american

The reputations of Hartford, Connecticut, residents Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mark Twain overshadow the city's antebellum authors. NeMLA 2016 seems ideally situated for a session to raise the academic appreciation and profile of earlier writers who contributed to Hartford's historical literary legacy, which includes Lydia Sigourney, Ann Plato, abolitionist ministers like Lyman Beecher and Amos G. Beman, and Hartford-born pamphlet writer Maria Stewart. Hartford was also a publishing center with a young Samuel G. Goodrich and later, Lewis Skinner, who printed Rev. James C. Pennington's book about African and African American history; lexicographer-journalist Noah Webster was of West Hartford, and The Charter Oak, was Hartford's anti-slavery newspaper.

The Evidence of Realism

[For the annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association at Harvard University, March 17-20 2016]

How do texts--and especially realist texts--and their plots use or complicate the idea of evidence? What sort of evidence do such texts seem to assume readers require in order to encounter the "effect of the real"? And how do contemporaneous ideas of evidence from philosophy, legal theory, or science provide context for the consideration of evidence in literary works?

Deadline for abstract submissions: September 30th 2015

In worlds full of superhuman heroes, mythological imaginary creatures and battle narratives of epic scope, what is the role of the domestic? In the recently released film _Avengers: Age of Ultron_, the titular superheroes hide away not in a high-tech secured stronghold but in a farmhouse belonging to the archer Hawkeye, his wife, and their young children. Barton's presence as the film's only parent with a seemingly stable domestic lifestyle provides a temporary shelter for our heroes, illustrating how the domestic can function as a stable ground for the superhero narrative to withstand its otherwise fantastic, explosive elements.

Foundational texts, events, and people influence our cultural and national personas. In the United States, for example, people may look to the Constitution and patriotic songs or even the bible as foundational texts--texts that define (and limit?) national identity. We often see events such as the Salem Witch Trials, the Civil War, and the Civil Rights Movement as critical moments of national formation, while people such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King, Jr. represent quintessential "Americans.". These foundational texts, events, and people work their way into literature and pop culture in myriad ways as authors, writers, poets, filmmakers and playwrights incorporate, reify, or challenge them through their works.

From sympathetic contagion to animal magnetism, nervous physiology to cell theory and germ theory, nineteenth-century medical theory and practice imagined human embodiment in open relation to the environmental, economic, religious, and political forces that shape historical experience. Often represented in both cultural and physiological terms, disease functioned as both sign and symptom of the irrevocable togetherness of mind and body, something to be combatted morally and technologically by prudence and enlightened reason.