The CFP Follies! The New Revue!

I intended to change course this week and write about the CFPs evidencing intelligence and scholarship, but then I saw this:

Taking Modernity from Behind

Panel Proposal for 2005 GEMCS: Crossing Borders

Abstract Deadline: July 15, 2005

In Negotiations, Giles Deleuze famously characterizes his history of philosophy as "a sort of buggery," the practice of "taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous." Using this description as an organizing impetus, we invite submissions for a proposed 2005 GEMCS (Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies) panel on approaching theories of modernity from behind - i.e. from texts retroactively designated as "early modern." What kinds of "offspring" does such an analysis generate? And to whom would they be "monstrous"?

Papers may address a variety of modernisms, including Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis, Marxism, the Frankfurt school, fascism, various avant-gardes, and other theories of anthropology, politics, sociology, psychology, and science. Papers should stage a conversation between modernity and early modernity in order to demonstrate not simply the utility of using modern theories to analyze early modern texts, but to demonstrate how a sodomitical reading practice de-familiarizes, hybridizes, and perhaps eroticizes both modernisms and early modernisms. Of course, we also welcome papers that query the very terms of Deleuze's description of sodomitical analysis and its implications for historiography.

I confess: That's damn funny.  More to the point, I think it's meant to be.  Of course, I'm not sure whether it qualifies as "intelligent" or "scholarship," but it is damn funny.  From the unintentionally funny department:

Burn French Theory Conference

The Burn French Studies Conference in Scotland invites papers to be presented at the 2005 annual conference in November...

Love the title.  Not thrilled with the follow-through.

Comments

[Some Guy]

"Query the terms of sodomitical analysis." Now I get it! So that's what it means to interrogate something -- to make it gay. How nice that my job is to go around "querying" everyone and everything I meet with. I'm a natural! It's about time my innate capacity for indiscriminate sodomizing was recognized as the gift to my profession that it is.

[David]

That is RDF, SG. RDF indeed. I salute you even as I edge away.