[Cwgrad-announcements] CFP: Failure: Idealism and History

[cwgrad-announcements at lists.ucr.edu]

Happy 2006 everyone!
A friend of mine is editing this and I thought some of you might be
interested in this...
best to you all,
Gaby

CALL FOR PAPERS

FAILURE: IDEALISM AND HISTORY





Proposals are invited for a volume on the topic of failure, and its
relationship to idealism and history, to be published in conjunction
with the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest (www.joap.org
<http://www.joap.org/> ).  We're interested primarily in those
historical and aesthetic "failures" which are a result of a powerful,
if sometimes naïve, idealism, out of step with their own contexts. 
Either a result of the exhaustion of a moment and/or movement, pushed
to its logical (or illogical) conclusion (such as the Children's
Crusades of 1212, or the Weather Underground), or the result of the
utter misunderstanding of a historical moment (novelist Yukio
Mishima's attempt to re-ignite fascism in post-war Japan).  The
question of re-visiting these various cultural, historical, artistic
moments is inevitably an exploration of the relationship between an
act and its historical moment, and bringing that relationship into the
present.  While a "success" may seem to be something that determines
the shape of history, failures on a colossal and spectacular scale are
often those things that bring history, culture, and art most sharply
into relief.



We're looking for essays, interviews, fiction, poetry, visual
explorations (e.g., photo-essays) or aesthetic experiments that deal
with the topic of failure and its relationship to idealism and
history.  Possible topics include: failed utopias, failure and
tragedy, failed political movements (including Marxism), specific
literary or artistic works (such as Gertrude Stein's The Making of
Americans, "The first truly original disaster of modernism"), the
"failure" of the Iraq war protests, various arguments on the "failure"
of the avant-garde and/or modernism, specific theorists' relationship
to failure (e.g., Deleuze and Guattari, Hakim Bey, Derrida),
technology and failure, the history of failure, failure and
architecture, alternative psychology movements, failed public art
(e.g., Tilted Arc).



Please send a 300 word abstract or description of the project, as a
Word attachment, to Colin Dickey, cdickey at nu.edu, by February 15,
2006.  Notification for selected work will be February 28, 2006, and
completed works will be due no later than June 1, 2006.