The Graduate English Students' Association in the University of Virginia's
Department of English would like to invite submissions to our annual
conference, to be held from April 5th to April 7th, 2007.
  
This conference invites papers that examine the relationship between texts
and the practice of improvisation. Creative works inevitably involve
improvisations of various kinds in their dealings with previous genre
categories, innovations within the formal boundaries of their media, and
even gaps between their own expectations and the end product. How do texts
register these dynamics through moments of improvisation? Is improvisation
incorporated into the received version of a genre or institutionalized as
its own form? How do literary, dramatic, musical, and other kinds of texts
deal with and even resist improvisation? Are some art forms or scenes of
artistic production more conducive to improvisation than others? Does
improvisation always push formal or generic boundaries? And how do we, as
critics in perhaps the most capacious of disciplines, make use of
improvisation?
  
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
-Dramatic improvisation
-Oral narrative traditions
-Speech acts
-Performance
-Generic boundaries and their expansion
-Multimedia works of art
-Music and literature
-Jazz and poetics
-Collective artistic production
-Tradition, convention, and invention
-Creative and compositional processes
-Scenes of cultural production
-Interdisciplinarity in literary studies
-Performatives and Performance

We are also pleased to announce our distinguished keynote speaker, who will
address these and other questions: Brent Edwards, Associate Professor of
English at Rutgers University, author of The Practice of Diaspora:
Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (2003), and
editor of Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (2004).
  
We welcome abstracts for panels as well as individual papers. Please submit
abstracts of no more than 300 words (or panel proposals of no more than 700
words, including descriptions of individual papers), making note of planned
A/V needs, to uvagesaconf2007_at_gmail.com no later than March 5th, 2007. (No
attachments, please.) Please address any other inquiries to the same
address.

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Received on Thu Feb 01 2007 - 18:59:16 EST