To what ends do narratives fail? If narrative is our way of making sense of the world (Herman 2004), why frustrate sense-making? Well-known in experimental fiction and film (from Sterne, Stein and Rankine to Caché and The Stanley Parable), frustrated narratives also occur, intriguingly, in texts with more practical, didactic or ideological aims: documentaries, journalism, political discourse, advertising, etc. And despite our rich conceptual vocabulary of frustrating narratives—“weak narrativitiy” (McHale 2001), plot “perversion” (Roof 1996), “antinarrative” (Rose 2012), “unnarratability” (Abbott 2003; Warhol 2005)—much remains to be explored about the motivations, readerly dynamics and impacts of narrative frustration.

The Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins Society will host two sessions at the upcoming ALA Conference in Boston, May 21-24, 2025. The PEHS is collaborating with the Research Society of American Periodicals (RSAP) on one of these two sessions. You can find the two CFPs below. Please consider submitting a proposal. The deadline is January 15, 2025. 

PEHS CFP One:

Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America invites submissions for a special issue on “Dictionaries and Disability: Ideologies, Definitions, and Depictions.”

Emerson Society at the Thoreau Annual Gathering CFP

The Emerson Society will sponsor a panel at the Thoreau Society Annual Gathering this summer in Concord, Mass. (July 9-13, 2025). This year’s conference theme is Thoreau’s Revolutions. We will consider papers both on the topic below and on the conference theme more generally.

“Emersonian Revolutions Today”

Call for Papers: Short Film Studies Issue 15.2

Deadline for manuscripts: 15 May 2025

Length requirements: 1500 to 4000 words, double-spaced

View the full call here>>

https://www.intellectbooks.com/short-film-studies#call-for-papers

After years of financial crisis and politics of austerity, as well as a pandemic that brought ordinary life to a halt, culture today is laden with excess. This excess can take many different shapes and foster diverse readings, some of them positive, focusing on excess as an opportunity, while others reflect on its pernicious effects.

Food transcends its role as sustenance, serving as a powerful lens through which to examine identity, memory, and power dynamics. From hunger-driven narratives to the celebratory and symbolic depictions of meals in contemporary cinema and television, food occupies a central place in Hispanic cultural productions. It can represent tradition and identity, critique societal norms, or even subvert power structures.

The Popular Arts Conference (PAC) invites submissions for our 18th Annual meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, August 28 – September 1, 2025.

PAC is an annual academic conference for the studies of comics and the popular arts, including science/speculative fiction and fantasy literature, film, and other media; comic books; manga; graphic novels; anime; gaming; etc., presented to a mixed audience of scholars and fans. The mission of PAC is to promote scholarship on popular culture and to encourage the engagement between scholars and fans in order to deepen our understanding of the popular arts. PAC presentations are peer reviewed, based on scholarly research.

“The House of the Seven Gables in Ink, Wood, and Stone: A Roundtable Discussion”

CFP: 2025 SSAWW Conference“Understanding Histories, Imagining Futures: 25 Years of SSAWW”November 6-9, 2025 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Marriott Old City

For the 2025 SSAWW Conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, we invite proposals on the theme “Understanding Histories, Imagining Futures” as we commemorate twenty-five years of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers.

Dear Colleagues:

My forthcoming collection, Imperial Debt: Colonial Theft, Postcolonial Reparations, is in contract and due out in 2025. 

Please review the original CFP for the book, copied below, and let me know if you have work that would be appropriate for it and fits within the rubric (see below). I have lost a chapter at the last minute, and need to replace it. 

The full chapter is needed by Dec. 31 2024. I will respond right away to any and all inquiries. Please email me to let me know of your interest and/or to submit the chapter: maureen.fadem@gmail.com

Thank you considering this important project--my very best,

We seek original contributions in English or Spanish from scholars across disciplines for the
forthcoming De Gruyter volume Spanish Identity and Eurovision: Media, Politics, and Cultural
Performance. Please submit a 300–500-word abstract in English or Spanish to editors Marina
Cuzovic-Severn (mcuzovi@calstatela.edu) and José Eduardo Villalobos Graillet
(eduardovgraillet@isu.edu) by February 28, 2025.

Summary

Call for Papers

（日本語版は下にあります）

The Mechademia conference began in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 2001, as a new forum for people hoping to establish the English-language academic study of anime and manga while still keeping ties with the creative energy of the fan cultures that these vibrant media were creating. Since then, Mechademia has taken on many forms, including two academic journal series, conferences in various locales and venues around the world, and a widening network of collaboration between academics, fans, and creators, while pursuing the study of anime, manga, and related media as an interconnected trans-local nexus of cultural practice. 

Nancy Drew and Sookie Stackhouse. The Executioner and Sweet Valley High. Warhammer or Star Wars tie-in novels. Franchise series like these occupy a unique position, inspiring voracious (often young) readers while often complicating traditional scholarly approaches to literature.

We seek 15-minute papers for a prospective panel on franchise fiction, mass market books, and pulp at the American Literature Association conference in Boston, May 21-24, 2025.