Ambiguous and paradoxical, the concept of hospitality has been extensively explored in its social, political, and ethical dimensions. In his cycle of seminars on hospitality (1995-97), Jacques Derrida reconstructs hospitality’s conceptual history, highlights its complexities and contradictions, and underlines the imbrication between hospitality and hostility. Building on Derrida’s reflections, works such as Rosello’s Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest (2001), McNulty’s The Hostess: Hospitality, Femininity, and the Expropriation of Identity (2006), and Baker’s Hospitality and World Politics (2013) have considered the global, transnational, and gender aspects of hospitality.

KIIT School of Language & Literature (KSLL) invites papers for the international conference on the topic of “Cross-Religious Exchanges in Eastern Indian Cultural and Literary Traditions” to be held on February 15-17, 2024 in the hybrid mode at Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology-Deemed to be University. The conference aims to explore the interactions among religion, philosophy, and literary and cultural texts from the Eastern and North Eastern part of the Indian subcontinent.

46th Annual Comparative Drama Conference 

Conference Dates: April 4 - 6, 2024

Location: Orlando, Florida 

Deadline for Abstract Submission: October 1, 2023

Disability Studies in Dramatic Texts and Performance 

Papers are sought for a special panel series on the subject of disability studies in dramatic texts and performance. We invite research on representation, imagery, symbolism, societal regulation, social impact, or the construction of disability as it pertains to casting and depictions of those with disabilities in playtexts and dramatic performance. 

In the past decade, the novella has re-emerged as one of the dominant forms of contemporary speculative fiction, with both stand-alone debuts and long-running series taking part in the form. This session invites papers that examine the novella form in speculative fiction in a number of ways.

“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.

In Literature and Evil, Bataille argues for a close connection between literature and "Evil" as a sovereign and productive value, which is defined against an oppressive use of reason that "flattens" all knowledge into a reductive uniformity. Bataille finds in Blake's A Marriage of Heaven and Hell "agitations", "poetic violence" and "lacerations" that occur in Blake’s drive towards human totality and death. At the same time, Bataille observes that this violence and Evil also "raise us to glory" in Blake's attribution to Evil of "the wisdom of Hell that heralds ... truth” --albeit a truth irreducible to representation, priority of the logos, and assimilation by reason.

                                                                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

“This shabby piece of equipment”: Modernism and Artificial Intelligence

Session sponsored by the International Lawrence Durrell Society

Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture after 1900

The International Lawrence Durrell Society requests proposals for 20-minute presentations on artificial intelligence in the modernist era. Potential subjects include:

CALL FOR PAPERS: Special Issue of Mississippi Quarterly

“Hurricane Katrina at 20: Rethinking the Literary and Cultural Legacies of the Storm” 

 Guest Editors, Courtney George and Judith Livingston (Columbus State University)

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast with catastrophic results for the surrounding communities, which are still recovering today. Almost immediately, journalists, artists, and scholars began producing significant work about Katrina—work that has continued, especially as we begin to view the disaster and its circumstances in the context of our current social justice and climate-related struggles.

Ecologies of Exile: Exploring Literature Penned by Persecuted Writers during the Holocaust

Northeast Modern Language Association

Submission Deadline: September 30, 2023, at: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/20750

Abstract

Archives in Transit: From Personal Life Histories to Public Experiences as Academics

Northeast Modern Language Association

Submission Deadline: September 30, 2023, at: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/20713

Abstract

While life in the academy often precludes acknowledging one’s own personal and familial life histories and experiences, generative and embodied scholarship in the humanities requires a thorough reckoning with our positionality and intersectionality. In this creative session, participants traverse from the personal to the professional by paying homage to the roots that lead to routes.

North American History and Culture in Popular Media in the German-speaking Lands

Northeast Modern Language Association

Submission Deadline: September 30, 2023, at:  https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/20712

Abstract

Research Colloquium for Graduate Students in German Studies

Northeast Modern Language Association

Submission Deadline: September 30, 2023, at: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/20710

Abstract

2023 marks the fortieth anniversary of the initial publication of Sweet Valley High. While Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield may rank amongst the best-known teen romance heroines, the texts themselves exist within a much larger pantheon of series books intended for or read by teens, and featuring romance narratives. The Journal of Popular Romance Studies (JPRS) seeks articles for a special issue devoted to young adult series romance. These articles may focus on YA series romance from any historical period or language context, and may derive from any relevant discipline, including interdisciplinary approaches.

Possible topics may include, but are not limited to: