"Serials, Cycles, Suspensions"
Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference
Hotel Whitcomb, San Francisco, CA
March 1-4, 2018
Host Institution: San Francisco State University
The nineteenth century was shaped by serial forms of organization, production, and communication. By the nineteenth century the idea of the "series" had moved from the discipline of mathematics into the culture at large, as theories of temporal and spatial connection became dominant organizing principles for systems of knowledge developed in laboratories, libraries, and museums. Implied within seriality is both the continuity of cycles and the discontinuity of suspensions. INCS 2018 invites proposals for papers having to do with any aspect of nineteenth-century seriality, including, but not limited to:
SERIAL CULTURE (PRINT, LITERARY, VISUAL ARTS, THEATER, ENTERTAINMENTS): serial narrative, serial poetry, serial readers, periodicals, newspapers, magazines, the penny press, sequels, chapters, spinoffs, adaptations, serial photography, moving pictures, panoramas, song cycles, operatic cycles, sonnet cycles, musical canon, fugues, story cycles, genres, Bildungsroman, science fiction, steampunk, vampires, mysteries, cartoons, animations, echoes, allusions, narrative suspense, middles, cliffhangers, narrative immersion and world-building, suspension of disbelief, serial rhetorical forms (prolepsis, procatalepsis, hypophora, paradox), repetitions, rhyming, meter, caesura, variations, reinventions
SERIAL TIME: calendars, clock faces, seasons, standardized time, empty homogeneous time, typological time, historical materialism, the dialectic, diurnal time, the working day, the liturgical year, academic terms, courts of assize, revolutions, resurrections, reincarnation, evolutionary cycles, suspended revolutions (1848), fashion cycles, interruptions, stutters, prophesy, psychological and social developments (childhood, adolescence, adulthood), life cycles, hormonal cycles, addictions, apocalypse, inheritance, trauma and repetition compulsion, recurring dreams, causality dilemmas
SERIAL INVENTIONS AND TECHNOLOGIES: suspension bridges, train tracks, serial numbers, circuit boards, the arithmometer, difference and analytical engines, automata, escalators, fax machines, Braille, mechanization, manufactories, power looms, punch cards, evolution, dialectical materialism, circulatory systems, catalogues, optical illusions, stereoscopy and stereoscopes, phenakistoscopes, zoetropes, cameras, panoramic photography, the Cinématographe, the Kinetoscope, the Mutoscope, celluloid, bicycles, carousels, Ferris wheels, suspenders, crinolines, hot air balloons, panoptic structures, treadmills, piano rolls, gramophones, rotary presses, stereotypes
Please submit individual papers (250-word proposals) or panels (a single document including a 250-word panel description accompanied by 250-word abstracts and one-page participant CVs) to the SFSU submission portal at http://lca.sfsu.edu/conference/incs2018/proposal by October 15, 2017. You will be prompted to post a one-page CV with your name, affiliation, and email address (for panels this information should correspond to the organizer). Proposals that are interdisciplinary in method or panels that involve multiple disciplines are especially welcome. For questions please contact conference organizer Sara Hackenberg at shackenb@sfsu.edu. For more information, please visit the INCS website: http://incsscholars.org.