theory

In "The Site of Memory," Toni Morrison claims that as an African American writer her literary heritage is the autobiography, the slave narrative. Quoting Harriet Jacobs, Morrison claims that a central trope of the slave narrative is occlusion, leaving the unspeakable unspoken. However, for Morrison, a writer heavily indebted to her formerly enslaved precursors, "the exercise is very different. [Her] job becomes how to rip that veil drawn over "proceedings too terrible to relate." Morrison pays her literary debt to these authors by revealing that to which they were unable. In what ways do 20th and 21st Century black American authors struggle with or against their 19th Century literary heritage? Or even their early twentieth century heritage?

Following the successful launch of the inaugural Samuel Beckett Summer School last July, Trinity College Dublin is delighted to announce that this year's school, whose patron is Edward Beckett, will take place on campus from July 15 - 21, 2012. The weeklong celebration of the Nobel-Prize-winning Irish writer is designed to draw scholars, students and enthusiasts from around the world to explore his work in the very location where Beckett, as a student, began his distinctive intellectual and creative life.

BIG DATA AND UNCERTAINTY IN THE HUMANITIES September 22, 2012, University of Kansas

This conference seeks to address the opportunities and challenges humanistic scholars face with the ubiquity and exponential growth of new web-based data sources (e.g. electronic texts, social media, and audiovisual materials) and digital methods (e.g. information visualization, text markup, crowdsourcing metadata).

We invite papers of high literary standards by scholars in the field of Indian Writing in English to contribute to a book to be published by McFarland & Co., Inc., USA in 2013. We encourage only Poststructuralist / Postmodernist / Cultural / Postcolonial / Globalization perspectives. Papers focusing the works of Amitav Ghosh, Anita Rau Badami, Chrostopher Cyrill, Shani Mootoo, Bapsi Sidhwa, Gita Mehta, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Sujata Bhatt will be preferred.

The overwhelming success of Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas finally confirmed Stein's celebrity status in the United States in 1933. Yet she lamented that she had become known less as an important author than as the host of a Parisian salon in which famous writers and European painters gathered amidst her collection of modern art. Her earlier, more challenging writing continued to go unnoticed and unpublished despite the wide public appeal of the autobiography and the success of Virgil Thomson's production of Stein's opera Four Saints in Three Acts in 1934.