twentieth century and beyond

The College English Association solicits abstracts on the special focus of the 89th SAMLA conference from November 3-5 in Atlanta: “High Art/Low Art: Borders and Boundaries in Popular Culture.” From the selection of singer and songwriter Bob Dylan as the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature last year to the election as President of a former reality-television star, the topic could not be more timely nor seminal.

More information on the conference may be found at https://samla.memberclicks.net/.

This convention will bring together scholars working across the broad field of literary studies to discuss the literary as an interface between different forms of knowledge and processes of knowledge formation, looking at questions of how and through what means the literary is communicated, represented, negotiated, and remade. By placing the concept of the literary centre-stage while at the same time interrogating its role as an interface, we wish to open up for discussion questions about the role, dynamism, and value of the literary in a time of institutional change and ongoing disciplinary formation.

Call for Contributors: 25 Events that Shaped Asian American History

ABC-CLIO, the leading publisher of academic reference works, is developing 25 Events that Shaped Asian American History to be published in 2019. This single-volume project covers the breadth and depth of Asian American history through key events that include diverse Asian American groups including Chinese, Cambodian, Filipino, Hmong, Japanese, Korean, South Asian, Pacific Islander, and Vietnamese American history. Each essay will be around 7,000 words. Contributor guidelines with samples will be provided.

This panel reflects on the place of confusion in British and American modernism. Confusion has not been traditionally considered a proper scholarly response to textual analysis; critics are supposed to interpret a text rather than allow themselves to experience its uncertainties. What happens when we explore the confusion we feel when reading not as something to be worked through, but as something to be worked with? Building on affect theorists’ work on how our feelings can influence the way we read, such as Eve Sedgwick’s reparative reading and Rita Felski’s reflective and post-critical reading, how can considering confusion change both our experience of reading and our critical practices?

This panel will take place at the NEMLA 2018 Convention in Pittsburgh, April 12-15: https://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention/session.html