film: conference
By Christian
McKinney
Conference Coordinator
WHAT:
Postcards from the Future: The Chuck Palahniuk Project
is an interdisciplinary academic conference on the works of fiction author
Chuck Palahniuk.
WHEN:
April 6th and 7th, 2001
WHERE:
Edinboro University of Pennsylvania
MORE
INFO:
For registration information and a schedule of events, please visit the conference
website.
"The first rule of fight club is you do not talk about fight club," Brad Pitt says from the cloudy depths of a dirty basement underneath a seedy bar in the "toxic waste part of town."
"The second rule of fight club is you do not talk about fight club." The camera pans in a slow circle that captures Pitt in some kind of weird spotlight so ambient that you get the impression that he's personally generating his own aura with his larger-than life posturing, his wide crooked grin, his spiked brownish-blond hair. Or maybe it's the character he's playing, the apocalyptic demagogue known as Tyler Durden.
As the rules suggest, this is a meeting of fight club, the fictional underground boxing arena created by novelist Chuck Palahniuk in 1996 and adapted to film in 1999 by David Fincher and Twentieth Century Fox.
The high-octane fury that drives both the novel and film have been matched only by the storm of praise and criticism from publications as diverse as The New Statesman, The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times and Rolling Stone.
And now it's the subject of an upcoming academic conference hosted by Edinboro University. Titled Postcards from the Future: The Chuck Palahniuk Project, the conference will take place on April 6th and 7th at Edinboro University. It will feature two days of lectures, presentations and interactive events with Chuck Palahniuk himself.
Palahniuk will be reading from Choke, his next novel scheduled for release in May of this year. There will also be a film showing of Fight Club followed by an open discussion session with Palahniuk. On Saturday, Palahniuk will present the keynote address as the guest of honor at the conference luncheon. Palahniuk is an Oregon-based fiction writer and freelance journalist. Since Fight Club, his first published novel, he has published two equally controversial books, Survivor and Invisible Monsters.
Survivor, which is currently being adapted to film, follows the only surviving member of a suicide cult as he works his way from housekeeping to televangelism to plane hijacking. On the side, he runs he runs a suicide hotline where he encourages callers to kill themselves.
Invisible Monsters, meanwhile, details a disfigured supermodel's nihilistic rampage as she spends her time stealing prescription drugs from the elderly.
Organized and implemented by The Edinboro University Honors Program, the goal of Postcards from the Future is to help establish an international scholarly dialogue on Palahniuk's novels as well as the film adaptation of Fight Club and to encourage serious discussion and debate among students, researchers, critics and fans.
The first question that a lot of people ask of the conference is, "Why?"
The Honors Program believes that, despite the lurid content, Palahniuk's works are mordantly apocalyptic whirlwinds that masterfully weave black humor and scathing social analysis into a tapestry that captures the sense of late twentieth century American culture as well as, if not better than, anyone writing in America today.
In a pop culture climate increasingly dominated by condescending prefabricated fluff devoid of any substance, Palahniuk is one of the few pop-writers cutting through the surface and exposing the rotting underpinnings of the American worldview. His works are one of the last literary battlegrounds where questions like, "What is real?," "Why or we here?," and "What do we really want out of life?" are still given serious attention.
Think of what Mark Twain might have written if he had been born in the early 1960s and you have what Palahniuk is doing now.
The conference, meanwhile, is following the tradition of Palahniuk's novels and aims to be entertaining and educational, philosophical and glib, controversial and serious. Some presentations with titles like, "The Gospel According to Chuck," "The Ruthless Messiah," "Freud and...Fight Club?," will analyze Palahniuk's novels and Fight Club from a variety of angles. Others with titles like, "My Own Project Mayhem," "Myths of Violence," and "The Gender Influence in Art Education," will examine real-life issues tangential to the themes in the novels.
Tickets to all conference events are available through The Edinboro University Honors Program and the conference website. Contact (814) 732-2981, fightclub@edinboro.edu, or visit the official conference website for details.
Think of Brad Pitt (as Tyler Durden) booming the first two rules of fight club.
Now go break them.
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