Warwick Conference

[Andrew Dinn]

LARSSON at vax1.mankato.msus.edu writes:

> I'm still coping with jet lag and Final Exam week here, but can give you
> some quick first impressions.  I'm sure others will follow.  I may have
> time for some more detail in a week or so.

I'm still catching up with work after my weekend off, since the
weekend necessitated three days recuperation to reinstall thoughts of
computers in place of Pynchon.

> 1. The conference was *very* intensive, running from 10 a.m. to
> about 10 pm on Saturday and 10 to 6 p.m. on Sunday (ironic for a
> writer indebted to Sloth, no?).

Not only that but almost everyone stayed for the whole shebang,
including a drinking session at the Falcon on Saturday which I left at
4:00 am. I think some people carried right on through the night and
rolled straight up to the Sunday sessions.

> 2. A very interesting mix of participants.  The majority were from the UK or
> US but many came from all over.  My session included presenters from
> Australia, South Korea, Greece and Morocco!

> 3. Predictably, the conference was fairly heavy on the theoretical
> side.
> 
> Besides Deleuze and Guattari, many references were made to Lacan and
> especially to Frederic Jameson's notions of postmodernism and the
> "technological sublime".

Speaking as a non-technician I found the Deleuze and Guatari papers
quite hard to follow. I returned from the conference with a copy of
Anti-Oedipus donated gratis by another attendee which I have begun to
struggle with but have found hard going. The Lacan, Jameson, Derrida,
etc threads in various other papers were relatively straightforward.

What was most striking about the papers was their enormous variety
both in method and content and, incredibly, the extremely low lemon
density. Most papers were just read straight through although, given
the time limits (28 papers in a weekend!), this often necessitated
cutting some text. Best `performance' of the weekend was Pierre-Yves
Petillon of the Ecole Normale Superieure who managed to cram a vast
array of literary innuendo, puns, Gallic witticisms and mock(?)
Anglophobe asides into his 30 minutes yet still stick to the subject
(sorry Don, although your performance was up near the top of the
list).

I was surprised to find that noone had organized a conference on this
scale before. The organisers managed it on virtually no budget,
advertising and organising it mostly electronically. I only hope the
next one is as good.

> It's all still a bit of a blur to me.  I'm looking forward to
> publication of the proceedings, so I can read the papers I missed
> and re-read the ones I heard.

Now, there is an interesting proposition. Is there any plan to publish
the proceedings? I asked a few people if they would be interested in
making their papers available *electronically*. Is anyone willing to
do so? If a publication is in the offing does this mean that there is
a copyright problem? I would prefer to re-view some of the papers now
rather than have to wait for a publisher to get something into print.

Anyway, if I can find some OCR software I will scan in and post the
abstracts (there is no copyright notice on them).


Andrew Dinn
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there is no map / and a compass / wouldn't help at all