For MLA 2022, Washington D.C., ChLA + MSA Allied Organization Co-Sponsored Session (non-guaranteed)

Stories from ancient Greek myths dot the literary landscape of the early 21st century. To some extent, this has been the result of deliberate planning, as when Canongate began publishing a series of mythological retellings by well-known authors in 2005. But alongside and independent of such coordinated efforts to keep old tales alive for contemporary audiences, offerings from both established authors (David Malouf, Barry Unsworth, Colm Toibin, Pat Barker) and successful newcomers (Madeline Miller, Daisy Johnson) have likewise retold and reimagined mythical narratives in recent years.

Coronavirus disease with its global and local pandemic has been on the top agenda of Government leaders, scientists, health professionals, as well as on the daily headlines across journalistic media. New governmental measures, decrees, scientific recommendations, and sanitary campaigns  emerge everyday to combat or alleviate the pandemic which are endorsed and spread through mainstream media. On one hand, a new discourse and rhetoric has been articulated to create, support, and even impose a ‘new normal’ that reconfigures how human beings communicate, interact, and socialize in public and private spaces.

How have transatlantic imaginaries and networks played a central role in the construction of hispano-americano and Latinx identities? How have these identities embraced the political causes of the black diaspora, like antislavery, civil rights and Black Lives Matter? To what extent have artists, writers and activists triangulated the Americas, Europe and Africa in their transatlantic imaginaries? 

This panel addresses epistemic inequality in literary studies: the categories, theories and methods through which we read and conceptualize literature are still determined at the center of global academic production, while peripheral epistemologies often do not circulate beyond national borders and therefore do not take part in the shaping of the discipline.

In the last decades, the multiplications of works in the field of Witchcraft Studies made it possible to profoundly renew the approaches and the study designs of the repression of witchcraft in the late Middle Ages and in the beginning of the Early Modern Era. Consequently, research has substantially specified the methods and configurations (ideological, political and doctrinal) that contribute to the genesis of the “witch-hunt”. Research also uncovered that the repression of witchcraft could take a number of different forms depending on the contexts, the spaces studied, the sources and the aims they seem to pursue. It underlines the extreme plasticity of the accusation of witchcraft and the categories of such a crime.

Proposals are invited for a volume in the MLA's Approaches to Teaching World Literature series entitled Approaches to Teaching the Works of Jorge Luis Borges.

Essays in this volume could address teaching Borges's work by focusing on topics such as philosophy, religion, mythology, detective fiction, gender relations/gender conflict, politics, the fantastic, history, popular literature, film and other arts, translation. Borges’ works are taught in so many different courses and contexts (Modern Languages, English, History, Philosophy, Religion) that we welcome essays teaching Borges in non-traditional settings or to non-literature students. Contributors are also invited to propose essays on topics not mentioned above.

The SWCA Board is excited to announce that the 2021 Southeastern Writing Center Association conference will be held fully online. Join us Feb. 11-13, 2021, to discuss the transformations writing center professionals and the field undertake during times of crisis and trauma. The COVID-19 pandemic, racial injustice, social unrest, natural disasters, and significant changes in the structure and leadership of higher education have greatly accelerated the pace of these changes and prompted all of us in the writing center field to reconsider many aspects of our approaches to writing center work and everyday operations. Writing center professionals are called not just to react, but to proactively transform their identities, missions, and services.

journal "Technology and Language"

Chief science editor Alfred Nordmann, Darmstadt Technical University

The theme of the special issue is related to the Word as a starting point in interdisciplinary studies of the relationship between technology and language. We propose to publish research by specialists in philosophy, philology, linguistics, history, art, computer science, logic and others.

 Special issue In the Beginning was the Word - The Word as a Technical Object  offers but not limited to the following topics:

In this special issue of _Survive and Thrive: A Journal for Medical Humanities and Narrative Medicine_ (Vol. 6, slated for publication Summer 2021; full schedule below), we ask students, educators, caregivers, essential workers, survivors, scholars, and healthcare professionals to give voice to their experiences during the coronavirus pandemic. 

Emerging Subjects: Transnational Modernism and the Urban Imaginary 

Seeking papers for a seminar for this year's virtual ACLA--to be held on April 8-11 2021--entitled "Theorize Yourself: Autotheory and Psychoanalysis."  Submissions can be made on the ACLA portal through October 31.  Description below.

Conversations about autotheory circle around psychoanalysis as a conceptual touchstone, with the understanding that analytic theory, more than serving as one of the fields that autotheoretical writers engage, is itself a parallel discourse. “Freud’s dream” of the theory of the Oedipus complex appears, in one moment, to be an autotheory avant la lettre; in the next, it seems that the birth of psychoanalysis takes place in the sublation of Freud’s self-analysis.

NOVEL BEGINNINGS:

TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES ON EARLY MODERN FICTION

28-29 September, 2021

University of Huelva, Spain

We are proposing the following CFP for ACLA 2021, which will be held virtually.