Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society: "Resisting Readers and Resisting Narrators within Sedgwick's Works" at SSAWW

deadline for submissions: 
February 10, 2018
full name / name of organization: 
Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society
contact email: 

The Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society invites proposals for the following panel at the SSAWW Conference November 7-11, 2018 in Denver: "Resisting Readers and Resisting Narrators within Sedgwick's Works."  Many of Sedgwick's popular short writings are didactic in nature, leading readers toward desired, mostly conventional responses.  If Judith Fetterley valued the "resisting reader of texts, where can we find that message within Sedgwick's writing? How are characters themselves resisting readers - and what kind of texts do they resist?  Are there multiple layers or dynamics of resistance within a text?  And what about the narrators?  In novels, Sedgwick often subverts the traditional didactic narrator voice, at times folding narration into letters, and at other times experimenting with other devices that destabilize the narrative voice. How does this narrative function challenge readers? Ideally, this panel will not only explore instances of resistance but also consider reading and textuality in innovative ways.  In turn, these questions about reading and the nature of texts can influence the steps we take in recovering the work of Sedgwick and others: what texts we choose, how we present them to 21st century readers, and how we consider nontraditional forms of textuality or nontraditional methods of access. The Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society is open to proposals that address writers other than Sedgwick if they otherwise fit the prompt. Please send questions and 200-word abstracts to Lisa West, lisa.west@drake.edu by February 10, 2018.  

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