CFP: "Narrative Hysterics: Feeling and Form in Women's Experimental Fiction"

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS FOR VOLUME 12 OF

Katherine Mansfield Studies

THE PEER-REVIEWED YEARBOOK OF THE KATHERINE MANSFIELD SOCIETY

PUBLISHED BY EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

celebrating the centenary of the publication of

Katherine Mansfield’s

Bliss and Other Stories (1920)

Editors

Gerri Kimber, University of Northampton, UK

NeMLA 2020: Boston, MA

http://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention.html

In his 1961 essay “The New Lost Generation,” James Baldwin argues that Europe gave the “new” African American expats of the late 1940s and the 1950s “the sanction, if one can accept it, to become oneself. No artist can survive without this acceptance. But rare indeed is the American artist who achieved this without first becoming a wanderer, and then, upon his return to his own country, the loneliest and most blackly distrusted of men.” Indeed, Baldwin asserts that African American expats in Paris gained a kind of liberation through their experience with a culture wholly unlike their own.

Recent scholarship on Chaucer has focused on his global influences and receptions. But how global was England in the century after Chaucer? This panel will explore this question, seeking answers in discussion of previously overlooked texts (such as Lydgate’s Fabula Duorum Mercatorum), consideration of source study, and pedagogical practice. This panel hopes to illuminate global roads into and outward from English literature of the fifteenth century, examining how its authors perceived and represented cultures and peoples far afield from their own, but also considering how those authors’ works were received, and how we view them today both in our scholarship and in the classroom. 

A full 43% of Lydgate’s works in the DIMEV have no print or online editions. Rather than situating Lydgate in relation to his “big works” that have (sometimes multiple) editions – “Siege of Thebes,” “Troy Book,” and “Fall of Princes” – we should take our cue from Thomas Warton, who in 1840 wrote that “to enumerate Lydgate’s pieces, would be to write the catalogue of a little library.” We invite proposals addressing “Lydgate’s Little Library” – those pieces that demonstrate his “versatility of talents” (to quote Warton) and do not get the scholarly or pedagogical attention that his larger works do.

OUR DICKENS: DICKENS AND HIS PUBLICS

17th-19th July 2020, Bloomsbury, London

In 2020, the 150-year anniversary of Dickens’s death, the annual Dickens Society Symposium will take place in Bloomsbury, Dickens’s home for periods of time and where he produced some of his most memorable novels. Organised by Royal Holloway, University of London, in collaboration with the Charles Dickens Museum (formerly the Dickens House Museum), the anniversary Symposium seeks to explore what Dickens means to so many people across the world and why he has meant so much to diverse publics over time.

The Early Proverb Society emphasizes the functions of that mobile, morphic form, the proverb.  EPS showcases our readings at a round table (three to four discussants and one respondent) and a panel of papers (three speakers) at the 55th Congress, May 7-10, 2020.  All methodological approaches are welcomed warmly.

Round table:  Medieval Proverbs:  Exchanges, Clashes, and Transactions

Medieval animal studies has tended to privilege literary and encyclopedic texts, viewing animals within Aristotelian hierarchies of rationality, while research on animals in medieval medicine has focused on their use as ingredients, rather than their potential status as patients. There have been few discussions of animals and humans in relationships of care, or of animals as the recipients of medical treatment. In this panel, we seek to expand these conversations by centering veterinary medicine, including treatment manuals (e.g., hawking handbooks), literary representations of veterinary practices (e.g., romance heroes caring for horses), and other genres that concern the (un)ethical, (il)legal, or (im)proper treatment, training, or keeping of animals.

What can we learn from unexceptional texts and artifacts in the Middle Ages? How can we critically assess the metrics by which we evaluate quality? How can medieval studies reconcile, or recover from, the history of Orientalism in its estimation of non-European medieval traditions? This panel builds on conversations during the 2019 Medievalists @ Penn Conference on Mediocrity (https://middling-ages.tumblr.com), which we seek to carry in more explicitly transcultural directions.

This panel within the March 5-8 2020 NeMLA conference in Boston is dedicated to a discussion of the ways that religion intertwines with fiction in the work of Jorge Luis Borges. 

Your presentation might consider one or several of the following questions:

How did Jorge Luis Borges draw from and transform different theological traditions in his fiction and poetry?

Are there interesting relationships between Borges's fictionalized theologies and literary theory? How do they correspond to his ideas about fiction? 

Do different religious traditions respond to separate aspects of the author’s literary project, or do they overlap and combine? What functions to they serve? 

What is the relationship between purity and power? The normative valuation of purity may be rooted in religion. In fact, purification rituals and instruction that link purity to transcendence come close to a universal feature of religiosity. Yet purity or “purism” is also thoroughly political, as Alexis Shotwell shows in her book Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times. Shotwell’s analysis shows that purity legitimates the disavowal of complicity in ecological, colonial, and other systemic crimes. Purity attends conceptions of various identities, including caste, class, race, gender, and sexuality, inheres in constructions of deviant to moral behavior, and activates disgust as a politically mobilizing agent.

SAMLA 91 Special Call for Abstracts: A Toni Morrison Tribute

To honour the late Toni Morrison, SAMLA seeks papers to explore her illimitable legacy as a writer, publisher, intellectual, and citizen. SAMLA welcomes abstracts on any topics germane to Morrison's work and life. Special consideration will be given to abstracts addressing:

-          Timothy Greenfield-Sanders' recent documentary Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am (2019)

-          Morrison's final non-fiction collection The Source of Self-Regard: Essays, Speeches, Meditations (2019)

-          Teaching Morrison in the Twenty-First Century

NeMLA 2020 Boston

Please find the CFP for NeMLA’s 51st Annual Convention to be held in Boston, MA on March 5-8, 2020. Abstracts may be submitted by September 30, 2019 via the link provided:

Contemporary Francophone Women Authors’ Representations of the Sacred (WIF Session) Roundtable https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/18025 

Panel for NEMLA 51st Annual Convention (March 5-8, 2020) - http://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention.html