twentieth century and beyond

Themes of waste and waste management circulate in contemporary literature as demonstrated in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the scatological poetry of A.R. Ammons, the collages of James Schuyler and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and the language middens of Caroline Bergvall’s Drift. Collections like Jennifer Scappettone’s The Republic of Exit 43 also highlight the shared architecture of landfills and human bodies connected by waste, built environments, and literary corpuses. The purpose of the seminar is then twofold. First, this seminar invites participants to explore art, film, and literature through the lens of waste, waste management, and toxic materialism.

This roundtable endeavors to assess the influence of Donald Trump’s 2016 election on literature in the US and around the world.   Three avenues of inquiry will be featured. First, do the results of the 2016 election in the US clearly influence literature in the US or worldwide?   If so, what are the main traits of this influence?  Second, are there commonalities between writing in the US and writing elsewhere following the election?  Finally, focusing on non-US writing, are there perspectives or themes that are not at all present in US writing?  Is there a global voice after Trump’s election that does not exist in the United States?

Constructing South Asian National Identity in Literature and Film: Confluences on the Asian Subcontinent

When Partition created India, East Pakistan (later Bangladesh) and West Pakistan in 1947, the nationhood of these new states moved from the theoretical to the real in dramatic fashion, setting up complexities and contradictions that continue to reverberate into the present day. This panel will investigate the past, present, and future of these South Asian nations’ search for cultural identity in an examination of their fiction, poetry, and film. 

This panel explores the representation of the Great War from roughly late 2017 through roughly 1925 in order to examine perspectives on the final years of the war and the onset of peace. 

The guiding themes in this panel will be as follows:

· The examination of the effects and results of the year as the war is concluding

· Exploring the aftermath of the war to gauge its meaning and consequences

· Comparing representations of the Great War from country to country and language to language to measure its impact on life in Europe and the rest of the world

· Comparing the final years of the war in film and literature

· Examining the effects of the war on geographical areas. 

Call for Papers

Poetry & Poetics (Critical)

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

39th Annual Conference, February 7-10, 2018

Hyatt Regency Hotel & Conference Center

Albuquerque, New Mexico

http://www.southwestpca.org

Proposal submission deadline: October 22, 2017