We have always lived with trauma, but how do we embrace trauma into our lives and create a meaningful life in the world we live in?

In recent years, critical considerations of aesthetics or beauty have been de-emphasized in literary criticism. There is a certain taboo about the notion of beauty, as Elaine Scarry has neatly pointed out: “many people have either actively advocated a taboo on beauty or passively omitted it from their vocabulary, even when thinking and writing about beautiful objects such as painting and poems” (117). There has been many talks about how aesthetics demeans a work’s values—serving as Bourgeois distractions from the real social issues we face, which rightfully remains as an important critical consideration.

ON-LINE CONFERENCE (via Zoom)

11-11 July 2022

CFP:

It is widely known that ideologies of racism, nationalism, and xenophobia are dangerous and spread all over the world. We want to examine these terms as much as possible, from many perspectives and variable aspects: in politics, society, psychology, culture, and many more. We also want to devote considerable attention to how the phenomena of racism, nationalism and xenophobia are represented in artistic practices: in literature, film, theatre or visual arts.

What does it mean to write and think about nature? Do language, thought, and mimesis ultimately have the capacity to impact (and possibly cultivate) our natural environments, and do these environments in turn have the capacity to impact (and possibly cultivate) our words and ideas? Taking such questions as a starting point, this panel aims to explore how the relationship between the human community and the environment has occupied a central space within literature and thought across various epochs and epistemological arenas. 

Dante Decolonizer: Poet of Justice

Epistemic Plurality and the Ethical Imagination

…ché, per quanti si dice più li ‘nostro’… (Purgatorio, 15.55)

 This NeMLA sponsored seminar is designed to engage Dante’s interrogation of justice as an epistemically rooted, ethical imperative. This year’s speaker’s panel and subsequent roundtable seek to explore Dante’s attention to the centrality of epistemic plurality in the ethical imagination with respect to justice, as exemplified in key passages like: Inferno 3–5, 8, 26, 32–33; Purgatorio 10–11, 13, 15–18, 30–31; and Paradiso 3, 10–12, 17–21. 

Who Was that Masked Woman? Representations of Women Vigilantes and Outlaws in Popular Media from Reconstruction to the Great Depression

We are looking for two chapters to complete a manuscript currently in development with a publisher.  We invite chapter proposals for a collection of critical essays that examine how women vigilantes, anti-heroines, and outlaws were represented in movie serials, radio dramas, films, comics, and pulp fiction in America at the turn of the century.  

“The Art of Losing”: Loss in Literature and Film

Panel Session, NeMLA’s 54th Annual Convention in Niagara Falls, March 23-26

In her iconic poem “One Art,” Elizabeth Bishop writes of “the art of losing.” The poem’s speaker first recounts the loss of small things such as “lost door keys” and “an hour badly spent”; then, the losses grow in import: “my mother’s watch,” “three loved houses,” “two cities,” “two rivers, a continent,” and finally, “even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love).”

CFP – Roundtable

Creativity and Innovation in French and Francophone Curricula

54th Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) Convention

Niagara Falls, NY

March 23-26, 2023

Deadline for abstracts: September 30, 2022

Strategies of Speculation in Post-Apocalyptic Fiction (panel)

NeMLA Annual Convention (Niagara Falls, NY; 23-26 March 2023)

Medical sociologist Arthur Frank argues in his foundational The Wounded Storyteller that an ideal illness narrative accepts contingency and acknowledges that “the human body, for all its resilience, is fragile” (49). About her own illness experience, Audre Lorde famously argues that our greatest strength stems - paradoxically, perhaps - from our greatest vulnerability (Cancer Journals 14). Both of these perspectives suggest that resilience is finite, and that recognizing as much can be itself empowering. This panel therefore wonders: what potential does fragility have in a world rife with environmental disasters, personal and structural traumas and other catastrophes that all seem to demand resilience?

While the phenomenon of warming may be global, the effects of it are not. Evidence is clear that many populations in the Global South are more vulnerable to the harm of rising seas, increasing droughts, and more frequent super storms. We are also increasingly aware that in areas of the Global North, political, economic, and social inequities contribute in significant ways to unequal climate vulnerability and resilience. As a result, calls for climate justice are becoming more urgent. But what does such justice look like from different social and geo-historical locations? Whose voices carry in these urgent conversations about what climate justice means, and whose do not?

Narratives of Pregnancy, Birth, and Postpartum - NeMLA Conference 2023

Adaptation studies has contended with the question of hierarchies since it first emerged. Adaptation as a process similarly so: the problem of the source and the ‘original’ has established certain values and positions of texts. This has been challenged most notably through the debate in the field around fidelity, wherein the question of being ‘true’ to the source has been variously deemed fallacious, unhelpful, or both. Despite some recent proponents for it, what emerges from this is the challenging of the hierarchies that the fidelity debate espouses. Broadly, this has been main way in which these hierarchies have been challenged in adaptations, primarily due to the seemingly inescapable status fidelity has in the field.

We are pleased to announce we are accepting abstracts for chapters for our tentatively titled book, Teaching Black American Speculative Fiction & Beyond: Equity, Justice, and Antiracism. This proposed collection is based on our popular 2021 NCTE Assembly on American Literature (AAL) session, which focused on American speculative fiction and issues of social justice. The collection will focus on equity, justice, and antiracism within different genres/modes of speculative fiction (e.g., science fiction, fantasy, horror) and various formats (e.g., short and long fiction, film, graphic novels, comics, and plays).

I am in need of ONE essay for a collection called Outlander as Crime Fiction, pre-approved to be published by McFarland. A Ph.D. is preferred but please feel free to send your proposal even if you are a doctoral student. Email me if you would like to discuss an idea before submitting a proposal. At this point, I only need one paragraph describing your general topic/idea. The completed essay due date is flexible but I'm looking at probably Sept/Oct. 2022 at the latest. Most of the collection has already been written. 

Topic: Crimes of the British Empire in Diana Gabaldon's Lord John (and Outlander) Series