Special dossier | edited by Marica Orrù and Igor Juricevic

A fundamental element of the American imaginary, superhero and heroic narratives have seen a new apogee since the turn of the century. New and old heroes and heroines have populated popular culture, giving rise to a variety of texts that tackle diversity, nostalgia, and the need for imaginaries and narratives that help us deal with the struggles inherent to our current times.

This two-part dossier, co-edited by Marica Orrù and Igor Juricevic, will collect essays on (super)hero figures in twenty-first century US popular culture, with a specific focus on diversity, cross-genre texts, and transmedia representations. 

Call for Papers

MLA 2024 in Philadelphia

On Poe’s Longer Works

Poe’s theory of effect suggests that literary works should be readable in one sitting, but he published several pieces that are not. Organized and sponsored by the Poe Studies Association, this panel for the 2024 Modern Language Association Convention in Philadelphia will examine Poe’s longer works, including Eureka, Pym, Rodman, and others. (For example, are “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” really readable in one sitting? A very long one, perhaps.) We will consider proposals that offer new and engaging readings of any of these longer texts.

Founded in Paris in 2007, the Transatlantic Walt Whitman Association (TWWA) invites students, researchers, and Whitman enthusiasts to participate in its 13th annual Whitman Week, consisting of a seminar for students interested in Whitman and Whitman’s poetry, and a symposium bringing together international scholars and graduate students. In 2023, the Whitman Week will take place for the first time in Rome, at Sapienza University of Rome from June 12 to June 17.  

Please view the full Call for Papers on the website: https://whitmanweekrome2023.com/

Seminar Structure

Critical Stages/Scènes critiques is available online to the reader without financial, legal or technical barriers. Ιt is a a biannual (June/December) peer-reviewed journal fully committed to the Open Access Initiative. It offers a platform for debate and exploration of a wide range of theatre and performance art manifestations from all over the world.

Critical Stages/Scènes critiques is indexed by SCOPUS, DOAJ, MIAR, ERIH Plus, DRJI, GOOGLE SCHOLAR, and listed in the ULRICH’s web Global Serials.

Call for Papers

Special Issue #29 (June 2024)

There has recently been a surge of interest in the subject of slavery and its legacies in Arabic fictional production.

While some of these Arab novels highlight histories and complex legacies of enslavement, others prefer to revisit and connect the historical contexts and genealogies of slavery to modern issues of social justice, failed nation building projects, and persistent forms of coloniality.  In these novelistic narratives, slavery continues to affect perception of the self and national identity in relation to race, gender and ethnicity, as well as referencing blackness and its socio-cultural constructions within different modern Arab communities.

For Critical Insights volume under contract:

Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses

EXTENDED: DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS: January 31, 2023

In their book on Queer Indigenous Studies (2011), Qwo-Li Driskill, Chris Finely, Brian Joseph Gilley and Scott Lauria Morgensen ask: “What does a queer decolonization of our homelands, bodies and psyches look like?” (219). Their question is critical when understanding the complex realities of Indigenous and Black queer individuals in the settler-colonial states of both Canada and the US, as well as in the central and southern states of “Latin” America. The queer Indigenous and Black body – especially when it is trans* or gender nonconforming – is often the site of violence and misrepresentation, yet it is also a site of destabilization and decolonization when reimagined and reified in digital media and literary forms.

 (E)motion in Changing Worlds

Thessaloniki, Greece, 3-5 November 2023

Call for Papers

The Department of English Literature of the School of English at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, in collaboration with the Hellenic Association for the Study of English (HASE), invite scholars to (re)submit proposals for the international conference E-motion in Changing Worlds to be held in Thessaloniki, 3-5 November 2023.

The August Wilson

Author Society

of the

American Literature Association

announces its

CALL FOR PAPERS

for the

34th Annual ALA Conference

May 25-28, 2023

The Westin Copley Place

10 Huntington Avenue

This special issue centers Blackness in fandom studies. Fandom studies has gestured toward race generally, and Blackness in particular, from its alleged white center while always keeping race at its margin. It has largely co-opted the language of race, difference, and diversity from the margins and recentered it around white geeks and white women. Indeed, fandom studies has done lots of things—except deal with its race problem. But as Toni Morrison (1975) asserts, that is the work of racism: it keeps those at the margins busy, trying to prove that they deserve a seat at the center table.

Complicity rhetoric is frequently adopted in public and political discourse. For example, Joe Biden has repeatedly used the formulation ‘silence is complicity’ as a call for the defence of human rights. Yet, in an ever more interconnected and globalised world, identifying and tracing the often complex relationships of cause and effect that comprise complicity is more and more difficult. The notion of collective complicity seems to be increasingly applicable to phenomena that define the contemporary world, such as the effects of global capitalism and the climate emergency (and has been elaborated, for example, by Christopher Kutz in Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age (2000)).

“Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism,” writes Walidah Imarisha, “we are engaging in speculative fiction. All organizing is science fiction.” This panel seeks to bring together critics probing historical, present, and possible future relationships between speculative fiction and social justice. The emergent concept of “visionary fiction,” developed by Imarisha and adrienne maree brown, articulates radical and generative connections between speculation and social movement work.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Rethinking Body in Medical Humanities

The George Saunders Society invites prospective participants for one or two panels at the 2023 American Literature Association conference in Boston, MA, to be held May 25 to 28, 2023. We are interested in presentations on any aspect of George Saunders’s life and work; in this, our fourth year of activity at ALA, we are particularly interested in papers that challenge, complicate, or go beyond the most common (particularly religious, ethical, or new sincericist) readings of the author’s work in the critical literature to this point. The topic is therefore open, but possible approaches might include: