If you have 7 minutes to read a NY Times article, it seems to be the perfect end to our questions about repetition, authorship, and representation.  Link here.   Baudrillard would be so proud.

Look upon their works, ye mighty!  The final expertise project from Esther and Aliya, ripe for working with Shaun of the Dead…

My abject apologies for the delay, folks.  Christine and Ashley had this up much earlier in the day, and I’ve been remiss in posting the link.  Here’s their expert take on Stuart Hall.

Huzzah!  An expert look at Jim Collins from Alex and Kim H. !

A call for papers from the journal Invisible Culture.  It’s like they know that we’re reading Jim Collins…

The archive as a place, a collection, a history, a concept, and a practice has always been unstable and replete with cultural meaning. In his essay “Valery Proust Museum,” Theodor Adorno associates museums with death rationalized, pointing to how the modern form—the physical space, technology, and ideology—forces a chronological order onto its objects.

In the digital age, however, archives no longer need necessarily be housed physically, nor must they abide by chronological schema. In The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich describes the database—a sort of digital archive—as too much information with “too few narratives that can tie it all together.” Do future manifestations of the archive inevitably negate those traits we have come to associate with archives in the past or present? Does the digitization of the archive give us an opportunity to rethink the archival project in terms of how the archive, its access and selection, affects knowledge, authority, and subjectivities? What might the archive of the future look like or accomplish? What does it mean to question the future of the archive?

Coming out of an interdisciplinary graduate conference on the same topic held at the University of Rochester in the Spring of 2007, the peer-reviewed, electronic journal Invisible Culture invites papers and projects that explore the shifting space, practice, and cultural meaning of the archive. Submissions in the form of 2,500-6,000 word papers from all disciplines, as well as digital projects (i.e. virtual archives or explorations of the same) are welcome.

Areas of inquiry for submissions may include, but are not limited to, the following topics and questions:

• What are the effects of the digital/technological broadening of access on the research of primary materials in literature, film, and art history?
• How might access to a wide range of historically related—but physically separated—texts change the parameters of analysis and methodologies?
• Legality, authority, or dissemination of archives
• Digitization and the dynamics of globalization, imperialism, colonial and post-colonial discourse(s)
• Distinctions between public and private spaces
• Anonymity, erotics of encounter, role playing, and new or temporary subjectivities formed in contributing to or observing digital archives
• Archived memory in life-writing (autobiography, letters, journals, blogs, etc.)
• Archival access, relevance and organization
• Digitization and the “aura” of a work
• Audience, authorship, the researcher, and community involvement
• The role of manuscripts, illuminated or otherwise
• Preservation and transmission of oral or written histories and memory
• Literary variorum
• Questions of old canons, new canons, and the end of the canon

Come on down, it’s Donna Haraway, courtesy of Misti and Melissa.  Enjoy!

While you’re contemplating possible paper topics, I thought you might be interested in a recent call for essays on Fight Club that’s circulating among scholars.  See the full call here.

Take a look-see at Marina and Ryan’s hard work on Brian McHale…  They’ll be taking questions tomorrow in class!

Below the fold, a set of photos to consider for Tuesday’s class. Think about our various terms for discussing Cindy Sherman, and remember that Linda Hutcheon’s ideas about photographic discourse and representation might come in handy…

In addition, check out these links for some introductory information about Nikki Lee.

A few photos and a bio available from the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago.

Here’s a review of her “Projects” work in the Harvard Crimson. (If you want to check out the photos before the review, click below and then return here…

For your blog post this week, I’d like you to do a mid-terms self evaluation by looking back over your blog posts and comments to date.  This might take you a bit longer than a “normal” blog post, so take until Tuesday at class time to complete it, if you wish!  There are a couple of purposes of this self-evaluation: the first is to track the consistent ideas, themes, questions, worries, definitions, obsessions, etc. that arise in your writing about postmodernism so that you can begin to think about paper topics; the second is to reflect a bit on how the writing and commenting is working for you, and how it might work better.  I’ll give you feedback on this, so you may either choose to post it to your blog or turn it in to me in hard copy.