cfp.english.upenn.edu

This year’s MLA convention puts special emphasis on “conversation” as a model for our own scholarly exchanges. Our panel welcomes papers that analyze “conversation” as a form of collaboration, as a compositional practice, and interpretive hermeneutic in early modern England. As Katherine Larson has recently argued, “conversation” represents a “matrix of issues – the intersections among oral and written and verbal and physical interchange, the threshold between “private” and “public” communications and the sanctity of the boundaries of conversational spaces.” In addition to synchronic exchanges among contemporary interlocutors, we are interested in:

Dramatizations of conversational exchanges
Representations of embodied conversations
Intertextual conversations (diachronic and synchronic)
Post-mortem conversations
Self-fashioning through conversational exchanges
Paratextual conversations
The rhetorical commonplaces of conversational exchanges
Considerations of conversation in the context of extant models of cognition

Please send 250-word abstracts to kristen.bennett@tufts.edu and Dianne.berg@tufts.edu by March 15.