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

Editors: Ananya Roy Pratihar(IMIS,Bhubaneswar), Saswat Samay Das (IIT, Kharagpur) & Shashibhushan Nayak(GP Nayagarh)

Challenging Structural Inequalities: Langston Hughes and His Contemporaries

--The Langston Hughes Society at the 35th ALA Convention--

May 23-26, 2024
The Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, IL 

The Langston Hughes Society invites proposals to participate in our session at the 35th Annual American Literature Association Conference, May 23-26 in Chicago, IL.

This issue will engage the theme of the National Communication Association’s 109th Annual Convention on freedom. The convention’s call recognizes the relationship between human communication and freedom, inquiring into the meaning of freedom and the role of communication in achieving freedom. In response to this theme, the Journal of Dialogic Ethics invites essays that consider connections between and among freedom, dialogue, and ethics, with a special focus on interfaith and interhuman perspectives.
 

Paper submissions are invited for the Jack London Society panel at the American Literature Association Conference The Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, IL, May 23-26, 2024. Papers may address any aspect of Jack London studies. Send a 250-word abstract for a twenty-minute presentation to Kenneth Brandt at kbrandt@scad.edu by January 27, 2024. Include a brief biographical sketch and any AV equipment needs. We also welcome proposals for innovative formats including roundtable discussion groups and panels featuring more speakers and briefer papers. Panel presenters can join the Jack London Society at http://jacklondonsociety.org/

This is a second call for chapter manuscripts for the edited volume called “Human Rights and Indian Literary Communities”. 

 While most submissions are in, there is scope for more chapters ONLY in the areas given below.

 This collection undertakes various explorations about the role of literary (and related cultural) communities in the acknowledgement and understanding of human rights bearing subjects. Can literary texts highlight and empathise with those on the social margins as legal subjects possessing rights? Do texts also recognise and challenge the contours of human rights? Can literary communities help imagine and reimagine the outlines of those deemed human and therefore capable of being human rights bearing citizens?

American Literature Association Richard Wright Society
May 23-26, 2024
The Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, IL

The Richard Wright Society invites proposals to participate in two sessions on Wright to take place at the 35th Annual American Literature Association Conference, May 23-26 in Chicago, IL.

Panel: Richard Wright’s Chicago

Conference CFP

We particularly encourage and welcome applications by BAME people and other groups that are underrepresented in academia, especially Black women scholars.

CFP | Rethinking the Ecological Imaginary: Decolonial Ecologies and Black Feminism

IASH, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

30-31 May, 2024

Deadline: February 14, 2024

American Literature Association
35th Annual Conference
May 23-26, 2024
Chicago, IL

We welcome proposals on current debates regarding Asian American literature. Our aim is to provide a forum for new and innovative work in Asian American literary studies.

Please email your proposal (max. 250 words) and a brief CV (max. 1-page) to Timothy K. August at timothy.august@stonybrook.edu by January 23rd, 2024. Please be sure to mention any technological needs for your presentation.

Students in Writing Studies 4200, “Writing and Cultures,” at the University of Minnesota Duluth will edit a collection of creative writing (poems and nonfiction writing) about the broad theme of "Migration." As such, they solicit writings on this topic for inclusion in the collection.

Submissions could address the topic from many perspectives

2024 WOCIA Call for Workshop Proposals

Submission Deadline: Monday, January 22, 2024

The annual Women of Color in the Academy Conference once again invites proposals for workshop sessions for our upcoming 8th conference. Scheduled to take place on Friday, May 17, 2024, the theme will be “Legacies of Solidarity: Bridging Generations in the New Normal.” Inspired by recent events such as the SCOTUS decisions on Dobbs and eliminating affirmative action considerations in college admissions, we are interested in receiving proposals for workshops that will engage in some way, shape, or form with this year’s theme. In addition, we are also interested in receiving proposals for workshops on:

Humankind has always sought to explain its origins and the mysteries of life to map personal and collective boundaries, and to secure its sense of identity through the power of everyday events and occurrences. Exemplary accounts of imaginary happenings and supernatural creatures from a time beyond history and memory explain the genesis of the universe, the making of a living thing, the formation of an attitude or the inception of an institution. The essence of these traditional narratives reflects a certain system of values and code of self-conduct of a group of individuals bound together by social and cultural ties, and the cardinal virtues and vices of human nature captured in a conventional configuration.

The twentieth-century literature and culture tended to explore and to celebrate subjectivity. But this tendency did not mean the turn to the self, but beyond the self, or as Charles Taylor puts it, “to a fragmentation of experience which calls our ordinary notions of identity into question”. 

Memory is a major theme in contemporary life, a key to personal, social and cultural identity. Scholars have studied the concept from different perspectives and within different disciplines: philosophy, sociology, anthropology, geography, architecture, urban design, and the interdisciplinary "place studies". According to Pierre Nora, places of memory or lieux de mémoire refer to those places where "memory crystallizes and secretes itself"; the places where the exhausted capital of collective memory condenses and is expressed. To be considered as such, these sites must be definable in the three senses of the word: material, symbolical and functional, all in different degrees but always present.