University of New England

Code 

An International Conference

November 1-4, 2007

The Department of English at UNE is pleased to be a sponsor of the twenty-first annual conference of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA), to be held November 1-4, 2007 in Portland, Maine.  Over two hundred scholars from all over the world are expected to attend.

SLSA is an international organization that welcomes colleagues in the sciences, engineering, technology, computer science, medicine, the social sciences, the humanities, the arts, and independent scholars and artists. Its official publication, Configurations, is the only scholarly journal devoted to the study of discourse in scientific, technological, and medical theories and practices.  Founded in 1993, the journal explores the relations of literature and the arts to the sciences and technology; special issues often reflect themes developed at the annual conference.

The 2007 conference theme is code, broadly defined.  Code can be “wet” (genetic, organic, human), “dry” (digital, mathematical, logical), something in-between, neither, or both (linguistic, symbolic, religious, moral, legal). Code is the meeting ground of strange bedfellows, the cipherer and decipherer, the domain of law and its subversion, communication and privacy.  Code is about patterns, sequences, systems, translations, and substitutions.

The conference will feature two plenary sessions, one on Friday evening and one on Saturday evening, respectively headlined by N. Katherine Hayles and Brian Massumi. Hayles has achieved extraordinary renown as an incisive critic at the intersection of science, literature, and the arts, and her work is particularly concerned with the parallels between scientific models and literary theories as well as in contextualizing the interactions between humans and intelligent machines. Major books include How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (U of Chicago Press 1999), Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science (U of Chicago Press 1991), and most recently, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (U of Chicago Press 2005).  She is the Hillis Professor of Literature in English and Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Massumi established his preeminence by introducing the English-speaking world to the poststructuralist theoretical work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari through his translation of A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (U of Minnesota Press 1987), followed by his own interpretive study, A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (MIT Press 1992).  Massumi’s most recent book, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Duke U Press 2002) places him once again at the center of interdisciplinary research, advancing philosophies of communication, electronic art, and the virtual. He is Professor of Communication at the Université de Montréal.

The Friday evening plenary will be held at the conference site, the Holiday Inn By the Bay. The Saturday evening plenary will be held at the Portland Museum of Art, a short walk from the conference hotel. For more information, visit the conference website (http://www.slsa07.com/) or contact Susan McHugh (smchugh@une.edu).

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