american

This panel for the 2013 Modernist Studies Association Conference seeks to expand our knowledge and understanding of American surrealist experimentations in relation to the complex transnational cultural dialogue emerging in the 1920s and continuing until the 1940s, whose aims included the redefinition of an American cultural identity.

Papers dealing with American surrealist innovations, techniques, ideas, sites, and temporalities are solicited. All genres are welcome, including, literature, film and the visual arts. Innovative readings of individual works are encouraged, as well as presentations addressing larger questions concerning the relevance of American surrealism.

Call for Papers, At Face Value: Re-thinking Surfaces
Friends of English Graduate Student Conference, UCLA
Friday, May 31, 2013 at UCLA

Keynote speakers: Professor Rachel Lee (UCLA), Professor Daniel Tiffany (USC)

Sir Peter: Aye, ever improving himself!--Mr. Surface, Mr. Surface...Well, well, that's proper; and you make even your screen a source of knowledge...
Joseph Surface: Oh, yes, I find great use in that screen.
-Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The School for Scandal (IV.3)

How might we theorize the aesthetics and poetics of practices such as deletion and erasure? All periods, genres, media welcome. Inquiries and abstracts with short biographies to pbenzon at temple dot edu by March 1.

Full CFP:

Articles are invited for an edited collection on issues related to any element of The Walking Dead (either the original graphic novel or the AMC television series). The following categories suggest possibilities for exploration but are by no means exhaustive:

• Zombies/the Undead
• The postapocalyptic world
• Monstrosity
• Fandom and/or Reception
• Transformation and/or Adaptation
• Posthumanism
• Gender
• Race
• Hybridity
• Heroism
• Villainy
• History
• Memory
• Power
• Violence

Transnational Currents of US-China Relations:
 The 10th Anniversary of the American Studies Network (USCET-ASN) in China

The Edith Wharton Society invites papers that engage with this year's SAMLA conference theme: "Cultures, Contexts, Images, and Texts: Making Meaning in Print, Digital, and Networked Worlds." We are open to a variety of interpretations. For example, what meanings emerge when we consider Wharton's work alongside the "networked worlds" of her various homes and travels? How has the rise of digital humanities and new forms of communication fostered new scholarship and approaches to Wharton's writing? A range of responses to this topic is welcome, including examinations of her travel writings, other non-fiction, fiction, and poetry.

The 2012 South Central MLA Conference is accepting paper proposals for its Biography/Autobiography/Memoir panel. Literary paper proposals on any aspect of biography, autobiography, and memoir are welcome. Please submit a 200-word abstract by 4/1/13 to mge1108@gmail.com.

The SCMLA conference will be held in New Orleans, LA from October 3-5, 2013.

Announcing

The First Book Institute

June 10-14, 2013

To be hosted by the Center for American Literary Studies (CALS) at Pennsylvania State University

Co-Directors

Sean X. Goudie, Director of the Center for American Literary Studies and Winner of the MLA Prize for a First Book

Priscilla Wald, Professor of English and Women's Studies, Duke University and Editor of American Literature

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The Problematic of Architecture and Utopia

Special issue of Utopian Studies (25:1, Spring 2014) on Architecture and Utopia

Call for Papers – Deadline: 01 May 2013

Guest Editor: Dr Nathaniel Coleman, Newcastle University nathaniel.coleman@ncl.ac.uk

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Papers are invited for publication in a forthcoming issue of Utopian Studies on the topic of Architecture and Utopia. In this instance, architecture is construed as including interiors and gardens in one direction, and cities and landscapes in the other, with individual buildings, or assemblages of them, in the middle.

The American Humor Studies Association seeks papers for a panel, "Humor in the Digital Age," for the 2013 South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA) Conference at the Marriott Atlanta from November 8-10. This panel will examine how the rise of new media (including social media, Web 2.0, and blogs) has created new contexts for the production, distribution, and exhibition of American humor. We welcome papers on humor and comedy as they are employed in viral videos, blogs or vlogs, web series, webisodes, parodies, participatory culture online, memes, or remixes.

This panel tackles the question of whether or not postmodernism as a way of thinking about literary texts has truly run out of steam, or whether we are only now gaining enough critical distance to assess its impact on literature and literary studies.

Particularly welcome are proposals that consider the ways in which discussing postmodernism in the 21st century may help us reassess claims that postmodernism has gotten bogged down in, or become coterminous with, consumerism, radical otherness, irony, whiteness, masculinity, and nationalism, problems that it had hoped to deconstruct or move beyond.

Please send along a 300-word abstract no later than March 15 to Matthew Mullins: mmullins@sebts.edu

The 2013 South Central MLA Conference is accepting paper proposals for its Autobiography/Biography/Memoir panel. Literary paper proposals on any aspect of biography, autobiography, and memoir are welcome. Please submit a 200-word abstract by 3/21/12 to mge1108@gmail.com.

We are now welcoming papers on topics related to bodies and modernism, each understood broadly, for our graduate student conference, to be held at the University of Wyoming, February 22-23. Because the definition of "body" is perpetually adapting to modern thought and criticism, we ask that papers discuss bodies (human, animal, textual, political, cultural, geographical, etc) and their relationships to emotion, environment, medicine, science, rhetoric, or language. These bodies may be scarred, gendered, criminal, captive, veteran, traumatized, disabled, and so on. How do we think about bodies and their position in relation to their context? This context, much like the definition of body, is fluid and subject to interpretation.

From wisewomen, witches and warriors, to madwomen and monsters, confined females have been represented through a variety of rhetorical strategies that mask the complexities of their characters. This panel seeks papers that look beyond the rhetoric to the nuances of imprisoned women in fiction and non-fiction, such as "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Anne Frank's diary, to Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and prisoners' memoirs. Women's prison literature is the focus of the panel, and papers by women prisoners and their teachers will be welcomed enthusiastically, but papers on male prisoners are also invited.