american

This panel calls for papers that stake a claim in the cultural significance of representing alcohol or alcohol consumption. How do these representations relate to alcoholism as a disease and the alcoholic as an identity category? Does the text evaluate alcohol abuse morally or politically? Do communities organized around alcohol consumption facilitate social movements based on class, race, sexuality, or gender?

Interdisciplinary Conference on Sports and Violence, March 19, 2016, Proposals due by October 31, 2015

Americans love sports. An estimated 35 to 50 million American youth play organized sports, the Super Bowl regularly attracts over 160 million viewers, and sports figures are among America's most recognized celebrities.

The postmodern god figure has been a staple of postmodern art at the very least since John Barth published Lost in the Funhouse, in which the god figure, both author and father, was simultaneously characterized as asleep, malevolent, kind, and/or insane. As this figure has penetrated popular culture, s/he has become more and more linked to investigations of gender and sexuality. These "god" figures strive to control the lives of others (e.g. Amy Dunne in Gone Girl, Tyler Durden in Fight Club, Kaiser Soze in The Usual Suspects). These puppet masters often work behind the scenes, exploiting the margins of society for either personal or social gain.

In recent scholarship, lyric emerges as a privileged form for expressing, simulating, and circulating pain: its formal flexibility, non-narrative structure, and somatic elements allow lyric to evoke an embodied sensation whose "resistance to language," as Elaine Scarry memorably argues, "is essential to what it is." Yet these characteristics do not adhere neatly to lyric. Not all lyrics are formally free and non-narrative. Furthermore, various literary genres employ the formal invention, non-narrative digressions, and somatic elements most often identified with the lyric form.

Doubles and doppelgangers abound in the Victorian Gothic novel and Miltonian readings have emphasized the inner monster as a nod to the period's desire to, in Tennyson's terms, "Move upward, working out the Beast, / And let the ape and tiger die" (In Memoriam). How does the trope of doubleness figure in other nineteenth-century contexts beyond the Gothic and its subterraneous influence?