african-american

Françoise Lionnet and Shumei Shi define transnational “as a space of exchange and participation wherever processes of hybridization occur and where it is still possible for cultures to be produced and performed without necessary mediation by center” (Minor Transnationalism 5). Yogita Goyal sees transnationalism “as a replacement for the outdated category of multicultural literature, and as an acknowledgement of the interconnectedness of the United States with the rest of the world through circuits of capital and culture” (Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature 7).

"Border Crossers and Crossings: Taking Risks in Writing Fiction" (Creative Writing) This creative writing panel invites writers to read from and discuss moments in their literary fiction where they or their characters have dared to cross some kind of border. This border might include portraying the life of someone very unlike themselves or outside the spheres of their own world, as in crossing boundaries of race, class, gender, sexuality, ableism, work-life, point-of-view, etc. Or the border crossing might pertain to disrupting traditional forms. Or it might pertain to writing un-p.c. moments or despicable characters or speaking truths that normally don’t get spoken. Or. Or. Or. This panel is not interested in gratuitous violence, porn, or erotica.

The 46th annual Louisville Conference on Literature & Culture since 1900

February 22 - 24, 2018

The 46th annual Louisville Conference on Literature & Culture since 1900 will be held at the University of Louisville, February 22-24, 2018. Critical papers may be submitted on any topic that addresses literary works published since 1900, and/or their relationship with other arts and disciplines (film, journalism, opera, music, pop culture, painting, architecture, law, etc). Work by creative writers is also welcome.

Submissions may be in English, French, German, Italian or Spanish. Submissions will be considered if received by 11:59 P.M. EST September 11, 2017.

Critical panels

Back in 1983, M.L. Rosenthal and Sally Gall identified the poetic sequence as a kind of invented genre, and a notable, even defining achievement of the first half of the twentieth century (or first half plus a few years: Robert Lowell’s Life Studies was one of their important examples). They saw the sequence as a form a number of poets converged on, largely independently, but ultimately one that offers, according to their Foreword, “an inner history of modern poetry written in English.”

Homonationalism has typically been used to name a late-twentieth and twenty-first century phenomenon in which gay and lesbian rights discourse has achieved power, in part, by donning the rhetoric of U.S. exceptionalism. Yet Jasbir Puar’s 2013 re-articulation of homonationalism as a “facet of modernity and a historical shift” also points to an underexplored set of questions pertinent to nineteenth-century American Studies: What are the deeper genealogies of homonationalism? What forms does it take in periods prior to the popularization of the “homosexual” as a type in Euro-American sexology? What earlier iterations of nationalist homosociality also comprise something like a sexual politics?