Video games are increasingly popular objects of critical study in the literature classroom. In the spirit of the theme of SAMLA 92, Scandal! Literature and Provocation: Breaking Rules, Making Texts, this panel invites papers that consider the provocative and controversial implications of studying video games in the context of literary studies. How are games, metagames, and game studies breaking texts and textual paradigms by creating new rules for studying literary objects, forms, and histories? The panel will investigate the affinities and divergences between games and literature, as well as the friction between game studies and literary criticism.

Virtual conference on Saturday 7 November, 2020
at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, with Zoom.

Humankind has ever been impressed by, and formed by, the natural world. The world’s beginning and end are a subject in numerous narratives. Ecocriticism addresses large scale concerns about anthropocene changes. In literary tradition there is a multiplicity of understandings, while Biblical religion has stated that God made both heaven and earth. 

Papers, which are also offered for publication as articles in The Glass, and eventually on the CLSG website, will have a reading time of about 20 minutes. The CLSG interest is in exploring Christian and Biblical themes in Literature.

The Flannery O’Connor Society invites papers on topics relevant to O'Connor's interpretations of and commentary on her own work, including but not limited to: the value of deferring to O'Connor's readings of her own stories, O'Connor's religious vision, O'Connor's definitions of grotesque or gothic, or O'Connor's politics. We want to know: how much should we let O'Connor dictate the meaning of her work? Please send a 300-word abstract by June 15, 2020, to Sarah Shermyen, University of Georgia, at sshermyen@uga.edu. Please also include a brief bio and any A/V requirements in your abstract. Paper will be read at SAMLA in Jacksonville, FL; November 13-15, 2020. 

2020 marks the tenth anniversary of Michelle Alexander’s groundbreaking work, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, which brought unprecedented attention to the ongoing discrimination present in the United States’ criminal justice system and its many devastating effects. Numerous studies have also documented the ways in which children and young adults are impacted by the criminal justice system, whether they are in it themselves, have a family member in it, or are living with the expectation of entering it in the future.

The Iris Murdoch Review board invites essays relating to the life and work of Iris Murdoch and her circle for the eleventh edition of the Review. Essays must conform to the Review's formatting guidelines and be approxmately 7000 words in length. Essays may focus on her fiction, philosophy, theology, life, informal writings, or her engagement with other figures in her life or work.

The Iris Murdoch Review (Kingston University Press) is a peer-review journal that publishes articles on the life and work of Iris Murdoch and her milieu on a yearly basis. The Review aims to represent the breadth and eclecticism of contemporary critical approaches to Murdoch, and particularly welcomes new perspectives and lines of inquiry. 

November 13-15, 2020 | Jacksonville, FL 

PAMLA 2020 Las Vegas   Nov 12-15 2020

General Standing Session: Composition and Rhetoric

This session welcomes all papers addressing the fields of composition and rhetoric from
pedagogical, practical, and theoretical perspectives. In addition, we encourage papers that
address the conference theme, “City of God, City of Destruction,” in ways that connect the
rhetoric/composition field with topics or practices examining the current political, religious, and
social divides. Possible areas of interest include debates, classroom strategies, and rhetorical
approaches to:

In keeping with this year’s MMLA conference theme of “Cultures of Collectivity”, this panel solicits propositions that reflect on the many ways in which the individual and the collective were conceived in pre-revolutionary society. Rather than viewing the individual and the collective as being separate facets of social existence, papers that look at the liminal movement between subjective experience and the larger political body will be of particular interest. Possible topics include, but are certainly not limited to:

15th Annual Conference of the German Society for Comics Studies (ComFor) | 8 to 10 October 2020 | Online

ComFor’s 15th annual conference aims to intensify a dialogue between the various disciplinary approaches to the medium of comics and related popular narrative images (including manga, graphic novels or cartoons) by focusing on the concept of medial, mediated, and mediating agency. Building on perspectives from actor-network theory and subsequent approaches to a possible actor-media theory, the conference aims to reconstruct the complexities of distributed agency within historical and contemporary cultures of comics.

A roundtable session at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University (www.wmich.edu/medievalcongress) examining the continuing effects of Tolkien's depictions of race in medievalist works. ***This is a re-proposed session from the cancelled 2020 Congress.***

SCMLA 77th ANNUAL CONFERENCE October 8-10, 2020

Whitehall Hotel • 1700 Smith St.  • Houston, TX 77002

Conference Theme: “Politics of Protest”

The issue intends to bring to the fore the writings of women from colonial and postcolonial era of South Asia, particularly exploring how these women writers addresses the issues of violence, speculating identity and belongingness while defying stereotypes in primarily male literary traditions as a focal point. Moreover, the proposed issue considers how different literary genres ranging from novels, poetry, novellas, short stories, memoirs to autobiographies by South Asian women writers present an exclusive and inimitable insight into varied understandings of pre-constructed gender roles and relations in the context of south Asian society and culture.

Dr. Jennifer K Farrell, Midwest Popular Culture/American Culture Association

contact email: 

farrell@msoe.edu

CALL FOR PAPERS, ABSTRACTS, AND PANEL PROPOSALS

Midwest Popular Culture Association/Midwest American Culture Association Annual Conference

Friday-Sunday, 2-4 October 2020

Minneapolis, MN

The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship

Call for Papers

Special Collection: Translation, Remediation, Spread: The Global Circulation of Comics in Digital Distribution

Editors: Jonathan Evans, Kathleen Dunley and Ernesto Priego