twentieth century and beyond

"Border Crossers and Crossings: Taking Risks in Writing Fiction" (Creative Writing) This creative writing panel invites writers to read from and discuss moments in their literary fiction where they or their characters have dared to cross some kind of border. This border might include portraying the life of someone very unlike themselves or outside the spheres of their own world, as in crossing boundaries of race, class, gender, sexuality, ableism, work-life, point-of-view, etc. Or the border crossing might pertain to disrupting traditional forms. Or it might pertain to writing un-p.c. moments or despicable characters or speaking truths that normally don’t get spoken. Or. Or. Or. This panel is not interested in gratuitous violence, porn, or erotica.

With Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania as a backdrop, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys show Michael Chabon finding his footing as a rising American novelist. One of the most notable devices employed in these and his later works is the way that the locations ground his characters and his plot as well as reveal his stylistic flourishes as a storyteller, even before The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay earned him a Pulitzer Prize.

Why and how are place such an evocative facet of many American writers’ work, and how does the repeated commitment to establishing place in American writing position it in a more global sense as a fiction writer?

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?

Broad theme: The other, othered veterans (inspired by the delay of the transgender ban)

The editors of English: the Journal of the English Association are very pleased to initiate in 2017 the opening of an annual essay competition exclusive to postgraduates. We are looking for essays that provide new perspectives on canonical and/or non-canonical Anglophone literatures, and therefore welcome submissions that focus on single author/texts or a range, and which develop original arguments beyond simple close reading, while engaging with recent scholarship in relevant fields.

The competition is open to any postgraduate student who is registered on a doctoral programme at any institution anywhere in the world, by, or within three months of, the submission deadline: September 30th, 2017.