ACLA: Unfinished : The Theory and Praxis of Incompletion
Organizers: Madeleine Reddon (Loyola University Chicago) and Jeff Noh (Clark University)
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FAQ changelog |
Organizers: Madeleine Reddon (Loyola University Chicago) and Jeff Noh (Clark University)
American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) - Chicago, Illinois, March 16-19, 2023
ACLA 2023 Annual meeting seminar proposal
In recent decades, human rights have risen to prominence as a “dominant discourse for addressing issues of social justice” (Swanson Goldberg and Schultheis Moore 2012, 4). Scholars have demonstrated (and interrogated) the role that literature has played in human rights’ ascension–from the novel’s progressive expansion of the category of the “human” (Hunt 2007), to the widespread (albeit compromised) liberal belief that conveying narratives of suffering to concerned publics can promote justice (Schaffer and Smith 2004), to the evidence that “human rights bestsellers” shore up American militarism and neoliberal imperialism (Anker 2012).
Mapping the Impossible is an open-access student journal publishing peer-reviewed research into fantasy and the fantastic. We welcome submissions from undergraduate and postgraduate students (and from those who have graduated within the last year) from any higher education institution. We publish articles on any aspect of fantasy and the fantastic and any work within this transmedial genre.
We are currently open to submissions for our special issue entitled ‘Fantasy Across Media’, matching the theme of GIFCon 2022.
Very few attempts have been made so far to decolonize the expanse of Blue Humanities, yet it stands as an ensemble of creative renewals. With Ian Buchanan’s ‘Must we eat Fish’ we get to encounter the topography of such renewals. With his essay Buchanan effects a relation between ‘the foundational non-humanity of our being’ and oceans while Probyn, whose standpoint he critiques, seeks a persistence of exploitative humanist relationality with the same in the guise of “amplifying the level of felt relatedness to it”.
Since antiquity, cities have been pivotal elements in collective and personal histories. As physical and imagined spaces, they have fostered narratives of grandeur and downfall, center and periphery, democracy and imperialism, temporality and spirituality.
The conception and depiction of the city have evolved across time and space, providing different models of social and cultural relations, influencing aesthetic conventions, and generating particular emotions and values, often in contrast with other geographic settings or forms of communal living.
Scholars have turned to genre as both method and topic in recent years. It has arisen as a heuristic for literary sociologists, feminist critics and race theorists. At the same time, critics observe a so-called “genre turn” in the contemporary novel, noting that generic forms have begun to transgress into the domain of literary fiction.
Catherine Malabou places her signature concept of “plasticity” within the material encounters between the Kantian, Hegelian, and Derridean threads of the continental philosophical tradition and emerging developments in neuroscience, epigenesis, and political organization. Her recent work has demonstrated the relevance of these encounters to fields as diverse as trauma studies, gender and queer studies, hermeneutics, anarchism, postcolonialism, artificial intelligence, evolution, anthropogenic climate change, sexuality, and affect studies, to name just a few.
The Pharmakon Today (ACLA 2023)
It is a commonly adopted procedure within postcolonial studies to situate literary objects of the colony in relation to the cultural heritage of the colonizer. Whether read under the “writing back” rubric, or as instances of “hybridity” and “creolization,” postcolonial texts are commonly conceived in terms of an exchange taking place between center and periphery. But recent work on “the global cold war” (Westad 2005) promises to overturn conventional protocol. As a result of this paradigm, we have begun to view the postwar years as characterized by a global contest between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
FORTHCOMING JOURNAL "Theatre and Performance Notes and Counternotes" (Penn State University Press) deadline for submissions: Rolling full name / name of organization: Michael Y. Bennett, Editor / TPNC contact email: bennettm@uww.edu
Hello from Nanditha Narayanamoorthy and Yvonne Eadon, postdoctoral research scholars from the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP) at UNC Chapel Hill. We are looking to convene a 6-paper panel for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender & Queer Studies Interest Group at the International Communication Association (ICA) 2023 in Toronto.
Call for papers
2023 marks the 400th anniversary of Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, known as the First Folio, published in 1623. It included 36 plays, some of which had not been published before. On the website of The Folger Shakespeare Library readers are invited to “learn more about Shakespeare’s language, life, and the world he knew,” suggesting that we might be able to unlock, or at least better understand, Shakespeare’s works by studying what he and his contemporaries not only read but also saw or heard.
CALL FOR PAPERS
American Literature Association Annual Conference
Boston, MA
May 25-28, 2023
The Cormac McCarthy Society will sponsor three sessions at the American Literature Association Annual Conference in 2023.
Topics Open.
Papers on The Passenger and Stella Maris are especially welcome
Please submit proposals with one-page abstracts to Steven Frye, California State University, Bakersfield, at sfrye@csub.edu
Literature, art, and scholarship can challenge social structures that underpin injustice and create spaces where love and care can flourish. Yet they can also spectacularize, universalize, or appropriate lived experiences.
Call for Papers: Mapping the Impossible, Special Issue ‘Fantasy Across Media’
Extended submission deadline: 13 November 2022
Mapping the Impossible is an open-access student journal publishing peer-reviewed early-career research into fantasy and the fantastic.
For more information about the journal and submissions click here>>
https://fantasy-research.gla.ac.uk/index.php/submissions/
Aims and Scope
Following on our inaugural meeting in April 2022, we are thrilled to announce that the Anne Lister Society will reconvenefor its second conference, 31 Mar -- 1 Apr 2023, in Halifax, U.K.
Launched in the summer of 2020, the Society aims to foster knowledge of Lister’s extraordinary life and writings and to interpret her legacy. It seeks to nourish conversation among scholars and to build conversations between scholars and Lister’s wider readership and expanding network of invested enthusiasts. By encouraging research and greater understanding of her way of inhabiting the world, the Society aims to establish and sustain Anne Lister’s place — both in the cultural tradition and for the future.
Rethinking Europe in the Contemporary Novel: Between the Regional and the Global
American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting (Chicago, March 16-19, 2023)
CFP: Journal of Class & Culture special edition: Class and Contemporary UK Film and Television.
The Journal of Class & Culture is a peer-reviewed journal bringing a cultural dimension to the analysis of class, and a class optic to the understanding of culture. This special edition follows on from a conference in July and focusses on class and contemporary UK film and television. Papers are invited that explore the intersection of capital, contemporary UK film and tv, and class-orientated research within contexts of production, formal qualities, and consumption.
Call for Participation: Researchers, Arts Practitioners, and Activists
Winter Symposium : Reading Gerald of Wales Topographia Hibernica (1188) and Itinerarium Cambriae (1191)
The newly established Nordic Summer University study circle Praxis of Social Imaginaries: Cosmologies, Othering and Liminality invite all who are interested in joining our group to investigate the praxis of reading together, the praxis of listening and the praxis of telling stories.
Boundaries and Margins in Fantasy
10th - 12th May 2023
University of Glasgow Online Conference
The Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic is pleased to announce a call for papers for Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations (GIFCon) 2023 with the theme of 'Boundaries and Margins'.
We would like to draw colleagues' attention to our seminar at the American Comparative Literature Association's (ACLA’s) 2023 conference, "Narratives of Post-Viral Syndromes: Thinking the Past, Present, and Future". Anyone interested in presenting a paper at this seminar is requested to formally apply through the ACLA’s website between October 1 and October 31 (https://www.acla.org/narratives-post-viral-syndromes-thinking-past-present-and-future)
Carrie Paechter, in her article “Rethinking the possibilities for hegemonic femininity: Exploring a Gramscian framework” (2018)6, discusses the challenges and possibilities of conjuring a space where the discursive model of feminine essentialism can be better perceived as a binary opposite of hegemonic masculinity and patriarchal oppression. A few popular generic spaces within the mediascape, where machismo claims a front row within the psyche of the audience, have hitherto been dominated by male leads. Since the early 2000s, media representation has been witnessing a tangible shift with the emergence of female leads. The characters played by women started appearing more convincing.
In fantasy and science fiction, death, immortality and rebirth are topics that feature frequently, elucidating that the loss of life and the questions of how it might be prevented or reversed are at the centre of human concern. These questions also constitute an essential focal point of the works of the Oxford Inklings, particularly Tolkien and Lewis.
Following a ceremony (winter 2021) in which Barbados officially removed Queen Elizabeth II as head of state, Prince William and Kate Middleton visited Jamaica. They were met with protestors calling for apologies and reparations from the British Crown. At least five other former British colonies besides Jamaica, including Belize, the Bahamas, Grenada, Antigua and Barbuda, and St. Kitts and Nevis have also indicated a desire to sever direct relationships with the British Monarchy. Considering 2023 marks the 210th anniversary of Edward Long’s death, the author of the famous three-volume History of Jamaica (1774), how might we read Long’s illustrated book when the British Caribbean seems less British?
Children’s literature and material cultures of childhood have always enjoyed a long-standing relationship. In Anglocentric contexts, it is well studied how toymakers and children’s book editors worked hand-in-hand during the “Golden age of children’s literature” to construct a joint children’s market for books and toys (Masaki 2016; Field 2019). However, even though playing, with its various aesthetic, pedagogic, material and cultural meanings, constitutes an important element of South Asian children’s book cultures as well, this phenomenon has remained rather understudied in the academy.
This seminar asks, what knowledges are produced through scholarly, pedagogical, and creative engagements with electricity?