What new modes of literature have emerged in current activist movements and subcultures?  How do they mesh with longer standing forms of performance and protest?    This session, approved for the 2018 Northeast Modern Language Association in Pittsburgh, April 12-15th, aims to explore the explosion of activist communications online and in the streets to discover how they constitute new genres, forms, and modes of literacy. Papers on Women’s and Climate March posters, Pantsuit Nation posts, agitprop theater productions, poetry broadsides and posts, and on theories and ethics of activist communication are welcome.  

This panel will aim to conceptualize the relationship between literature and the museum in the age of cultural mediation and digital media. We will examine how the imagined and immaterial museum space, as represented in the narrative text, can contribute to redefining the aesthetic experience for the spectator. This will also allow us to explore the critical posture adopted by contemporary authors with respect to the existing configuration of the physical museum space available to the public. The multiplication of stories staged in the museum space raises the question of the type of narratives that the museum experience can offer.