Tuesday, June 07, 2005

Proof that Academics read the National Enquirer

I've said before that I think the silliness of a lot of academic work has more to do with the publish or perish environment that academics find themselves in; sort of like the night-before- the-paper's-due panics that undergrads suffer; than any deep seated incompetance. The departments want product, so academics crank out whatever crap they can think of.

But, even I don't know what to make of this...

CFP: The Cultural Logic of Brad Pitt ...

For the 2005 Western Literature Association Conference in Los Angeles, we plan to organize a panel on the film icon, Brad Pitt. Why Brad Pitt? As one of this generation's most popular actors, Pitt has explored many of the cultural tensions of our emerging postmodern era. Depicting masculine American whiteness in various states of crisis, his characters generally enact complex postmodern agencies; they are never wholly coherent, they are often self-destructive, and they generally rely on a certain amount of play -- between stability and instability, between life and death, between autonomy and alter-dependency, between control and abandon. Simultaneously reifying and challenging hegemonic codes of race, class, gender, and regional or national identity, his characters explore the complex and changing postmodern cultural landscape. Tracing his performances through a variety of films and theoretical texts we hope to explain Brad Pitt's multidimensional postmodernity by exploring: 1) the cultural logic of his performances, showing how they dramatize postmodern cultural tensions, and 2) the kind of cultural or political work that his performances accomplish, or the difference that they make and the impact that they have on the audiences who watch them. ...
Please send a 1-page proposal and 1-page CV to Robert Bennett by Friday, June 10, 2005.

Apparently, if you're near Montana State University and looking for pot, Robert Bennett is your go-to guy.

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