This session is a part of the 50th annual NeMLA convention in Washington, D.C., which will be held March 21-24, 2019. Abstracts must be submitted through NeMLA's database: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/17463

Kurt Vonnegut is well-known as a satirist, often critiquing, or at the very least complicating, American ideological assumptions and governmental policies and procedures. His work often challenges traditional notions of history and identity. At times, his commentaries are explicit, and at others, they are implied or metaphorical. 

Call for Papers, “Afterlives of The Odyssey” for the MLA International Symposium (23-25 July 2019 in Lisbon, Portugal)

Monsters and Materialities

Proposed session for the 2019 IMC (Leeds), 1-4 July, Leeds, UK

Organizers: Asa Simon Mittman and Renée Ward

We seek papers to compose a session on the subject of “Monsters and Materialities” for the 2019 International Medieval Congress at Leeds. The Congress theme is “Materialities.” 

Papers are invited on any theme arising from the novel. We especially welcome papers investigating the novel and its adaptations in any medium that focus on contrasting perspectives and discourses of the quest for the origin, meaning and purpose of life. This is an invitation for posters, 20-minute papers or alternative/experimental presentations. Place and dates of symposium: University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus, 30 November-1 December 2018. Deadline for proposals 01 October 2018. Please send 200 word proposals to: cyprusfrankenreads@gmail.com.

Social perceptions of madness continually inform interpersonal and policy decisions in the US, notable of late in the shooting of unarmed, non-violent mad people of color; the use of mental “unfitness” to disparage Donald Trump; and the equation of madness with violence after school shootings. Contemporary discussions of how to surveil, restrict, and value those identified as “mad,” mentally and emotionally disabled, or distressed demonstrate the significance of Mad Studies work in the humanities.

We have found the recent debates that pit formalism against historicism to be rather dissatisfying. This seminar holds that the way out of this false dichotomy is through Marxism. We seek to understand how Marxism and related political positions offer a fruitful engagement with literary and aesthetic form precisely because of their political perspectives. Moreover, from the standpoint of Marxism, we are interested in how social and historical issues are formal issues in aesthetics.

CALL FOR PAPERS—AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS OF DETECTIVE AND CRIME FICTION, ESPECIALLY THE WRITING OF SUE GRAFTON

The editors of a new scholarly journal, Mean Streets: A Journal of American Crime and Detective Fiction, are pleased to present this Call for Papers for the inaugural issue. The journal will be published by the Pace University Press (New York City), which has been sponsoring scholarly journals since the 1980s.

We invite paper proposals for our panel at the 50th convention of the Northeast Modern Language Association taking place in Washington DC, March 21-24, 2019.  

Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile,
And cry 'Content' to that which grieves my heart,
And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,
And frame my face to all occasions.
I'll drown more sailors than the mermaid shall;
I'll slay more gazers than the basilisk;
I'll play the orator as well as Nestor,
Deceive more slily than Ulysses could,
And, like a Sinon, take another Troy.
I can add colours to the chameleon,

In the American cultural imagination, the Midwest embodies the “home” or “heart” of the nation associated with frontier and rural values of promise, fertility, order, and stability, according to Joanna Jacobson in “The Idea of the Midwest.” Jacobson argues that the Midwest has come to symbolize the quintessentially “American,” speaking to “the impulse to invent a myth of commonality rooted in the physical landscape at the center of the continent and for the insufficiency of that myth as a response to the conditions of urban industrial culture.” While the idea and image of the Midwest in American culture serve as resources of recovery and refuge from the ill effects of urban industrialism, it is increasingly evident that these visions of a pastor

The International Association for Robin Hood Studies (IARHS) invites abstract submissions for its Twelfth Biennial Conference, to be held at the University of Montevallo (Montevallo, AL) from 14-17 May 2019. The theme of the conference is “Outlaw Bodies.”

In his Lettre sur les aveugles, Diderot shares the discovery that the cane of the blind is not a crutch, but a privileged organ of sensory perception, structuring the encounter with external reality and shaping its internal representation. Bernard Pivot may have had the same powers in mind when he compared the cigarette of Françoise Sagan to this cane: the writer can't see, and therefore can't write, without it. How has the mythical literary status of the cigarette fared in the decades since the first tobacco-control laws? How is smoking represented in an era of growing panic about addictions, as well as persistent unease about the role of government in promoting and enforcing good health?

The récit de filiation is a growing genre which can be divided into a number of subgenres. In the récit de filiation, the author seeks to position themselves within a lineage which is usually, though not exclusively, familial. The process involves a quest for additional information that is incorporated into a narrative which is both diachronic and retrospective. Subgenres include the récit de filiation ouvrière (Martine Sonnet); the historian récit de filiation (Stéphane Audoine-Rouzeau, Ivan Jablonka); the récit de filiation d’immigration (Doan Bui); the figurative récit de filiation (Pierre Michon, Amin Maalouf).

For the next issue of The Scattered Pelican, we invite all graduate students in Comparative Literature or related fields to submit article-length contributions exploring the theme of the 20th Annual Graduate Student Conference of the Comparative Literature, Hispanic Studies and Theory & Criticism, which recently took place at Western University: Matter(s) of Fact.