Lonesome Dove at 40: McMurtry, Mythmaking, and the Reimagining of the American Southwest

A Larry McMurtry Symposium

November 14–15, 2025 Southern Methodist University | Dallas, Texas Co-Sponsored by SMU English’s Narrative Now Initative and the Clements Center for Southwest Studies

Organizers:

Dr. Christopher González
English, SMU
[ctgonzalez@smu.edu]

Dr. Ariel Ron
History, SMU
[aron@mail.smu.edu]

Abel Fenwick
English, U of Arkansas
[fenwick@uark.edu]

Rooted in the ancient tradition of fabula, the concept of fabulation (or fonction fabulatrice) was perhaps most explicitly introduced to the modern philosophical lexicon by Henri Bergson, who described it as a “special faculty of voluntary hallucination.” It was later revisited by Gilles Deleuze, both with and without Félix Guattari, as a “speech act, an act of speech” that transgresses the boundary between the personal and the political, producing “collective utterances.”

The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association invites submissions for a Fall 2025 issue on the theme of “Health in/of the Humanities.”

“We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.” So reads an inscription on the tomb of the fictional author Kilgore Trout in Kurt Vonnegut’s 1973 novel Breakfast of Champions. While darkly serio-comic, the novel’s exploration of how “ideas or the lack of them can cause disease” raises genuine questions about the relationship between the humanities and health that inform the theme of the fall 2025 issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association.

The song lyric occupies little space in academia, where it is less studied, less appreciated, and perceived as less-than other kinds of writing. Despite music’s ubiquitous cultural presence, the song lyric—as creative work—suffers from what renown songwriter Jimmy Webb calls a “status problem”: songwriters do not enjoy the same standing as writers of other kinds of traditionally studied literature. The most common way that song lyrics have earned scholarly attention is by conflating the form with the poem. Goldstein’s (1969) The Poetry of Rock is one of the first books to attend to lyrics as poetry.

In 2025 alone, public arts and humanities organizations have faced constant and systemic threats to their funding, their missions, and their ongoing goals to provide communities with access to the arts. The Trump administration's demolition of funding to the National Endowment for the Humanities immediately harmed the ongoing projects of organizations across the country, while imperiling most of the state humanities councils across the country. More recently, the rescindment of National Endowment for the Arts grants affected the publishing missions of nonprofit, independent publishers like Graywolf and Milkweed, while also shredding the community outreach efforts of public arts, literary arts, and literacy programs across the nation.

This edited volume seeks to collect scholarship on the treatment of political themes and world-building in the Star Wars franchise since Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012. Scholars have thoroughly explored political topics in George Lucas’s works, but have paid less attention to how Star Wars projects under Disney have continued, changed, or challenged the franchise’s approach to politics. To advance the scholarship on this subject, we welcome proposals from a variety of disciplines and perspectives, including literary criticism, cultural history, political science, film studies, and fandom studies. 

Possible / Suggested Topics:

Dear friends, colleagues, and students, 

We are excited to announce the Call for Papers for the third issue of the NEW BENJAMIN STUDIES yearbook, centred around the theme “Walter Benjamin in Times of Crisis”.

The editorial collective of NBS is pleased to welcome Anna Migliorini (Florence) and Ana María Miranda Mora (Utrecht) as guest editors for the issue. 

Latinx Visions 2.0

ONE PLANET—MANY WORLDS

CALL FOR PAPERS

ONLINE CONFERENCE

November 3-7, 2025

Co-Organizers: Matthew David Goodwin, Cathryn Merla-Watson, Taryne Jade Taylor

State of the Nation Film and TV in Britain: Representations of the Social, Political, and Cultural Landscape.

How might we illustrate, explore, and begin to define the ‘state of the nation’ film and television text? This edited collection, in collaboration with Intellect, invites consideration of these questions. We are particularly keen for considerations of contemporary nominees such as Adolescence (2025) and Mr Bates vs The Post Office (2024).

The editors invite abstracts for a forthcoming edited volume entitled Disney: A Companion, which will offer a comprehensive critical exploration of The Walt Disney Company’s cultural, historical, aesthetic, political, and industrial significance. The Companion is intended for the Peter Lang Genre Fiction and Film Companion series (https://www.peterlang.com/series/gffc), and aims to bring together a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives that interrogate Disney’s enduring legacy and its evolving role in global media and culture.

A great number of Gothic fiction productions explicitly address themes such as gender roles and reproduction from diverse perspectives, which at times hold opposing viewpoints on certain aspects of these topics. The ability to gestate is often considered one of the key indicators of sexual difference. However, the subject of gestation and child-upbringing is not usually addressed in Gothic fiction, aside from iconic examples such as Rosemary’s Baby (1968). As Russ (2007: 25) has stated, these processes are often not described in many texts. Frequently, the women in these stories are either young and childless or middle-aged, with their children already grown and secure (ibid.).

The affordances of speculative fiction to provide not only specific examples, but also schemas, for alternate ways of knowing and being are well known. Suvin identified the novum as the central feature of science fiction, a feature which made it possible to consider humanity not generally nor as "fixed and supernaturally determined", but rather in terms of "which [human]? in what kind of world?: and why such a [human] in such a kind of world? (10).

CFP: Proposals Requested for Modernism in British & World Literature: A (Re)consideration (updated)

Deadline for submissions:

October 1, 2025

Note on Updated Proposal:

This CFP is now live on the Journal of Postcolonial Writing website.

Blue Humanities and the Indian Ocean: South Asian Literary and Cultural Representations

We are pleased to announce the launch of Commentarium: Journal of Humanities Studies, published by the University of Madeira's Faculty of Arts and Humanities. This interdisciplinary journal focuses on the Humanities and invites contributions that bridge various academic disciplines. It will be published annually, exclusively online, and will be freely accessible through the Open Journal System platform.

The journal welcomes submissions from both domestic and international scholars and researchers in Portuguese, English, Spanish, French, and Italian, with contributions accepted on a rolling basis. Book reviews may be submitted only in Portuguese or English.

Registration and submission are now open.

Harper Eternal: New Inquiries on Frances E.W. Harper 

We invite submissions for a paper panel themed “Non-Western Aesthetics: Rhetoric, Resistance, and Representation” – an exploration of aesthetics from diverse cultural perspectives, non-Western rhetorical traditions, and globalized literary theory. Our aim is to examine non-Western, non-hegemonic discourses from non-White nations that incorporate indigenous critical approaches and local theories within artistic and literary practices. We are particularly interested in South and Southeast Asian literary and cultural studies.

Broad areas of exploration may include, but are certainly not limited to, the following literary and cultural theoretical perspectives:

The history of literature is also the history of the evolution of the technologies used to produce, distribute, and consume it. The appearance of new technologies and media affecting traditional understandings of reading and of the object “book” is welcomed by some as the sign of literature’s inherent vitality and innovation, and perceived by others as a threat. Kathleen Fitzpatrick argues that the anxieties generated by the emergence of new digital technologies since the postwar era are rooted in the conception of the book as a symbol of a vestigial order of which literary critics and scholars consider themselves masters and protectors.

Journalism and Mass Communication Department of Sister Nivedita University, based out of Kolkata, has put up this inter-disciplinary theme to invite research papers/articles from faculties, researchers, professionals, technocrats, and industry experts from the fields of Mass Communication, Political Science, Sociology, Psychology, English and Cultural Studies to discuss the role of media in representing the marginal voice in the contemporary society, its changing narratives and its effects on human lives. General outlines have been given above, with papers invited on topics and realms on the broader understanding of the theme and beyond the mentioned topics.

TRACKS

Brenna Duperron and Sarah LaVoy-Brunette are continuing to build the 'Indigenous turn' with some exciting panels for the 61st International Congress on Medieval Studies (May 14-16, 2026), which include:

• “The Glo(cal) Middle Ages on Turtle Island” (hybrid panel);
• and “Settler Medievalism: Ideology and Practice” (hybrid panel).

Abstract submissions due September 15, 2025 to the ICMS Confex site:

https://icms.confex.com/icms/2026/prelim.cgi

Romance, Revolution and Reform Journal will host our 2026 conference on the theme of 'Sex in the Long Nineteenth Century.' The conference will take place in-person at the University of Stirling on 15th January, with keynote speaker Dr. Michael Shaw.

CALL FOR CHAPTERS

Considering Empathy: Critical Approaches across Disciplines

Co-edited by Diana Ashe and Beverley McGuire (UNCW) 

Project Description

We invite contributions for an edited collection addressing the current debate over the role and meaning of empathy in contemporary life. While empathy was once studied primarily by psychologists and ethicists, societal shifts and thought leaders have brought empathy to the foreground of fields like politics, technology, public health, rhetoric, environmental studies, business, international studies, sociology, literary and language studies, education, and more. 

Dear colleagues,We are delighted to invite proposals for the Ninth International Conference on Literary Juvenilia, to be held at Valparaiso University from April 16–18, 2026. This year’s theme, Youth Writers and Their Worlds, calls on scholars to explore the various ways young people have imagined, questioned, and shaped their worlds through writing.We welcome papers that engage with youth-authored texts—published or private, written or visual—and encourage approaches that foreground the material, cultural, and imaginative contexts of juvenile literary and cultural production. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

Call for Papers

Medievalisms in Time and Space

The International Society for the Study of Medievalism Annual Conference

Fully Online

November 14th and 15th, 2025

Hosted by Anita Obermeier at the University of New Mexico

We welcome submissions considering aspects of Medievalisms in Time (any temporalities or relationships between them) and Space (inner spaces, Outer Space and outer spaces, contested spaces, geographies real and imagined, trans-temporalities); Trans-medievalisms of all kinds (such as transgender medievalisms, transformative medievalisms, transgressive medievalisms).