon Hutner (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne) on American Literary History
Holden
The Obscene Post45
Curator: Josh Lambert (New York University)
Performance Anxiety: Medusa, Sex, and the First Amendment.
Amy Adler (New York University School of Law)
Vulgar Modernism: Grove Press and the Ends of Obscenity
Loren Glass (University of Iowa)
Shmuck don’t mean shmuck, except to some putz who digs it: The Mainstreaming of Yiddish Obscenity
Josh Lambert (New York University)
Mondo Rocco: Pat Rocco's Softcore Screenings and the Unobscene Sexual Geography of Gay Los Angeles
Whitney Strub (Rutgers University, Newark)
Halle
Artistry, Affect, and Experiment: Evaluating Comics
Curator: Hillary Chute (University of Chicago)
On Paper
Tyler Curtain (The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
The Labyrinth of Comics: Beyond Sequential Art
Martha Kuhlman (Bryant University)
The Artist-Hero
Ed Park (Columbia University and The Believer)
Van Aken
Making and Breaking the Subject in Contemporary Fiction
Curator: Mitchum Huehls (University of California, Los Angeles)
The Warring Subject
Matthew Wilkens (Washington University in St. Louis)
The Traumatized Subject
Mitchum Huehls (University of California, Los Angeles)
The Stateless Subject
Angela Naimou (Clemson University)
1:15-2:00: Lunch: The Van Aken Foyer
2:00-3:30
Case
Black Soul and the Void
Curator: Anthony Reed (Yale University)
After the End of the World’: Sun Ra and the Ends of History
Anthony Reed (Yale University)
Bearing Witness: Erykah Badu’s ‘Window Seat'”
Emily J. Lordi (Cornell University)
Marking the Margins: Janelle Monae’s ‘Cold War’ Landscape
Shana Redmond (University of Southern California)
Garfield
Sound, Sex, Abjection
Curator: Gustavus Stadler (Haverford College)
Doing Time with Donny the Punk
Tavia Nyong’o (New York University)
Woody Guthrie’s Spoiled Identity
Gustavus Stadler (Haverford College)
Call Me Morbid
Peter Coviello (Bowdoin College)
Holden
So Low You Can't Get Under It: Roots, Rap, Rock and Is Resistance For Real?
Curator: Nic Sammond (University of Toronto)
Compared to What: Lyricism, Realism, Relativism (Rap)
Andrew DuBois (University of Toronto)
"If it Ain't Cheap, It Ain't Punk": The Political Implications of DIY Punk Record Labels Kevin Dunn (Hobart and William Smith College)
Halle
Electronic Literature & The Book: Medial Intersection as Inspiration
Curator: Jessica Pressman (Yale University)
Visual Intellectuality and Digital Literature
Brian Kim Stefans (University of California, Irvine)
Towards a Genomics of Branching Narrative
Jeremy Douglass (University of California San Diego)
Bookishness
Jessica Pressman (Yale University)
Van Aken
Postmodernism, Then
Curator: Daniel Worden (University of Colorado at Colorado Springs)
Readymade in Mexico
Jason D. Gladstone (Wake Forest University)
Cognitive Mapping, Then and Now
Emilio Sauri (University of Massachusetts, Boston)
Biologizing Postmodernism
Rachel Greenwald Smith (Saint Louis University)
3:45-5:15
Case
Intimate Pop: Music in Private Spaces
Curator: Eric Weisbard (University of Alabama)
I am Sitting in a Room: On Privacy and Pop
Karl Hangstrom Miller (University of Texas)
Imagining the Studio: Historicizing Record Consciousness, 1948-1972
Keir Keightley (University of Western Ontario)
Dreaming of Michael Jackson: On Listening Like a (Jewish) Girl
Gayle Wald (George Washington University)
Garfield
Verse Woofer: Poetry and Rock in the 60s and 70s
Curator: Lytle Shaw (New York University)
Tape: The FBI's Poetics of Immediacy in the 60s
Lytle Shaw (New York University)
Patti Smith vs. The New York School
Daniel Kane (University of Sussex)
Noise Poetry, Noise Music: From 60s Cool to 70s Punk
John Melillo (New York University)
Holden
Working Art: Law, Labor, and Form
Literature and Civil Rights
Margaret Hunt Gram (Harvard University)
Post-Fordist Hollywood and the Economy of Artists
Jeff Menne (Vanderbilt University)
Beyond Repair: Precarious Life in Millennial Poetry
Margaret Ronda (Indiana University, Bloomington)
Halle
Zombies, Apocalyptic or Otherwise
Zombie Rhythm and the Temporality of Ethics
Ed Comentale (Indiana University, Bloomington)
Zom-pocalypse Now
Aaron Jaffe (University of Louisville)
Ten-Dollar Dreadfuls
Jonathan Eburne (Pennsylvania State University)
Van Aken
Form at Midcentury
The Second-Greatest Story Ever Told: James Michener's Hawaii and the Aesthetics of the Middlebrow Epic
Tom Perrin (University of Chicago)
The Private Eye and the Public Interest
Nicholas Donofrio (Harvard University)
Aesthetics and its Discontents: Flannery O'Connor's Violent Signs
Sarah Osment (Brown University)
5:30-6:45
Case
Morality as Message in Popular Music
Curator: Kenneth Bindas (Kent State University)
Music, Morals, and Political Appropriation
Travis Hreno (The University of Akron)
The Hermeneutics of Exile
George Reisch (Editor, Popular Culture and Philosophy, Open Court Press)
I Know I Had it Comin': Moral Responsibility and Structural Injustice in Johnny Cash
John Huss (The University of Akron)
Garfield
The Bowling Green State University Sound Recordings Archives: History and Use
Curator: Bill Schurk (Professor/SRA Archivist, Bowling Green State University)
Echoes of the Twentieth Century: An Ethnomusicologist in the SRA
Jeremy Wallach (Bowling Green State University)
The SRA for Students and Researchers
Matthew A. Donahue (Bowling Green State University)
The Heavy Metal and Hardcore Punk Archive Three Years Later
Brian Hickam (Benedictine University)
Holden
Poetry, Technique, Theory
Curator: Oren Izenberg (University of Illinois at Chicago)
Experiments in Living
Oren Izenberg (University of Illinois at Chicago)
The Knots of the Avant-Garde: Christine Wertheim's +|'me'S•pace and the Institute for Figuring
Sianne Ngai (University of California, Los Angeles)
Poetry as Monstrous Accumulation
Keston Sutherland (University of Sussex)
Poetry and Grammar (Again)
Jennifer Ashton (University of Illinois at Chicago)
Halle
The Aftermath of Media
Inglourious Basterds and the End(s) of Film
Jonathan Freedman (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)
Interviewing the Dead: Narrative Journalism in the Nuclear Age
Franny Nudelman (Carleton University)
Spectacular Films/Mundane Pleasures: Re-historicizing 'Cult' Movies
Mike Chopra-Gant (London Metropolitan University)
Van Aken
Techne and the Counterculture
Curator: John Williams (Yale University)
Generational Changes in Computer Practitioners: From Slide Rules to Smart Mobs in 50 Swift Years
Ellen Ullman (computer programmer and author):
Net Effects: Romanticism and the Computer Counterculture
Thomas Streeter (University of Vermont)
‘Not an Interface, But an Intermedium’: Thomas Pynchon discovers the Internet in The
Crying of Lot 49.
Madeleine Monson-Rosen (University of Illinois at Chicago)
Cybernetic Zen and the Art of Global Capitalism
R. John Williams (Yale University)
Saturday
9:00-10:30
Case
Country Identities
Curator: Fred Whiting (University of Alabama)
The Queer and the Subject of Country
Nadine Hubbs (University of Michigan)
Walking the Color Line: Race and Country Music in Hollywood Film
Diane E. Pecknold (University of Louisville)
Dolly Parton and the Centering of Country Music
Eric Weisbard (University of Alabama)
Garfield
Engineering Sound and Image in the 60s
Curator: J.D. Connor
Once Upon a Time in Slow Motion
Mark Goble (University of California, Berkeley)
Technology, Culture, and Cleveland’s Studio Scene in the 1960s
Susan Schmidt Horning (St. John's)
TransCanada Express: Glenn Gould, Petula Clark, and the Possibilities of Pop
J.D. Connor (Yale University)
Holden
Literature & Numbers
The Statistical Mechanics of Literary Criticism
James J. Pulizzi (University of California, Los Angeles)
Running the Numbers: Counting the Multitude in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
Renee Hudson (University of California, Los Angeles)
"Later Enough": Susan Wheeler's Datapoetics
Jeremy Schmidt (University of California, Los Angeles)
Halle
Periodizing the Present: Adolescence and Affiliation
Curator: Daniel Grausam (Washington University in St. Louis)
The Kids Are Alright: Neo-liberal Youth Counter Culture in Kang’s Looking for Bruce Lee
Joseph Jonghyun Jeon (University of San Diego)
Teenage Pasteland
Benjamin Widiss (Princeton University)
Cold War Wastelands
Daniel Grausam (Washington University in St. Louis)
10:45-12:30
Case
Music, Literature, and the Cultural Marketplace
Curator: Evan Brier (University of Minnesota Duluth)
Listening to Lo-fi Lit: Author Events and DIY Publishing
Tom Cerasulo (Elms College)
Seeing Clearly: The Early Career of African American Singer Johnny Nash
Kathleen Newman (Carnegie Mellon University)
American Novels After Rolling Stone
Evan Brier (University of Minnesota Duluth)
Michael Muhammad Knight's The Taqwacores and the Genealogy of Punk
Lee Konstantinou (Stanford University)
Garfield
Post45 Presents: The New Book Series (discussion)
Discussants: Emily-Jane Cohen (Acquisitions Editor for Literature, Philosophy, Religion at Stanford University Press); Michael Szalay (University of California, Irvine) on his The Hip Figure: Political Fiction and the Postwar Democratic Party; Jerome Christensen (University of California, Irvine) on his America’s Corporate Art: The Studio Authorship of Hollywood Motion Pictures; a
virtual Jared Gardner (Ohio State University) on his Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling
Holden
Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorders
Curator: Raymond Malewitz (Yale University)
Getting Beyond the End of the World: The Dialectic of Dystopia and Apocalypse in
Paradise and The Windup Girl
Philip Wegner (University of Florida)
The Commodity at the End of the World
Raymond Malewitz (Yale University)
Neurotive Disorders: Trauma, Synapses, and Contemporary Fiction
James Berger (Yale University)
Halle
Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American
Curator: Min Hyoung Song (Boston College)
Chinese Whispers
Ed Park (Columbia University and The Believer)
Lit Journals as Corrective? The Literary Marketplace from an Editor's Chair
Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis (University of Maryland at College Park and The Asian American Literary Review)
The New (Not So Asian) American Writers
Viet Nguyen (University of Southern California)
12:30-1:15 Lunch: The Van Aken Foyer
1:15-2:50
(please note end time- shuttle for Rock Hall leave 3 PM sharp)
Case
History on a Guitar String: Four Answers to Robert Palmer's Question
Curator: Carlo Rotella (Boston College)
Back Door Man: Howlin' Wolf and the Sound of Jim Crow
Eric Lott (University of Virginia)
Sonic Captivities: American Indian Crossovers and the Politics of Musical Sovereignty
Phil Deloria (University of Michigan)
"The plan of the city was all that you saw": Chicago Music and Chicago Literature
Carlo Rotella (Boston College)
Changing Times, Coming Changes: Sam Cooke, Bob Dylan & the Birth of Sixties Music
Jack Hamilton (Harvard University)
Garfield
Rethinking Formalism(s): The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present
Curator: Amy Elias (Past President 2011, A.S.A.P.)
A Politics of Formalism
Julian Murphet (University of New South Wales)
Dialogics and the Avant-garde
Amy J. Elias (University of Tennessee)
Against Historicism, or, Can We Imagine the Present?
Brian McHale (The Ohio State University, A.S.A.P. President 2011)
Holden
Poetry at Present: A Conversation about the State of the Art (discussion)
Curator: Andrew Hoberek (University of Missouri at Columbia)
Discussants: Kazim Ali (Oberlin College), Cathy Park Hong (Sarah Lawrence College), Alexandra Socarides (University of Missouri at Columbia), Timothy Yu (University of Wisconsin, Madison), and Joanie Mackowski (Cornell University)
Halle
Writing for Television (discussion)
Curator: Ginia Bellafante, The New York Times
Discussants: Peter Blake (currently executive producer and writer on House, the Fox medical drama; previously worked on The Practice; a graduate of Harvard and Harvard Law School), Todd Kessler (currently writer and co-creater of the FX legal thriller Damages; previously wrote for the second and third seasons of The Sopranos; a graduate of Harvard), Sarah Treem (playwright and writer and producer on the HBO series, In Treatment)
3:00-3:30 Shuttle to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
All panels at the Rock Hall will take place in the Theatre
3:30-4:45
New Digs: The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum's Library and Archives
Curator: Lauren Onkey, Vice President of Education and Public Programs,
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum
Andy Leach
Director of Library and Archives, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum
Jennie Thomas
Head Archivist, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum
Holly George-Warren
Music Journalist, author (most recently) of Public Cowboy No. 1: The LIfe and
Times of Gene Autry (Oxford 2007), The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: The First
25 Years (HarperCollins 2009)
Lauren Onkey
Vice President of Education and Public Programs, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
and Museum
5:00-6:15
A Kind of Hush: Pop Music as Literature
Kim Cooper
Very Different Tonight: The Contagious Nightmares of Wilhelm Reich
Jennifer Fleissner
The Song that Gets Stuck in Your Head
Rick Moody
Serge and the Paranoids: A Catalogue of Literary Collisions with the Popular Song
Kevin Young
Black Cat Blues
6:30-7:30
Multi-Tracking in Contemporary Culture: Steve Earle, Keynote & Performance
7:30-10:30 Dinner/Reception
10:15-10:30 Shuttle to The Renaissance Cleveland Hotel
About Post45
Post45 is a group of scholars working on American literature and culture since 1945. Formed in 2006, the collective is interested in reassessing the modes of inquiry applied to postwar American culture. How do we categorize and read American writing since 1945? What kinds of institutional structures characterize contemporary reading and writing practices? How do visual media, music, and literature come together in the cultural field? While the collective's core emphasis has been on literary inquiry, we seek to integrate such approaches with those from a variety of disciplines and media. Post45 is launching a book series in collaboration with Stanford University Press and an online journal . More information available soon on post45.org.