Papers sought for a special MLA session in Chicago 2007, addressing historical in contemporary American fiction.

Linda Hutcheon described postmodernism as “historiographic metafiction” and as a fundamental contradiction of being “resolutely historical and inescapably political.” The aim of this panel is to examine if and to what extent this notion can be applied to American contemporary novels (for instance, McCarthy, Mailer, Pynchon, DeLillo, Auster, Sontag) Some of the questions the panel wants to address (although they are not limited to these) are: How is history communicated in fiction? Are we facing re-visioning and reinterpreting history? What are the historical implications of postmodernism as well as the postmodern implications of history? Why is there a conflict (most often in the same text) envisioning history as nostalgia and history as apocalypse?

Abstracts up to 500 words should be sent by March 20 to dxm388_at_psu.edu

Damjana Mraovic

dxm388_at_psu.edu

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Received on Sat Feb 24 2007 - 13:11:26 EST