Matter Really Matters: Materialism in Nineteenth-Century Literature

British and Global Anglophone Panel Session

55th Northeast MLA (NeMLA) Annual Conference

March 7-10, 2024 Boston, Massachusetts

This collection calls for abstracts of 250-500 words for essays concerning social issues in The Andy Griffith Show, which aired from 1960-1968. Social issues may concern the following topics but not necessarily limited to them:

Alcoholism

Alternate femininities and masculinities

Competing rivalries among women

Construction of femininity and masculinity

Crime

Cultural outsiders in Mayberry

Depictions of the Appalachia region and population

Dialects/accents and other sociolinguistic issues among the characters

Elitism and exclusivity

Family feuds

Gender Roles

Intergenerational conflicts

Stereotypes of women in society

Lifewriting Annual: Biographical and Autobiographical Studies (published online by the Open Library of Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London) seeks reviews of recent publications, including autobiographies, memoirs, letters, and so on. Word length: 1000-1500 words. Citation style: Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition (author/date). Once accepted, you will be asked to register on our website, which will also give you access to our house style sheet. Expected online publication of volume 6 is December 2023. Please get in touch with short proposals and questions. Robert_P_Ward@brown.edu.

Call for Organisers:

BSLS Winter Symposium 2023
An Online Event
Proposals due by 31 July

https://www.bsls.ac.uk/2023/06/call-for-organisers-bsls-winter-symposium-2023/

The British Society for Literature and Science seeks organisers for its annual Winter Symposium, a one-day PGR/ECR-led event on a specific theme proposed by the organisers. This year, the BSLS members at the annual conference expressed particular interest in themes of Scale, and Alternate Histories, but we encourage potential organisers to move forward with any theme associated with literature and science.

A Critical Companion to Clint Eastwood

Deadline for submission of abstracts:

November 1, 2023

Prof. Ian Bekker & Dr. Philip van der Merwe

North-West University, South Africa

Contact e-mail: ian.bekker@nwu.ac.za & Philip.vandermerwe@nwu.ac.za

Edited by Ian Bekker and Philip van der Merwe

2023 saw a surge of wildflower blooms in an historic superbloom in California following an unusually wet winter after years of extreme drought in the state. On the other end of the spectrum, years of drought, excessive heat, and denser vegetation have made wildfires not only more likely to occur, but to rapidly spread out of control, which led to almost $12 billion in damage across the United States in 2022. In the anthropocene, nature lends itself to narratives of both excess and surplus, but also of extreme deficit, and the language which is used in policy documents, news stories, and fictional narratives provide a space in which both extremes come under a microscope.

ONE-DAY SYMPOSIUM

19th of January, 2024 – Université Paris Cité

‘Fantasies of France : Exploring Transatlantic Misunderstandings from the 18th Century to the Present Days’

‘Correct understanding is a particular instance of misunderstanding.’ – A. Culioli

Keywords: transatlantic circulation, cosmopolitanism, reception, translation, expatriation 

Fungus is everywhere. From the parasitical infection at the core of HBO’s The Last of Us, which has sprung a viral interest in cordyceps and other killer fungi, to Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris and Southern Reach trilogies, and even Michael Sarnoski’s 2021 truffle-centered drama Pig, mushrooms, spores, superbugs populate discourse, real and fictional.

The convergence of critical masculinity studies with postcolonial theory aims to interrogate discourses that created hegemonic and binary categories that in turn became eventual grounds for the historical racialization of gender and sexuality, as well as the gendering and sexualization of race. Following palimpsestic models of narrativization, this session seeks to problematize the layerings and shifting stratigraphies of power that obscure, erase, or overwrite the specific experiences that underpin notions of Asian masculinity and male identity as represented in various forms of literature and media.

Syndemic Motherhood: Exploring American Epidemics through Engaged and Applied Arts, a case study anthology, explores how various artistic practices and processes have been instrumental in processing, sharing, and learning about the intersectional epidemics unique to US-Americans and their experiences in motherhood. Issues related to social inequity such as gun violence, healthcare access, the COVID-19 pandemic, poverty, and childcare converge to create challenging circumstances for women and mothers in the United States. The arts provide a malleable yet rigorous framework to unpack these issues publicly.

EXTENDED DEADLINE

The climate crisis posits a major threat to the anthropocene regardless of geopolitical boundaries. However, Eurocentric discourses seldom acknowledge the resource exploitation that fuels climate change. This panel seeks to explore works of literature that highlight such instances of resource exploitation in the postcolony vis-à-vis the ideas of security and insecurity in the times of an emergent climate crisis. With a special focus on the specters of neocolonialism that threaten the security of postcolonial ecospheres, this panel seeks to decolonize the discourses of climate change that refuse to address the role played by Western ideology and capital in the rendering insecure of ecologies in the postcolony.  

The intersection of the digital and environmental humanities speaks to our current moment: we live in a world in flux, experiencing a changing climate we seek to explain by digital models. As we use new technology to interact with and understand the “natural” world, scholars and activists also use digital platforms to communicate about ecological issues with new and diverse audiences. Medieval studies has long been at the forefront of the digital humanities, while ecocriticism and environmental history have significantly advanced our understanding of how people in the Middle Ages conceived of the nonhuman world.

Early Middle English (launched 2019) is a peer-reviewed journal devoted to English literature and its contexts ca. 1100–1350. It takes a wide view of this lively period of literary experimentation, linguistic change, and multilingual interaction in England. The journal seeks articles (of any length) on early Middle English language and literature (including assessments of the state of the field); the multicultural, international, and multilingual contexts of early Middle English; the backgrounds, scholarly history, and afterlives of early Middle English; or theoretical interventions in areas such as gender, sexuality, race, disability, ecocriticism, and interdisciplinarity.

This panel seeks to challenge national paradigms by investigating transnational mediators. We welcome papers addressing writers who specialize in international mediation strategies (adaptation, translation, mimesis, extraction), specific moments of cultural brokerage, or literary works that are considered to have global influences and international linguistic-literary value. Please submit a 250-word abstract directly to the conference website - https://pamla.ballastacademic.com - by May 31.