twentieth century and beyond

In his famous study on “Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious," Freud argues that jokes, and the laughter they elicit, allow a kind of access to the unconscious. They permit, among other things, the fulfillment of repressed desires, the channeling of aggression into an acceptable social form, and polysemic satisfaction. As the structure of a joke operates similarly to the structure of a dream (by condensation and displacement, metaphor and metonymy), it also enables the revelation of contemporary ideology and its ambiguities. Further, for Lacan, with the child’s “jubilant assumption of his [sic] specular image” in the mirror, laughter coincides with the ego's coming-into-being.

C21Literature: Journal of 21st Century Writings

 Call for Papers


Special Issue: “Surveilling the Body: Ableism and Anglophone Literature”

Guest Edited by Dr Susan Flynn and Dr Antonia Mackay

  Violent Spaces

We are excited to announce the Call for Papers for Violent Spaces, the annual PGR conference of the Landscape, Space and Place Reading Group, which will be held on the 9th of September at the University of Nottingham. Spatial violence is an expansive concept which covers a range of environmental, social, political, economic and historical phenomena. As such, what is offered here is merely an insight into the way in which spatial violence might act upon and shape our contemporary world.

Call for Papers for Saving the Day: Accessing Comics in the Twentieth-First Century (A Roundtable)

51st Annual Convention of the Northeast Modern Language Association

Boston Marriott Copley Place, in Boston, Massachusetts, from 5-8 March 2020

Paper abstracts are due by 30 September 2019

Session organized by Michael A. Torregrossa, The Medieval Comics Project, and Carl B. Sell, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

The Charles Olson Society will sponsor a panel at the annual Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900, to be held at the University of Louisville from February 20-22. 2020 marks the 70th anniversary of this important essay, and the panel will therefore examine the essay’s theoretical and poetic legacies. We are interested in abstracts proposing innovative approaches to reading Olson’s essay and the conversations that it started. How have the theoretical or cultural contexts surrounding projective verse created a robust understanding of poetic practice in the post-1945 era? How have the legacies of projective poetry engaged with and inflected theoretical models?