cfp.english.upenn.edu

Graduate Student Conference, Rhetoric, Race, and Readers

24th of April 2010 at Jackson State University, Jackson, MS

Reading as a social and cultural activity enmeshes reader and text in an exchange that requires both compromise and collaboration. As graduate students, we are expected to apply critical theory to the texts we read with objectivity, but we recognize that as readers we bring our experiences and acquired social constructs to our reading. We are interested in exploring the conversation that results when reader and text come from different racial or cultural backgrounds or when a text expands what Jauss terms the reader’s “horizon of expectation” with regard to race, racial boundaries, and cultural attitudes toward race.

We invite submission of abstracts from the humanities and from the social sciences as well as works of fiction or poetry addressing the connection between reader and text.

Potential topics include, but are by no means limited to:
• Stereotypes in literature
• Racial dynamics in fiction
• Popular literature
• Literature of subcultures
• Effect of the Naipaul fallacy
• Mixed race studies
• Confluence of race, geography, and creativity
• Ideology, politics, and critical approaches to literature
• Institutional structuring of race studies
• Race and literary theory

Submit abstracts (500 words) to candis.p.pizzetta@jsums.edu

Submission deadline: 12 April 2010

Please visit http://www.jsums.edu/liberalarts/emfl/index.php for updates.