Technology, Literature, Rhetoric, the "human"
Tarez sent me an email about the 2006 Pacific Rim Conference on Literature and Rhetoric. This year's topic? Technology, Humanity, and Change. One of the pannels? Techno-Dystopias in Film and Literature. The others? Electronic composition.
So, of course I'm going to send in a proposal. Not that I have any clue as to how to do that.
But how to narrow my large freakin projects of doom to something suitable for a 20 minute presentation? And which project of doom?
Part of me really wants to stake my claim as a Burkeian doing the rhetoric of literature. Another part of me wants to hold off until I feel I can talk about Burke more freely without getting confused. For the Love of Johnny Damon, I don't want my Burkeian debut to be a disaster.
On the other hand, I can talk about identification without being a complete Burkean, right? My work on the film aspect has been minor (one paper), and it has lots of room for improvement and other resources. One thing I fail to talk about in that paper is the "Green" that is necessary. The ideology-spreading ability of film in that paper is glossed in two paragraphs. The comparison to literature is too quick.
So, something like: "Identification in Techno-Dystopian Film: Tempering the Revolutionary Spirit"??
Or, if I delay my entrance into that discourse community, what are my options? I'd have to research the hell out of what has been said about fan communities.
Which is why I'm sitting in the computer lab, running library searches like there's no tomorrow (there may be no tomorrow). What has been done? Am I repeating someone already?
Oh, please, not repetition.
1 comment:
One thing that has helped me out with this whole conference paper abstract genre, is realizing that the conference paper itself will have just enough time to do a few things: speak to the audience's need, state my "finding" or "original idea" and why it is so, give 3-5 examples/illustrations of where I see that "finding/idea," and wrap up with a contextualized discussion of where my research will go next. That helped me to see that, in order to not just reinvent the wheel, I was showing an audience my very necessary and unique take on one little piece of the whole wheel mechanism. 20 minutes is about 10 pages (at most). And most rhetoric conference audiences like it when we speak to them (rather than read at them).
For abstract tips, Samantha Blackmon is a great local source! blackmos@purdue.edu
-Tarez
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