We invite proposals for papers dealing with American Literature from 1945 to the present to be shared at the Pacific Modern Lanugage Association, held this year from November 7-10 at the Margariaville Resort in Palm Springs, California. The conference will be held completely in person.

Our panel organizers believe in a capacious understanding of post-1945 American Literature. The category of “literature” includes imaginative works (fiction, poetry, drama) but also essays, memoirs, or creative nonfiction. Texts that are written by American-identifying authors or texts about America or American life are welcome.

We are open to proposals on a wide variety of topics, with particular consideration granted to papers that engage with the conference theme of "Translation in Action." The postwar period offers a rich body of writing to consider, as a diversifying America has led to a diversifying American literary canon. Writers who engage with questions of translation do so in a context of a nation becoming more linguistically and culturally variegated, even in the midst of surges of xenophobia and resentment toward changes to an Anglo-dominated, English-speaking, mythical, ahistorical vision of the nation.

Topics of particular interest include but are not limited to:

--Integrating questions of linguistic translation in literary texts

--Managing the presence of multiple languages within a text

--Translation of cultural practices and senses of identity

--Linguistic hierarchies inside and outside English-dominated polities

--Figurative language and stream-of-consciousness as forms of translation

--Translation in light of AI-generated or language poetry

--Postmodernism, the signifying chain, and translation

--Refusing to translate and the untranslatable

--The market for translations

--The place of translations in English departments

--Translation across media

Paper proposals are due on April 30, 2024. Submit your 250-word abstracts via the PAMLA portal: https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/User/DashBoard.

Send questions to Jeffrey Gonzalez at gonzalezje@montclair.edu.