poetry

CFP: Specialists: Passions and Careers (collection Professional Development for Academics)

It has been a century and a half since the birth of W. B. Yeats. With the completion of major biographies and textual series, and in the context of technological and economic changes to global literary studies, Yeats studies finds itself at a critical juncture. This conference will gather scholars, critics, and creative artists from around the world to engage with Yeats as a figure of world literature, European and global modernisms, and Irish culture and politics; and Yeats's work as poet, dramatist, autobiographer, and writer of fiction, critical and reflective essays, and philosophy. The larger questions to be addressed concern the field of Yeats studies itself, and the role of Yeats in literary and cultural studies. Where are we now?

The 2016 MESEA conference in Warsaw will focus on ethnic and minority discourses that have undergone erasure, yet keep resurfacing, on cultural traces left by groups long gone that have been forgotten and silenced, as well as on cultural inscriptions left by those who have become visible and audible more recently. Yet, in addition to engaging with the archaeological hermeneutics of recovering submerged layers of ethnic meaning, we also invite scholars to engage in the perhaps more radical act of what Sara Dillon has called a "palimpsestuous" reading: a reading that attends to the ways in which multiple inscriptions and competing narratives are intertwined and produce complex meanings.

February 24, 2016 will mark the tenth anniversary of the passing of Octavia E. Butler. To commemorate her contributions to the world of letters, the Octavia E. Butler Society solicits papers for a special conference to be hosted by Spelman College February 24-26, 2016. The Society welcomes proposals of 250 words focused on any aspect of Butler's life, work, and influence. Because a major goal of the Society is to encourage the teaching of her works in the academy and beyond, we also invite submissions addressing approaches to teaching Butler in any pedagogical environment. Panel proposals are also encouraged.

We must account for the intensity of art, otherwise we can only explain part of our aesthetic experience. This argument is found in critics as diverse as Brian Massumi, Charles Altieri, and Sianne Ngai. Philosophers such as Alfred North Whitehead, Henri Bergson, and Steven Shaviro have argued that much of our perception is not cognitive but intuitive; we connect to the world through our senses.