The Valve (http://www.thevalve.org/go) is a literary weblog dedicated to the
proposition that the function of the little magazine can follow this form.
Beginning July 12th, the contributors to the Valve and a number of prominent
scholars--including Michael Berube, Gerald Graff, Scott McLemee, &c.--will
be discussing Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral's recently published Theory's
Empire: An Anthology of Dissent. This is the first of many planned online
colloquia concerning recently published works of interest to literary and
cultural scholars. Thinkers of all theoretical stripes are welcome to
attend and encouraged to participate in the ongoing conversation. A brief

1337: Essays on Video Game Culture Inside and Outside the Box
 
The editor seeks essays on video game culture, both within the contexts of
games themselves and in the "real" world, for a proposed collection.
Potential topics include:

-Linguistics (with an emphasis on d00dsp34k and/or txt or aim style chat)

-Gender construction within RPGs (e.g. males playing as female characters
and vice versa)

-Gender interaction within games and in the real world (e.g. E3 using "Booth
Babes")

-Economics within games (e.g. crafting systems) and without (e.g. Diablo
II items for sale on Ebay)

Narratives of Community: American Women's "Story Books"

Narratives of Community: American Women's "Story Books"

Call For Papers: Spenser at Kalamazoo

Two open sessions on Edmund Spenser
41st International Congress on Medieval Studies
Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo, Michigan)

4-7 May 2006

Abstracts may be submitted on any topic dealing with Spenser. As always,
we encourage submissions by newcomers and by established scholars of all
ranks. Papers on Spenser's shorter poems are especially welcome this year.

Seventh International Robert Graves Conference, Mallorca=20

Tuesday 4th July - Saturday 8th July 2006=20

'Robert Graves and the Art of Collaboration'=20

The Robert Graves Society is pleased to announce that the Seventh Internatio=
nal Robert Graves Conference, organised by the Robert Graves Society and the=
 St John's College Robert Graves Trust, will be held in Palma and Dei=E0, Ma=
llorca, Spain, 4th July - 8th July, 2006.=20

Seventh International Robert Graves Conference, Mallorca=20

Tuesday 4th July - Saturday 8th July 2006=20

'Robert Graves and the Art of Collaboration'=20

The Robert Graves Society is pleased to announce that the Seventh Internatio=
nal Robert Graves Conference, organised by the Robert Graves Society and the=
 St John's College Robert Graves Trust, will be held in Palma and Dei=E0, Ma=
llorca, Spain, 4th July - 8th July, 2006.=20

(apologies for cross-posting)

Call for Papers

41st International Congress on Medieval Studies

Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI

May 4-7, 2006

The Anchoritic Society is sponsoring three sessions at Kalamazoo in
2006:

Communities of Solitude: open to any interpretations of lives of chosen
solitude in medieval culture and life, and how those forms of devotion
and living interconnect with one another.

Call for Papers

41st International Congress on Medieval Studies

Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI

May 4-7, 2006

Call for Papers: Emergent Nature/Cultures

Papers are sought for a workshop entitled "Emergent Nature/Cultures,"
hosted by the Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota.
 Papers should address the nature/culture thematic, but contributors may
interpret this as they see fit.

Dreaming, Imagination, and Non-Discursive Rhetoric
Rhetoric Society of America Biennial Conference
May 26-29, 2006
Memphis, Tennessee

The imagination, according to Aristotle, provides the same kind of sensory
information to our consciousness during dreaming as our actual senses
provide to our consciousness during wakeful periods (459a1 15-22). If it is
the case that our knowledge-making derives from sense-perception, then it
must also be the case that the texts we imagine during the dream state are
also capable of producing knowledge. But what is this knowledge? And what
kind of text is this?

A CALL FOR PAPERS (Deadline –September 1, 2005; journal issue)

Much of contemporary academic debate is focused on the difficulty in
representing trauma, as well as the undeniable need to find a way to
communicate such experience. Scholars such as Cathy Caruth have noted that
the traumatized individual is unable to witness him or herself at the moment
of violent breach. Therefore, traumatic experience cannot be easily
understood, and yet, paradoxically, it must be articulated. Present day
concerns seem to focus in on the problematic representation of horrific
experiences such as slavery, the Holocaust, and the attack of September 11,
2001.

Criticism and the Divine: a Society for Critical Exchange session at the
Northeast Modern Language Association Convention in Philadelphia, March
2-5, 2006.

Twenty-minute presentations concerning the notion (or concept, image,
invocation, etc.) of the divine or the sacred as it emerges for recent
criticism/theory of literature and/or culture. How is the notion
explicitly or implicitly defined, engaged, critiqued, avoided,
superseded, deflected, etc.?

The Cultural History of Reading (forthcoming from Greenwood Press, 2007)
seeks contributors to its American Literature Volume, particularly authors
interested in the literature and culture of The American Revolution, the
Civil War, and the late 20th-early 21st centuries (1960-present)..

The volume examines written documents (books, pamphlets, treatises, plays,
poems, essays etc.) that shaped, and were shaped by, crucial cultural
events throughout the world and in the United States.