Call for Papers

Zombie Culture

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

41st Annual Conference, February 19-22, 2020

Hyatt Regency Hotel & Conference Center

Albuquerque, New Mexico

http://www.southwestpca.org

Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2019 

In “Dreaming of the Middle Ages,” Umberto Eco asks the question: “What would Ruskin, Morris, and the pre-Raphaelites have said if they had been told that the rediscovery of the Middle Ages would be the work of the twentieth-century mass media?”

Indeed, the twentieth-century mass media has disseminated what Eco calls, “escapism à la Tolkien” which has influenced many modern writers and cultural producers in other mass media such as films and video games. Although such “escapism à la Tolkien,” or “Tolkienesque” fantasy, seems harmless as pure entertainment, its consumption is massive, and many picture the Middle Ages not as it actually was, but how it is depicted through medievalist fantasy.

The MOSF Journal of Science Fiction is accepting submissions for a special issue on environmental studies and science fiction to be released in the summer of 2020. 

Can the Other Speak? Productive Difficulties in Ethnic and Postcolonial Literature

Northeast Modern Language Association Convention

March 5-8, 2020

Boston, MA

Deadline for paper abstracts: September 30, 2019

Contact: Misun Dokko mdokko@lagcc.cuny.edu

Our 2020 NeMLA panel emerges from Gayatri Spivak’s seminal question, “can the subaltern speak?” Following Spivak’s response to this question, we will investigate moments when subalterns cannot speak or have difficulty speaking. Our inquiry into these moments will build on and sharpen conversations about otherness with respect to literary texts and beyond.

“Transsexualité, transidentité: un tabou français?” (“Transsexuality, transidentity: a French taboo?”[1]): such was the title chosen by the online French news magazine France Infofor an article published in 2015[2]that discussed the lack of visibility trans(gender/sexual) people still experience in French society. Indeed, there has been an increasing visibility of trans individuals in film and TV in recent years.

According to Walter Benjamin, “the art of storytelling is coming to an end”; we are losing “the ability to share experiences.” Without storytelling, which was once “a capability that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions,” we are fragmented into a piece of “information” and isolate ourselves in what is believed to be subjectivity (“The Storyteller”). And yet, in exceptional situations, storytelling appears still possible. For example, when the northeast Japan was struck by the earthquake and tsunami disaster, after initial muteness and banal narrativization by the major media (which was indeed a disaster for storytelling), there emerged stories among the survivors.

Submit proposal online to ACLA (American Comparative Literature Association) by September 23
https://www.acla.org/modernity-zero-hour-question-universal-and-origins-...

In the trajectory of neoliberalism and an increasingly global marketplace, the necessity of undercutting the Western subsumption of the world is urgent. As Jean-Luc Nancy has argued, however, such a saturation of Western meaning, though potentially catastrophic, is not a forgone conclusion. On the contrary, it is precisely at the limit of the Western notions of telos and subjective agency that a new conception of the world can be collectively understood and created. It is also against such a limit that feminist discourses challenge the universal subject in the name of sexual difference and theories of intersectionality.

A recent trend has seen many writers create literary narratives that confront twentieth-century events while inscribing into that past the authors’ contemporary selves (e.g.: Binet 2009; Jablonka 2012; Foenkinos 2014). These biographical meta-narratives seem dictated by the impossibility to construct one’s own subjectivity without facing the very notions of civilization and humanity that our violent pasts have reconfigured.

Extrapolating Nostalgia: Special issue of Science Fiction Studies

The University We Want

This seminar asks when we let ourselves engage in utopian thinking, what do we want the university to be? We recognize that the university needs to change, but what should we change it into? How should teaching and learning happen? Who should make decisions and how? What should these institutions identify as their mandate, and how should they exist within their community? What might radical approaches rooted in ecologically responsible practices or decolonization look like?

Call for contributions to an edited collection

Writing STEAM: Composition, STEM, and a New Humanities

Deadline for Proposal Submissions: September 30, 2019

Editors: Dr. Vivian Kao, Assistant Professor of Composition, Department of Humanities, Lawrence Technological University; Dr. Julia Kiernan, Assistant Professor of Communication, Liberal Studies Department, Kettering University

Contact email: VKAO@LTU.EDU

Dates: 6-7 April 2020

Venue: University of Insubria, Como, Italy

Call for papers deadline: 24th November 2019

Committee: Paola Baseotto (Insubria University), Omar Khalaf (Insubria University), Marie-Christine Munoz-Levy (Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier 3)

Confirmed keynote speakers: Andrew Hadfield (University of Sussex) – Alessandra Petrina (University of Padova)

EJAS (European Journal of American Studies) is accepting submissions for a special issue on the American neuronovel to be released in April 2021.

 The word “neuronovel” was coined by American critic Marco Roth in a famous 2009 article, “The Rise of the Neuronovel.” According to Roth, in contemporary Anglo-American fiction “the novel of consciousness or the psychological or confessional novel—the novel, at any rate, about the workings of a mind—has transformed itself into the neurological novel, wherein the mind becomes the brain.” To illustrate his statement, he then quotes a long list of examples: