This panel is looking for presentations about innovations that college instructors of Central and Eastern European languages have been implementing in order to make language and culture courses relevant and meaningful in the era of post-Covid and the war in Ukraine. How has the pandemic changed our methodology and pedagogy? What approaches and techniques do we take with us? What practices do we discard? In what areas do we innovate and what are successful innovations? How do we adapt to different student expectations and experiences in face-to-face, remote or hybrid courses? What has the pandemic made obsolete, a “surplus”, in our courses? How has the war in Ukraine influenced our curriculum?

The year between December 29th 2022 and December 29th 2023 would have been the hundredth of William Gaddis’ life. Between 1955, when he published The Recognitions, and 1998, when he died shortly after completing Agapē Agape, Gaddis was notorious for a disproportion between reputation and readership. Being reflexively labelled “difficult,” with his own novels’ wry figurations of characters writing “for a very small audience,” and with a tendency to be categorized (though not always actually read) alongside the increasingly unfashionable “high postmodernists”… all this might have made it hard to envisage his work surviving into the 2000s.

“Indian literature is one, though written in different languages”. This statement made by S. Radhakrishanan continues to inform Indian literary historiography in fundamental ways. This so-called ‘oneness’ has however been a matter of critical contestation. Sheldon Pollock, a modern-day Indologist, tends to place the variety of vernacular (bhasha) literatures in Sanskrit cosmopolis with all kinds of originary claims. But keeping in view rather checkered history of Indian literature, its oneness cannot be pinned down to one definitive originary moment. The bhasha critics tend to discover the oneness of Indian literatures in the revolutionary bhakti-past.

Department of Liberal Arts, IIT Bhilai

Presents

South Asian Water Imaginaries in an Era of Environmental Crisis

 A graduate student workshop

 Friday, 13 October 2023

 Concept Note & CFP

Please consider submitting an abstract for the NeMLA session "Reassessing Resource Narratives: Ecocritical Perspectives on the Illusion of Surplus" (55th Annual NeMLA Convention March 7th in Boston, MA). The deadline for submissions is September 30, 2023. You can submit an abstract for this session here- https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/20666

“Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins,” is a popular ( Zechariah Chafee, 1919) is a popular aphorism in legal imaginaries that theoretically synthesizes the scope of concepts such as freedom, power, and sovereignty. The reality of globalization, and its inherent movements and interactions of bodies, challenges the radical frame and geographies of the aforementioned concepts. The inevitability of the relation, in its materialisations as contact, conflict, and integration, highlights the thin lines between acknowledging, understanding, and trespassing boundaries in human relations to each other and to the systems that govern their lives.

In classical accounts of Marxism, surpluses seem to be made only by labor power. Perhaps the most important shift in  contemporary Marxist thought has been to uncover how capitalism appropriates surpluses from non-capitalist systems. As Jason W. Moore explains, capitalism lives off what he calls “the Four Cheaps,” labor, food, energy, raw materials. Capitalism’s surpluses don’t just come from exploitation—that is, the use of the wage to extract surplus value from labor. It also comes from appropriation—that is, taking without paying at all.

Book proposal: Edited collection 

Proposed Title: Tree Lines: Arboreal Agency in the Creative Arts

Edited by Dr Stephen O’Neill, Maynooth University, Ireland

Abstracts are invited for chapter proposals for the edited collection, Tree Lines: Arboreal Agency in the Creative Arts.

Description / Rationale:

The Center for Medieval-Renaissance Studies at the University of Virginia's College at Wise announces the Thirty-Sixth Medieval-Renaissance Conference, September 21-23, 2023

Keynote Address

 Matthew Gabriele

Virginia Tech University

 Oathbreakers: The Long Shadow of Fontenoy (841 CE)

in the European Middle Ages

Our conference aims to encourage studies that explore an emerging paradigm in intermediality studies centred on "affective intermediality", and we hope to initiate a friendly, scholarly debate regarding the relevance and productivity of this approach. The necessity of such an “affective turn” of intermediality studies arises from viewing intermediality as an intricate and highly performative process of communication between humans within a particular context of material reality and historical time, not just as a “transfer”, a “combination” or “reference” of media characteristics or representations, i.e.

This panel invites papers that explore literary representations of populations—immigrants, migrant workers, the racially or sexually marginalized, disabled persons, etc.—that are rendered ‘surplus’ by American society. This might be through economic, political, or interpersonal forces. This panel is especially interested in the ways these populations resist this dehumanization and forge their own communities. The label ‘surplus’ pushes these populations to the margins of society, deeply isolating them. Isolation is one of the most crippling afflictions that an individual can encounter, leaving them with no support system when forces like prejudices, poverty, or oppression affect them so deeply.

This roundtable invites critics and writers to rethink cities (or neighborhoods/areas within cities) that are essential to understanding “American writing,” yet still seem to remain outside or “extraneous” to discussions of “American literature.”  What historical cities, lost neighborhoods, or even ruins/necropoli are critical to enduring issues explored within American writing?  What stories seem lost within locales trimmed of their histories?  How does re-centered dialogue around these locations remap American literary production?  What trajectories or points of transit are central to discussions of “canonical texts” in the present moment?  How do these questions reframe concepts of diaspora or a “literature of the Americas?” 

CFP: paper proposals for session at NeMLA (March 7-10, 2024, Boston, MA)

Please consider submitting an abstract for the 2024 NeMLA Convention:

This panel aims to examine how elective, therapeutic, spontaneous abortions, and stillbirths are represented in work of literature and cinema from an interdisciplinary and transnational perspective at the intersection of gender studies and the medical humanities. We welcome papers that engage with novels, graphic novels, memoirs, cross-genre texts, poems, films, and documentaries, that address experiences of pregnancy loss in contemporary societies, cultures, and languages, by using different methodologies.