We invite presentation proposals for the 2021 NeMLA Annual Conference, to be held virtually Mach 11-14.  

The current COVID-19 pandemic highlights the relationship between disaster, racism, and comedy in unexpected ways. Fear, hostility, and open acts of violence towards Asian bodies, the perceived carriers of disease, are naturalized in part through their exaggerated and comic portrayals. The images of Oriental “gross” food consumers in Hazmat suits and masks circulate via internet memes and anecdotes of personal encounters, generating a shared normal response of derision and repulsion. What is so funny, though? 

In After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (2015), Jedediah Purdy describes what he calls the "environmental imagination," which comprises “how we see and how we learn to see, how we suppose the world works, how we suppose that it matters, and what we feel we have at stake in it. It is an implicit, everyday metaphysics, the bold speculations buried in our ordinary lives” (6-7). Amidst the gravity of the Anthropocene today, Purdy examines the linkages between environmental imagination and “ways of acting, personally, politically, and legally, that have shaped the world in concrete ways” (7).

Just as the Greeks on the plains of Troy faced the plague-arrows of Apollo, the modern world currently stands before unprecedented challenges.  The present pandemic has forced us to face issues of mortality more closely than has been the case in recent decades. At the same time, the situation in which the academic world now finds itself is breaking down barriers in many areas: between home and work environments; between academics, students and the wider community; between teachers and pupils; between traditional disciplines; and between different methods of teaching. In fact, there has been a feeling amongst many for quite some time that winds of change are blowing through the corridors of academia.

UPDATE:

• Deadline extension for proposals now due October 11, 2020
• All-virtual platform for conference
• Reduced registration fee for all-virtual platform

Northeast Modern Language Association 52nd Annual Convention, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, March 11-14, 2021

Roundtable sponsored by NeMLA's Women's and Gender Studies Caucus

Teaching Women’s Filmmaking

Abstract This panel will seek to explore the changing relationship between scientific paradigms and society’s self-understanding as it is manifest in the novel form. If the novel itself has functioned as a record of the social imagination—a narrative ideologeme as Jameson describes it – this social imagination often borrowed its models from contemporary natural philosophy and later the social sciences. We see examples of this in Balzac’s use of taxonomical zoology, Sterne’s use of Cartesian “animal spirits,” or Joyce’s phylogenetic process in “Oxen of the Sun.” Some of the questions this panel will ask include: how do naturalistic sociological models help to mediate political and aesthetic theories? How do these models affect stylistic developments?

What is boredom and why do we feel bored? Recently, research on boredom has gained momentum in the scientific community, particularly in neuroscience and clinical psychology, where the symptoms of boredom and the behavioral patterns of the bored person are scrutinized (i.e. Boredomlab). Boredom, however, has been explored by philosophers for centuries and has been making a persistent appearance in the modern novel from nineteenth and century to present, in the moments of contemplation, waiting, idleness or complaints of bored characters.

Sacrifice 

Call for Papers

Princeton University Department of French and Italian

Virtual Graduate Conference

December 3, 2020

Keynote speakers: Andrea Frisch (University of Maryland), Vincent Message (Université Paris 8)

Need additional chapters for “Posthuman Animals" ***deadline for abstract:September 30, 2020    

Need additional chapters on

“Posthuman Animals: Readings in Literary and Cultural Texts”

***If interested, send us an email ASAP.

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES

2023 SPECIAL ISSUE

THE BOREDOMS OF LATE MODERNITY

 Twożywo, Kiedy wreszcie będzie wojna (When there will finally be a war), 2001

CALL FOR PAPERS

For its American Literature Association 2021 panel, the Robert Frost Society seeks papers offering fresh insights into the writing and life of Robert Frost.  All paper topics will be considered. 

Proposals should be sent to Professor Daniel Toomey by January 15, 2021.  E-mail address is dtoomey@landmark.edu 

The conference is planned for May 27-30, 2021.  Full information about the conference can be found at https://americanliteratureassociation.org/ala-conferences/ala-annual-con...

Se aceptan presentaciones de manera virtual.

This roundtable invites work that analyzes the new wave of graphic narratives in contemporary Spain. This roundtable also welcomes proposals that deal with different genres and approaches to the medium, including analysis of the industry and publishers.

Call for Papers

Digital Conference

Rethinking Postcolonial Europe: Moving Identities, Changing Subjectivities

8th postgraduate forum Postcolonial Narrations

February 10-12, 2021

International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC)

Justus-Liebig-University Giessen

Mark Z. Danielewski’s pentalogy The Familiar, published between 2015 and 2017, is likely the most audacious project in American fiction in the twenty-first century so far. Announced as a set that would eventually encompass 27 novels, the five novels published as the first “season” of the series as a whole have done what readers have come to expect of Danielewski’s work: they once more pushed the limits of what a novel is and can be.