category: theory

Tragedy/The Tragic in Asian American Literature

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 20:05:07 -0500

This panel will explore Asian American literary participation in the tragic mode. Reasons for this exploration include:
- the desire to explore some of the aesthetic dimensions of Asian American fiction that have long been neglected by critics.
- the desire to recuperate tragedy/the tragic for the 20th Century, where it has often been dismissed as no longer applicable
- the desire to break down longstanding binaries between existential and political approaches to the tragic.
- the desire to better understand possible political ramifications of tragedy/the tragic in the 20th Century
- the desire to examine the role of genre in knowledge production and ethics

Possible paper topics include, but not are limited to:
- any approaches/treatments of/responses to suffering in Asian American literature, by authors, readers, critics, narrators, or fictional characters
- a questioning of traditional Western claims to tragedy, through investigations of tragedy in Asian and/or Asian American literature
- Examinations of heroism in Asian American literature
- Explorations of the ways in which the tragic appears in Asian American literature
-The tragic as it manifests in Asian cultural values/belief systems.
- Ethics and suffering/grief/tragedy in Asian American literature
- Genre shaping in Asian American literature
- Attention to lyricism and imagism in Asian American fiction
- Negotiating hope in Asian American fiction
- The role of genre in knowledge production and ethics
- The tragic as it manifests in the 20th Century
- The tragic as it manifests in American literature
- The relationship of any of the above to transnationalism

Please send a 400 word abstract by email to sgardam@gmail.com by February 18, 2012.

Race and Metaphor in 19th/20th Century American Literature and Thought (MLA Boston; abstracts due March 10, 2012)

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:18:32 -0500

Race and Metaphor in 19th/20th Century American Literature and Thought
MLA Special Session
January 3-6, 2013, Boston, MA
Abstract Deadline: March 10, 2012

This session takes up connections between metaphor and race, examining the ways that language and cognition influence the interactions between different racial and cultural groups. In doing so, it looks to extend awareness of the interactions between daily language and other discursive systems or practices—literary, social, political, scientific, and/or economic linguistic paradigms, for example—that inform and influence the discussion of race in daily language. In highlighting the relations between different discursive practices, the goal is to understand the ways in which language in general, and metaphor in specific, both conditions and perpetuates the relationships between different groups of people in an unequal manner. Further, unpacking the connections between language and identity will allow us to extend the ways in which Critical Race Theory can be utilized to examine the linguistic configurations that disguise the social forces perpetuating inequality. In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1993), for instance, Toni Morrison engages the tensions created by race and metaphor:

Race has become metaphorical—a way of referring to and disguising forces, events, classes, and expressions of social decay and economic division far more threatening to the body politic than biological “race” ever was. [...] It seems that it has a utility far beyond economy, beyond the sequestering of classes from one another, and has assumed a metaphorical life so completely embedded in daily discourse that it is perhaps more necessary and more on display than ever before. (63)

Morrison is not alone in noting the relationship between race and metaphor; Ralph Ellison’s examination of white insecurity in “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks” (1970) highlights the historic validation whites found in subordinating blacks:

Since the beginning of the nation, white Americans have suffered from a deep inner uncertainty as to who they really are. One of the ways that has been used to simplify the answer has been to seize upon the presence of black Americans and use them as a marker, a symbol of limits, a metaphor for the “outsider.” (110-1)

In both Morrison and Ellison, the connection between race and metaphor becomes the means to demarcate the boundaries of inclusion and citizenship; the “utility” that Morrison connects to the metaphorical use of race refers to the implied assumptions within language that participate in maintaining the dominant ideology. In Ellison’s case, the observation that African Americans exist as a “metaphor for the ‘outsider’” points to the linguistic accrual of social and political power in language that occurs over time, specifically as this usage moves from a conscious to unconscious application.

This panel is interested in investigating the manifestation of these ideas in 19th and 20th century American literature and thought. It is open to papers focusing on the function of metaphor and race in individual works (poetry, prose, drama, film, etc.), papers addressing theoretical connections between race and metaphor, as well as papers that engage both simultaneously. How, for example, do individual authors dismantle racial metaphors in their work, or unconsciously (or consciously) make use of racial metaphors to structure ideas across individual or collective works? Are there different strategies employed by different groups of authors in addressing the negative ways in which racial metaphors silently supplement texts as well as the larger national discourse surrounding race? Similarly, how can George Lakoff’s and Mark Johnson’s ideas concerning the mapping of the source and the target of conceptual metaphors be applied to the metaphorical performance and production of race?

Elizabeth Young, author of Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor and the Carl M. and Elsie A. Small Professor of English at Mt. Holyoke College, will be the respondent for the panel.

Please send 250-500 word abstracts by March 10, 2012 to Thomas Morgan (tmorgan2@udayton.edu).

Other Islands: Shaw, Beckett, and World Literature (MLA 2013)

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:49:55 -0500

.
Despite their considerable differences, Bernard Shaw and Samuel
Beckett were born into an Anglo-Irish axis but envisioned worlds
beyond it that incorporated and transfigured their national heritage. This panel seeks papers that address how Shaw and Beckett might be read together, particularly through new definitions of world literature. How do Shaw and Beckett envision modern drama as a series of parables or demonstrations of world creation and destruction; as a negotiation between the local and the global; or as the erasure of historical geographies in favor of flexible places (landscapes, theatres) and spaces (the past, the future, the state)? Papers might also address Shaw and Beckett’s shared Protestantism and Neo-Protestantism, their universalism or rejection of universals, their insistence on science fiction and fantasy as ramifications of realism, and their dramatization of engagements with and retreats from inner and outer worlds, among other related topics.

Please send a 300 word-abstract and CV to Lawrence Switzky at
lawrence.switzky@utoronto.ca by March 10, 2012. Proposals and queries are welcome before the deadline.

CFP - Fashioning the City: Exploring Fashion Cultures, Structures, and Systems

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 11:07:06 -0500

CFP - Call for Papers

FASHIONING THE CITY:
Exploring Fashion Cultures, Structures, and Systems

An International Inter-disciplinary Conference

Dates and Duration: 19th-21st September 2012
Location and Venue: Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London, SW7 2EU. United Kingdom.
Principal Language of Conference Proceedings: English

Antwerp, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Dakar, Seoul, Sydney...a familiar, yet unfamiliar, line up of cities which have all emerged as sites for the production and display of fashion in recent times. Are these also the names set to usurp the power of the ‘’Big Five’’ ‘’Fashion Capitals’’ Paris, London, Milan, New York, and Tokyo? While the power, position and prestige of the legendary Fashion Capitals are recognised as such throughout the structures and networks of the fashion industry, none are sacrosanct as such. Post-World War Two Paris had to re-assert its hold on womenswear against threats from the sportswear culture of New York which emerged during the 1940s and early 1950s, and from London’s ‘’youth-quake’’ fashions in the 1960s. In Italy, both Rome and Florence were precursors to Milan’s authority as the country’s pre-eminent Fashion City. Yet, throughout the 20th Century, and in particular from the 1980s onwards, smaller cities, or ‘’Style Centres’’ such as Antwerp, Amsterdam, Barcelona or Copenhagen, have sought to develop their own influence through fashion culture. In Volume 15, Issue 2 of Fashion Theory: Journal of Dress, Body and Culture published in June 2011, the editors Lise Skov, of Copenhagen Business School, and Marie Riegels Melchior, of Designmuseum Danmark, brought together a collection of research papers which pioneer an approach looking at the decentering of Fashion Cities and the fashion culture that emanates from them. In her own paper in this volume Skov considers the changes occurring towards what she describes as a ‘’poly-centric’’ fashion industry. The purpose of this conference is to bring together a variety of fashion and creative industry practitioners, researchers and commentators to

(re)consider the developing structures and networks of the fashion industry as it is set to develop in the 21st Century through such a ‘’poly-centric’’ system of Fashion Cities. Papers of 15-20 minutes duration for presentation and discussion are sought on the five core conference themes as follows:

• Developing the Fashion City
• The Role of the Fashion Academy or School
• Fashion Culture on Display
• The Business of Fashion Culture
• Disseminating Fashion Culture

Within these core themes issues for discussion and possible subjects for papers (or groups of papers) may include:

• Developing the Fashion City
• Developing fashion culture
• Relationships between Fashion Capitals and alternative sites or cities of fashion
• Developing fashion culture outside the ‘’Big Five’’ Fashion Capitals
• The role of the fashion academy or school and professional training opportunities
• Dissemination of fashion culture and the Fashion City through the media, film and television
• Dissemination of fashion culture through display in museums, galleries and retail formats
• The structure and/or restructuring of the fashion industry in the 21st Century
• The role of Fashion Weeks and fashion trade fairs in developing fashion culture
• The role of technology and new developments in technology e.g. new sales strategies, augmented reality, Fashion Film, social networking
• The role of government and city councils at regional, national and international levels
• Fashion and tourism
• Commercial versus conceptual fashion cultures
• British, European and International Perspectives

The conference is to be accompanied by an exhibition placing into context the development of the Fashion City, evolving fashion cultures and the rise of the ‘’Style Centre.’’ The focus of this exhibition will concentrate on the experience of two Style Centres: Antwerp and Copenhagen. Papers are therefore particularly welcomed which pertain to the fashion cultures of Belgium, the Netherlands or Luxembourg, Denmark and the Nordic countries (Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden). Applicants with direct experience or with active research interests in developing creative city milieus, and which have a strong relevance to the fashion industry, are also warmly welcomed.

Abstracts of 300 words in English for presentations of 15-20 minutes duration should be submitted via E-mail by Friday April 6th 2012. Applicants should also include their name, job title, academic affiliation or company/organisation (as appropriate), together with full contact details including E-mail address. Facilities for presenting visual information, including PowerPoint slides and short films, will be made available to all speakers.

All Abstract submissions, together with any further questions, should be addressed to conference convenor Nathaniel Dafydd Beard at: nathaniel.beard[at]network.rca.ac.uk

Please Note: in order to promote as wide an access as possible and to facilitate continued and further debate it is intended that the proceedings of the conference are to be filmed with the permission of all participating speakers. In addition, all papers from the conference will be selected and considered for inclusion in a book-format publication(s) by a UK-based publisher.

All successful applicants will be notified by early May 2012.

No bursaries are available for travel or accommodation costs.

For further information and up-dates please refer to the conference and exhibition website:

www.fashioningthecity.wordpess.com

Supported by:

Royal College of Art

ALCS - Association of Low Countries Studies

Sex, Courtship and Marriage in Victorian Literature and Culture

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 05:14:28 -0500

Victorian Network is an MLA-indexed (from 2012) online journal dedicated to publishing and promoting the best postgraduate work in Victorian Studies.

The sixth issue of Victorian Network, guest edited by Dr Greta Depledge (Royal Holloway), is dedicated to a reassessment of nineteenth-century constructions and understandings of sex, courtship and marriage. Although the heteronormative and companionate marriage was vital for economic and reproductive reasons - as well as romantic impulses - recent scholarship has illuminated its status as but one of several diverse paradigms of marriage/sexual relationship accessible to the Victorians
Across the nineteenth century, profound crises of faith, extensive legal reforms and the new insights afforded by the emergent discipline of anthropology all contributed to a culture of introspection about the practice of marriage, at the same time as advances in science and medicine opened up new interpretations and definitions of sexual practices and preferences.

We are inviting submissions of no more than 7000 words, on any aspect of the theme. Possible topics include but are by no means limited to the following:

• Victorian narratives of queer desire: text and subtext
• Representations of women’s sexuality (angels, whores and spinsters)
• Prudishness and censorship: “deviant” novels and scandalous dramas
• Adultery, bigamy, divorce and other affronts to the ideal of companionate marriage
• Transgressive relationships
• Nineteenth-century marriage law, including prohibited degrees of affinity, property reform and breach of promise
• Representations of sexual innocence and experience (virginity, puberty and prostitution
• Subversion of traditional courtship narratives
• Sex and class: adventuresses, mistresses, sex workers and blackmail
• Customs of the country: courtship conventions, betrothals and bridal nights
• Performance, stylization and parody: gender scripts, consumer culture, theatrical subversion

All submissions should conform to MHRA style conventions and the in-house submission guidelines. The deadline for submissions is 30 May 2012.

Contact: victoriannetwork@gmail.com
Website: http://www.victoriannetwork.org/index.php/vn

Portals Literary Journal is accepting submissions for our Spring 2012 issue.

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 20:29:21 -0500

2012 Call for Submissions
Portals is currently accepting submissions for our Spring 2012 issue.

Submission deadline: March 1, 2012.

Portals invites original critical essays and short creative fiction that explore comparative literary topics across cultural, regional, linguistic, and temporal boundaries for the Spring 2012 issue. This edition will be available in scholarly journal listings worldwide.

Formal requirements for original critical essays:

Papers should be in English.
In order to be considered for submission, essays must compare at least two texts from different linguistic traditions.
Citations should include both the original language and the English translation.
Papers should be no longer than 25 pages in 12 point font, and should be properly formatted and documented in MLA style.
Formal requirements for creative fiction:

An author may submit up to 3 pieces of any form of creative fiction with a limit of 10 pages per submission. Fiction must be of a comparative/critical nature.
General requirements:

All submissions are to be sent via e-mail as an MS-Word attachment.
Submissions must include a 250-word abstract and a cover sheet including name, address, telephone number, e-mail address, school affiliation, and current academic standing. Your name should not appear anywhere else in the proposal, since this will be a blind selection process.
Authors should be currently enrolled undergraduate students, graduate students or doctoral candidates.
Submissions must be original and previously unpublished.
To submit, send your submission as a .doc or .rtf attachment to: clsa[at]mail.sfsu.edu

Review Process:

Portals is published once a year in the Spring semester at San Francisco State University, in conjunction with the Comparative Literature Student Association (CLSA). All articles are reviewed in a double-blind process, and authors will be notified by email within 2 to 3 months of the submission deadline.

We encourage authors to read our journal thoroughly before submitting. Portals most recent issue and archives can be found here: http://portalsjournal.com

All inquiries and questions can be directed to our editors at: clsa[at]mail.sfsu.edu

Modern Family (MSA 14. Las Vegas. 18-21 Oct. 2012)

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 15:25:18 -0500

The family—as a social institution, as field of study, as a body of representation and readership—has been underserved by theories of modernism. This oversight may stem from a perception that many of the moderns, such as the Greenwich Village avant-garde, were often averse to an institution they found inherently bourgeois and conservative. This panel invites papers that will consider the family as a center of modernist thought, aesthetics, and praxis.

How might family relate to the conference theme “spectacle,” a suggestion of that which prompts “curiosity or contempt” and even “marvel or admiration”? Can the family figure anything more than the negation of modernist conventions? How might the moderns radicalize family in keeping with their other impulses toward innovation and scandal? The panel welcomes projects dealing with any national literature or theoretical orientation, and encourages submissions to consider family as a broad term encompassing multivalent modes of organization.

Send a 250-word abstract and 1-page CV (as one email attachment) to wesley.beal@lyon.edu by Monday, March 19. More details about the 2012 meeting of the MSA are available here: http://msa.press.jhu.edu/conferences/msa14/index.html.

Wunderkino 2-- On The Varieties of Cinematic Experience; abstracts 4/11/2012; symposium 7/26-28/2012

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 15:16:40 -0500

Wunderkino (“wonder-cinema”) are moving images that ignite our curiosity and engagement, and help us to rethink questions of creativity, complexity, rarity and the multiple uses and understandings we might find in amateur and non-commercial films.

The 2012 Northeast Historic Film (NHF) Summer Symposium revisits the idea of Wunderkino, in a general call for proposals that aim to inform and expand our understanding of amateur and non-theatrical film. In 2011, the NHF Summer Symposium focused on assembling a “cabinet of cinematic curiosities.” This year, we are inviting proposals that feature amazing and extraordinary studies of amateur and non-theatrical films that offer lessons about culture, heritage, history, geography, performance, and the drama and comedy of social life. This year’s theme is an effort to draw upon the wide range of approaches that scholars, artists, filmmakers, and archivists are bringing to the study and use of amateur and non-theatrical film. We encourage (and expect) participants to incorporate interesting moving image excerpts as part of their presentations. NHF houses a 125-seat cinema with 35mm, 16mm, videotape, and DVD projection.

The NHF Summer Symposium is a multi-disciplinary gathering devoted to the history, theory, and preservation of amateur and nontheatrical moving images. For over a decade, the Symposium has been bringing together archivists, scholars, and artists in an intimate setting for three days of viewing and discussing lesser-known, amateur, and found films. NHF is located in Bucksport, a town of 5,000 on the coast of Maine (for more info on NHF, please visit: http://www.oldfilm.org). Presenters typically have 30-45 minutes in which to deliver their paper and engage in discussion with their colleagues. The symposium is open to archivists, artists and scholars from all disciplines. Please be advised that NHF is a non-profit organization. Unfortunately, we do not have resources to fund travel and lodging for conference presenters and participants. All presenters and participants must register for the symposium.

Please send 250-500 word abstracts outlining your paper ideas and a brief c.v. to the symposium organizers at the address below. We prefer e-mail submissions. We are happy to discuss your presentation ideas with you in advance of a formal submission. The Symposium Program Committee will begin reviewing proposals on April 11, 2012 and will finalize the program by May 11, 2012. Please send proposals and inquiries to: symposium@wunderkino.org

II Lisbon Summer School for the Study of Culture - Peripheral Modernities - Lisbon, July 9-14 2012

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 12:20:34 -0500

The long history of the modern seems to stress that modernity was a privilege of Western rationality, disseminated from a European centre across the imaginary waiting rooms of history. Yet, the markers of what was hailed as the sign of Western advancement – industrialization, secularization and rationalization – have been consistently questioned over the past decade as indicators of universal validity and modernity itself reconceived beyond Western provincialism. Homi Bhabha thus conceives of a ‘contra-modernity’ to qualify the post-colonial as a stage that both mimicks and subverts Western modernity, Susan Friedman speaks of ‘polycentric modernities’ that enlarge the geographical scope of the modernization endeavour, whilst Argentinian critic Beatriz Sarlo has defined the Argentinian Modernism as the aesthetical counterpart of the specific South-American decentering into ‘peripheral modernities’.
The II Lisbon Summer School for the Study of Culture will take the manifold assumptions about modernity and its modernisms as the stepping stone to address the multiple ways in which the modern has been claimed. Although the distinction between modernity as a social-political construct and modernism as it aesthetic-cultural counterpart seems to be widely consensual, the neat separation between the two terms is not uncontentious, as the cultural does not exist beyond social framing and neither does the political occur beyond the aesthetic exploits of artists. This gap, stressed in the claim made by Adornian aesthetics’ that modernism reflects modernity’s critical self-awareness, seems to bring more problems than results for a complex mapping of the concept. In fact, the process of modernity is complex, because it brings together the social, the political, the cultural and the economical. It is simultaneously critical and hegemonic, imaginative and rational, dislocated and situated, global and local, traumatic and empowering.
The Summer School invites doctoral students and post-docs to submit theoretical discussions and case-study approaches from all fields of the humanities and the social sciences that consider modernity and modernism as other, diverse, fluid, translocal, plural, polycentric and alternative.

Confirmed keynote speakers:
Arjun Appadurai (Univ. New York)
Ellen Sapego (Univ. Winsconsin)
Roberto Vecchi (Univ. Bologna)
Márcio Seligmann-Silva (Univ. Campinas, São Paulo)
Jorge Fazenda Lourenço (CECC – FCH|UCP)
António Sousa Ribeiro (Centre for Social Studies, Univ. Coimbra)
Ansgar Nünning (Univ. Giessen)
Vera Nünning (Univ. Heidelberg)
Elizabeth Bronfen (Univ. Zurich)
Xiaomei Chen (Univ. California)

CFP - International Journal of Engineering (IJE)

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 01:52:06 -0500

Computer Science Journals (CSC Journals) invites researchers, editors, scientists & scholars to publish their scientific research papers in an International Journal of Engineering (IJE) Volume 6, Issue 3.

International Journal of Engineering (IJE) is devoted in assimilating publications that document development and research results within the broad spectrum of subfields in the engineering sciences. The journal intends to disseminate knowledge in the various disciplines of the engineering field from theoretical, practical and analytical research to physical implications and theoretical or quantitative discussion intended for both academic and industrial progress.

Our intended audiences comprises of scientists, researchers, mathematicians, practicing engineers, among others working in Engineering and welcome them to exchange and share their expertise in their particular disciplines. We also encourage articles, interdisciplinary in nature.

CSC Journals anticipate and invite papers on any of the following topics:

Aerospace Engineering

Agricultural Engineering

Biomedical Engineering

Chemical Engineering

Civil & Structural Engineering

Computer Engineering

Control Systems Engineering

Education Engineering

Electrical Engineering

Electronic Engineering

Engineering Mathematics

Engineering Science

Environmental Engineering

Fluid Engineering

Geotechnical Engineering

Industrial Engineering

Manufacturing Engineering

Materials & Technology Engineering

Mechanical Engineering

Mineral & Mining Engineering

Nuclear Engineering

Optical Engineering

Petroleum Engineering

Robotics & Automation Engineering

Telecommunications Engineering

Important Dates - IJE CFP - Volume 6, Issue 3.
Paper Submission: March 31, 2012
Author Notification: May 15, 2012
Issue Publication: June 2012

For complete details about IJE archives publications, abstracting/indexing, editorial board and other important information, please refer to IJE homepage (http://www.cscjournals.org/csc/journals/IJE/description.php?JCode=IJE).

We look forward to receive your valuable papers. If you have further questions please do not hesitate to contact us at cscpress@cscjournals.org. Our team is committed to provide a quick and supportive service throughout the publication process.

A complete list of journals can be found at http://www.cscjournals.org/csc/bysubject.php