Reconstructing Cultural Criticism in America: Intellectuals/Discourses/Institutions
April 19-21, 1989

Wednesday, April 19
2:00 PM Gregory Jay: Introduction

2-4 PM Rewriting the Left
Alan Wald: "Marxists and Werewolves: U.S. Communist Wrtiers Reconsidered"
Barbara Foley: "Women and the Left"
Ross Posnock: "American Pragmatism and the Frankfurt School: Dewey, Bourne, Adorno"
Moderator: Andrew Martin

4-5:30 Lemuel Johnson: "American Culture and the Problem with Babo's Head"

7:30Michael Rogin: "Blackface, White Noise: The Jewish Jazz Singer Finds His Voice"

Thursday, April 20
9:30-11 Workshops
Crossing Disciplinary Boundaries
Henry Sussman: "The Literary Origins of Comparative Literature"
Winfried Fluck: "Interpretation and the Network of Relations: Organicism-Marxism, Interactionism and Postmodern Seriality"
Moderator: Marcus Bullock

11-12:30 Workshops
Afro-American Literary and Cultural Studies
Michael Awkward: "Negotiations of Power: 'White' Critics, 'Black' Texts"
Cheryl Johnson: "Naming and Cultural Duality"
Sandra Adell: "Ralph Ellison and the Question Concerning Modernism"
Moderator: Patrick Bellegarde-Smith

2-3:30 Workshops
American Intellectuals II
Gordon Hutner: "Studying America: Anti-Semitism and the Example of Ludwig Lewisohn"
Mark Krupnick: "Edward Said and Michael Walzer on the Biblical Exodus: Israel as Social Text"
Moderator: Paul Jay
Poetry and Politics
Ron Sillman: "Poets and the Critical Tradition of the Anti-Academy"
Hank Lazer: "Style as Enactment: Language Poetry and Cultural Criticism"
Moderator: Karl Gartung

4-5:30 Lois Banner: "The Meaning of Menopause: Aging and Its Historical Contexts in the Twentieth Century"

7:30 Stanley Tigerman: "Architectural Problems: Stasis, Otherness, Mimesis, Synthesis"

Friday, April 21
9:30-11 Workshops
Reading Mass Culture
Margaret Soltan: "The Artist's Journey to the Interior Design"
Thomas Yingling: "How the Eye is Caste: Race and Class in Gay Pornography"
Joan Burbick: "The Healthy Body as Cultural Discourse in America"
Moderator: Lynne Joyrich
Fictions of Cultural Criticism
Karen Lee Osborne: "Sara Paretsky's Literary Anger"
Thomas Schaub: "Ahab at the Pepsi Stand: John Barth and the Beginnings of American Post-Modernism"
Maurice Couturier: "Tristram in Academia: Textual Communication"
Moderator: Campbell Tatham

11-12:30 Feminism and Cultural Studies
Ellen Berry: "Gertrude Stein, Mass Culture, and the Ideology of Modernism"
Anne Balsamo: "Cultural Studies USA: A Feminist Reading of Cultural Billboards"
Moderator: Meaghan Morris

2-3:30 James Clifford: "Predicaments of Theory"

4:00 Changing Courses: Rewriting the Syllabi in American Literary and Cultural Studies
Paula Rabinowitz: "Theorizing the Thirties"
Steven Mailloux: "American Culture Studies and the New Syracuse Curriculum"
Peter Carafiol: "Changing Courses: Why Not?"
Moderator: James Sappenfield

General Discussants:
Gerhard Hoffman
Hans Bertens
Alfred Hornung
Rüdiger Kunow
Kathleen Woodward

back to thumbnails

Center for 21st Century Studies

Daniel J. Sherman, Director