The Spanish Flu of 1918-19 killed somewhere between 50 to 100 million people, but it did not infect every country. The Covid-19 pandemic of 2019-20 has not killed nearly as many people but is arguably the first event in human history that affects every person on the planet. The Greek word pándemos means “belonging to all the people.” The Covid-19 pandemic belongs to everyone. It shows, in dramatic fashion, how we are all connected.

“Stuff leaks through such that the real manifests not just as gaps and inconsistencies in reality.” 
                                                                                   Tim Morton, Humankind  

pacificREVIEW is now open to submissions!! This year's theme: The Mirror Maze! Please review the info below & visit pacrev.submittable.com/submit for complete submission guidelines and to submit. Any questions can be directed at info.pacrev@gmail.com. **The Mirror Maze 

2020 marks the centennial celebration of the publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise. Because a centennial is also a time to look back in order to reevaluate, reassess and then speculate on the future, we invite scholars to explore and analyze not only the lasting significance of Fitzgerald's oeuvre, but also the many possible parallels and/or tensions between his work and that of other writers and artists. Essays that turn to new perspectives and expand upon connections between Fitzgerald’s work and other literary and artistic expressions are also especially welcome.

Topics may include (but are not limited) to:

Recently we all must have noticed that there had been numerous memes doing rounds on social media platforms acknowledging, albeit in sarcastic ways, the role of the Covid-19 virus in teaching mankind some of the most-neglected values of life heretofore.  Such cultural texts with their nuanced sub-texts have been rapidly gaining access to our lives and activities as the subsidiary effects of this present pandemic situation. However, the pandemic is not something new to human civilization. There are references galore in various literary and non-literary texts of its sweeping destructive force before. But this present threat from Covid-19 seems to be a kind of a shock to the anthropocentric worldview.

Dear all,

 We live in quite challenging times, therefore we have decided to extend our submission deadline by 1 month, until November 1st, 2020! HyperCultura, http://litere.hyperion.ro/hypercultura/ encourages, though not imposing, a comparative approach on the following areas: literature (print and hypertext), (not classic literature), media studies, film studies, visual and performative arts, teaching (all of the above). Subjects such as Postcolonialism-Decolonization, Gender Studies, etc, are welcome if they analyze one of the above mentioned area. (eg, Postcolonialism applied to a book, a film, etc). 

Francophone Texts of the North and South: Geographical Imaginaries

Call for Papers - NeMLA 2021 - Online - March 11 - 14, 2021
Due October 11th

We invite presentation proposals for the 2021 NeMLA Annual Conference, to be held virtually Mach 11-14.  

The current COVID-19 pandemic highlights the relationship between disaster, racism, and comedy in unexpected ways. Fear, hostility, and open acts of violence towards Asian bodies, the perceived carriers of disease, are naturalized in part through their exaggerated and comic portrayals. The images of Oriental “gross” food consumers in Hazmat suits and masks circulate via internet memes and anecdotes of personal encounters, generating a shared normal response of derision and repulsion. What is so funny, though? 

In After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (2015), Jedediah Purdy describes what he calls the "environmental imagination," which comprises “how we see and how we learn to see, how we suppose the world works, how we suppose that it matters, and what we feel we have at stake in it. It is an implicit, everyday metaphysics, the bold speculations buried in our ordinary lives” (6-7). Amidst the gravity of the Anthropocene today, Purdy examines the linkages between environmental imagination and “ways of acting, personally, politically, and legally, that have shaped the world in concrete ways” (7).

Just as the Greeks on the plains of Troy faced the plague-arrows of Apollo, the modern world currently stands before unprecedented challenges.  The present pandemic has forced us to face issues of mortality more closely than has been the case in recent decades. At the same time, the situation in which the academic world now finds itself is breaking down barriers in many areas: between home and work environments; between academics, students and the wider community; between teachers and pupils; between traditional disciplines; and between different methods of teaching. In fact, there has been a feeling amongst many for quite some time that winds of change are blowing through the corridors of academia.

UPDATE:

• Deadline extension for proposals now due October 11, 2020
• All-virtual platform for conference
• Reduced registration fee for all-virtual platform

Northeast Modern Language Association 52nd Annual Convention, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, March 11-14, 2021

Roundtable sponsored by NeMLA's Women's and Gender Studies Caucus

Teaching Women’s Filmmaking

Abstract This panel will seek to explore the changing relationship between scientific paradigms and society’s self-understanding as it is manifest in the novel form. If the novel itself has functioned as a record of the social imagination—a narrative ideologeme as Jameson describes it – this social imagination often borrowed its models from contemporary natural philosophy and later the social sciences. We see examples of this in Balzac’s use of taxonomical zoology, Sterne’s use of Cartesian “animal spirits,” or Joyce’s phylogenetic process in “Oxen of the Sun.” Some of the questions this panel will ask include: how do naturalistic sociological models help to mediate political and aesthetic theories? How do these models affect stylistic developments?

What is boredom and why do we feel bored? Recently, research on boredom has gained momentum in the scientific community, particularly in neuroscience and clinical psychology, where the symptoms of boredom and the behavioral patterns of the bored person are scrutinized (i.e. Boredomlab). Boredom, however, has been explored by philosophers for centuries and has been making a persistent appearance in the modern novel from nineteenth and century to present, in the moments of contemplation, waiting, idleness or complaints of bored characters.