Trauma is a notoriously slippery concept to identify and comprehend, however, many theorists—-most notably Cathy Caruth in Unclaimed Experience—have argued that literature provides a means of representing and of ‘working-through’ experiences which otherwise have gone “unclaimed.” Absent from literary trauma theories, such as Caruth’s, however, is a consideration of the euro-centric core of theories of trauma. This absence can be attributed to the origins of literary trauma theory that emerged primarily out of Freudian psychoanalytic psychology and/or the deconstructive philosophy of the Yale School and Paul de Man.

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale had an enduring cultural effect well before the world began so uncannily to reflect it. Notable hallmarks of its resulting renaissance include, among others, the following three. Bruce Miller’s ongoing television adaptation, on the one hand, beginning in April of 2017, its second and third seasons moving us a few years away from Gilead as an established dystopia, as depicted in the body of the novel, toward its eventual downfall, as acknowledged in its concluding “Historical Notes.” On March 26, on the other hand, shortly before the third season’s premiere, Renée Nault’s graphic-novel adaptation of the original appeared.

CALL FOR PAPERS

The British Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies Conference, inaugurated in 1992, is the oldest and longest-running annual meeting of its kind in the United States. It encompasses colonial and postcolonial histories, literatures, creative and performing arts, politics, economics, and all other aspects of the countries formerly colonized by Britain and other European powers.

    We welcome a variety of approaches and viewpoints, and the generation of wide-ranging, productive debates. Thus we are particularly interested in interdisciplinary and/or cross-cultural panel proposals.

The history of censorship in modern South Asia goes back to the Registration of Books Act (1867), used to track anti-state sedition; and to the various indigenous and British non-governmental associations of civilians who organized themselves as the guardians of literary culture around the same time. Both these currents continue to the contemporary moment in many ways. Genres of dissent are governed by various acts, laws, associations, extra-judicial modes of repression, and more recently, by social media.

Since the nineteenth century to the present, fragmentary writing has been widely deployed in literature and philosophy (i.e. Ernst Bloch, Schlegel, Mallarmé, Adorno, Maurice Blanchot, Kafka, Beckett etc.) as a strategy to disrupt the idea of totality by and through writing. Fragmentary writing as an incomplete totality, bears absent voices and traces and alludes to a whole.

Travel & Literature at CEA 2020

March 26-28, 2020 | Hilton Head Island, South Carolina

Hilton Head Marriott Resort and Spa

The College English Association, a gathering of scholar-teachers in English studies, welcomes proposals for presentations on Travel and Literature for our 51st annual conference. Submit your proposal at www.cea-web.org.

Panel description: This session proposes to discuss the complex identity formation of people from the Beur community living in France through the study of contemporary Beur literature. It examines the current cultural and socio-political debates on nationalism, identity and culture taking place in France, as well as the complex processes of integration that have affected both the North African immigrant community and the French people in the postcolonial era.

Call for Papers, for an accepted session at the next NeMLA conference, in Boston, March 5-8, 2020.

NeMLA’s 2020 theme will be: "Shaping and Sharing Identities: Spaces, Places, Languages, and Cultures"

A Space of One's Own: Articulating the Scope of the Female in American Literature

For this panel, we invite contributions on literary explorations of the socialist legacy in Eastern Europe in its relation to the present and the future. Much of the post-1989 scholarship has focused on Aufarbeitung broadly defined as a crucial trait of literature from and about the former East. More recently, some scholars have brought into view another dimension of literary engagement with Eastern Europe’s past: an engagement with the hopes and dreams that never came to fruition and the unrealized, alternative futures embedded in the socialist past.

2020 marks the 100th anniversary of the year of freedom from indentureship for Indian labour. Ninety-two years had elapsed between start of the system and this red letter day when they say the system finally collapsed. It was a relief for many of those caught by its myriad snares. The worlds and the subjectivities that were imbricated in the system, giving rise to it or succumbing to the weight of its oppression or emerging from under it, have not yet been fully explored. We are proposing an anthology of stories in your unheard voices in order to create an opportunity for exploration.

Can you write a story or a poem that imagines what it was like for someone from the Indian sub-continent to become an indentured labourer?

This edited scholarly collection seeks to explore the ongoing usefulness of the noir label through attention to less heralded films that straddle genres, are difficult to categorize, or have been limited in academic study because of their identification with a single genre, style, star, or director. Our goal is not to expand the noir canon but to recover lost nuances and give new life to specific classical era (1930s-1959) films by exploring them through a noir lens.
 

Since the 2016 election, there has been much soul searching in certain progressive circles about the role that identity should play in liberal politics in the United States and beyond. Authors as diverse as Kwame Anthony Appiah, Francis Fukuyama, Mark Lilla, and David Wootton have recently urged us to consider the possibility of constructing a form of liberalism in which identity does not necessarily play a central role. In the writings of at least some of these authors, we may discern a desire to recover the heritage of classical liberalism, with its emphasis on abstract individualism and the importance of so-called “negative” freedoms, such as freedom of speech.

Containing Childhood: Space and Identity in Children’s Literature