Is the 20 c. inheritance of literary criticism in its various modes of strong, ‘suspicious’, deep reading woefully inadequate for reckoning with the current and impending environmental crises, as many have claimed?

Critics declare that these crises demand entirely new concepts and ways of doing things, for example borrowing from the sciences and social sciences. But the practice of criticism, as opposed to its programmatic statements, remains remarkably consistent. This observation leads us to ask what kinds of environmental thinking established practices of criticism already perform. In other words, which concepts and methods that are not explicitly environmental are good for thinking environmentally?

PLEASE JOIN US FOR THE THIRD ANNE LISTER SOCIETY MEETING in Spring 2024!

Following on our inaugural meeting in April 2022 and our second in 2023, we are thrilled to announce that the Anne Lister Society will reconvene for its third conference, 5-6 April 2024, in Halifax, U.K., during the events of Anne Lister Birthday Week.

AMERICAN NIGHTMARES: THE INAUGURAL SYMPOSIUM OF THE SOCIETY FOR THE STUDY OF THE AMERICAN GOTHIC

March 21st – 23rd, 2024

Salem, Massachusetts

Conference director: Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Central Michigan University

With the kind support of the American Literature Association

Proposals for individual papers, 3- or 4-person paper sessions, and 5-person roundtable sessions are solicited for AMERICAN NIGHTMARES: the inaugural symposium of the Society for the Study of the American Gothic.

We're accepting paper proposals for the following seminar at the ACLA annual meeting, which will be held in Montreal, March 14–17, 2024. Papers should be submitted online through the ACLA portal. Feel free to email with any questions.
 

Mirror / Mirror

Organizers: Hilary Bergen (The New School), Sandra Huber (Concordia University)

It has been nearly twenty five years since the publication of David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s Narrative Prosthesis. This seminar considers the status of its eponymous central concept.

Michael Bérubé has stressed the significance of “narrative prosthesis,” describing it, in The Secret Life of Stories, as “the single most influential account of narrative in disability studies” (41). This concept has become so important that, according to Bérubé, “any subsequent account of disability and narrative cannot fail to address” it (41).

The primary aim of this edited volume is to explore the word ‘Literature’ in the age of AI. Etymologically, the Latin word litteratura is derived from littera (Latin) meaning the ‘smallest element of alphabetical writing’ (Klarer 1). The word ‘literature,’ then means, any writing e.g., a medical prescription, usage instruction written on the bottle of shampoo or maybe a cautionary warning on the packet of cigarettes. To specify the particular type of literature we use the term ‘Creative Literature’ (called the Literature of Power by Rees).

As early as middle school, students learn to accept if not revere certain plays among Shakespeare’s works as canonical. Some are so ubiquitously recognizable that people know the plot through pop culture or other means without ever having read the work itself. However, there are a number of plays that are rarely recognized at all, let alone produced, read, or studied. Many history plays, for example, bridge a gap between iconic, climactic battles at Agincourt or Bosworth Field. Coriolanus is recognizably Roman, but Julius Caesar is the perennial favorite. Romeo and Juliet is a popular cultural touchstone, but who knows even the outlines of Cymbeline or Pericles?

Multiple award-winning author Ann Leckie is extremely well-regarded in speculative fiction, but relatively understudied in academia. With a new book out in June 2023 that expands the world of the Imperial Radch trilogy, it is an exciting time to be an Ann Leckie scholar. This session invites essays that address her work broadly.

Mid-America Theatre Conference (MATC) will be holding its 44th Annual Meeting at the Pyle Center on the campus of UW-Madison in Madison, WI on March 7-10, 2024!

See below — or visit the MATC website at http://matc.us — to find individual calls for papers for the all-conference papers, pedagogy symposium, playwriting symposium, practice/production symposium, theatre history symposium, articles-in-progress and pitch-your-book workshops, and emerging scholars panels.

“Things change,” no doubt, and for many decades now changes in literature and the visual arts have often been conceptualized in two interconnected ways. First, artifactual change is taken as a sign of or proxy for deeper, systemic modifications (from old-fashioned “periods” to master changes like “rationalism,” “capitalism,” and “modernity”). To “historicize,” as Frederic Jameson enjoined us to do, means to imagine artifacts as registering the complex conditions that made them possible in the first place. Second, this brand of change is thought through the trope of rupture, since the various systems that relay one another — call them paradigms, epistemes, horizons or regimes — are held to be incommensurable, despite possible surface similarities.

We invite proposals for a panel at the upcoming AAAS annual conference, to be held in Seattle, WA, April 25-27, 2024.

Call for Papers: British Literature: Restoration and 18th Century at CEA 2024 

March 21-23 Atlanta, Georgia 

The Westin Buckhead Atlanta 

The College English Association, a gathering of scholar-teachers in English studies, welcomes proposals for presentations on British Literature: Restoration and 18th Century for our 53rd annual conference.  Submit your proposal by 1 November 2023 at https://www.conftool.pro/cea2024/

                                                                A One-Day International Conference

                                                                               on

                                   “Global Plant Humanities: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Botanical Life”

                                                                            organised by

The Department of English, Sadhan Chandra Mahavidyalaya in collaboration with the School of Arts & Social Sciences, Southern Cross University, Australia

Date of Conference: 12-12-2023                                                                 Mode: Hybrid

Northeast Modern Language Association 

Boston MA  |  7-10 March 2024

https://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention.html

[Call for Papers]

Panel on “Diasporic Feminist Approaches to U.S. Imperialism”

https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/20483

How do we make visible violence that is actively hidden and erased?