Is the 20 c. inheritance of literary criticism in its various modes of strong, ‘suspicious’, deep reading woefully inadequate for reckoning with the current and impending environmental crises, as many have claimed?

Critics declare that these crises demand entirely new concepts and ways of doing things, for example borrowing from the sciences and social sciences. But the practice of criticism, as opposed to its programmatic statements, remains remarkably consistent. This observation leads us to ask what kinds of environmental thinking established practices of criticism already perform. In other words, which concepts and methods that are not explicitly environmental are good for thinking environmentally?

PLEASE JOIN US FOR THE THIRD ANNE LISTER SOCIETY MEETING in Spring 2024!

Following on our inaugural meeting in April 2022 and our second in 2023, we are thrilled to announce that the Anne Lister Society will reconvene for its third conference, 5-6 April 2024, in Halifax, U.K., during the events of Anne Lister Birthday Week.

AMERICAN NIGHTMARES: THE INAUGURAL SYMPOSIUM OF THE SOCIETY FOR THE STUDY OF THE AMERICAN GOTHIC

March 21st – 23rd, 2024

Salem, Massachusetts

Conference director: Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Central Michigan University

With the kind support of the American Literature Association

Proposals for individual papers, 3- or 4-person paper sessions, and 5-person roundtable sessions are solicited for AMERICAN NIGHTMARES: the inaugural symposium of the Society for the Study of the American Gothic.

Gaston Bachelard asserts that "all really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home." How does one define "home"? Is it a materially constructed shelter, or a psychological space that holds one's memories, imaginations, and, essentially, a space that "protects the daydreamer" (The Poetics of Space, 5)? Furthermore, what does it mean to exist in a "body"? And what does it feel like to be "at home" in a body? How does one traverse these inhabited spaces, both in public and in private? Or, how are spatial boundaries reinstated when the home and the body is misaligned?

Ambiguous and paradoxical, the concept of hospitality has been extensively explored in its social, political, and ethical dimensions. In his cycle of seminars on hospitality (1995-97), Jacques Derrida reconstructs hospitality’s conceptual history, highlights its complexities and contradictions, and underlines the imbrication between hospitality and hostility. Building on Derrida’s reflections, works such as Rosello’s Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest (2001), McNulty’s The Hostess: Hospitality, Femininity, and the Expropriation of Identity (2006), and Baker’s Hospitality and World Politics (2013) have considered the global, transnational, and gender aspects of hospitality.

KIIT School of Language & Literature (KSLL) invites papers for the international conference on the topic of “Cross-Religious Exchanges in Eastern Indian Cultural and Literary Traditions” to be held on February 15-17, 2024 in the hybrid mode at Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology-Deemed to be University. The conference aims to explore the interactions among religion, philosophy, and literary and cultural texts from the Eastern and North Eastern part of the Indian subcontinent.

Accepting Late Submissions: December 15, 2023

The Collecting and Collectibles Area of the Popular Culture Association invites papers on

“The Future Imaginary in Collecting” for the 2024 National PCA/ACA Conference to be held on March 27-30 in Chicago USA 

We would especially like to encourage submissions that contribute new directions and calls to the existing scholarship on “Collecting” and particularly address how collections/collectibles imagine the future.

Possible topics for presentations include but are not limited to: