Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies

Vol. 49 No. 1 | March 2023

Call for Papers

Culture Chameleons: Narrative Code-Switching

Guest Editors

Earl Jackson, Jr. (Asia University)

Mary Goodwin (National Taiwan Normal University)

Deadline for Submissions: June 30, 2022

Bodily Transgressions in Fantastika Media

A Digital Symposium: 12 November 2022

“Fantastika” – a term appropriated from a range of Slavonic languages by John Clute – embraces the genres of Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror, but can also include Alternate History, Gothic, Steampunk, Young Adult Dystopic Fiction, or any other radically imaginative narrative space. Our goal is to bring together academics, independent researchers, creators, and audiences who share an interest in this diverse range of fields with the aim of opening up new dialogues, productive controversies, and critical collaborations.

At times depicted as loquacious and licentious, while most often portrayed as silent or inert harem slaves, the Arab and Muslim women received much attention from writers of different periods. Though considerable scholarly attention was given to discussing such representations and others, there are still forgotten and underrated characters. With the access we have to an abundance of digitized historical literary sources, we can trace these figures and analyze them in more depth.

Conference Call for Papers:

International Gaming: Laws and Regulations around Games in the Digital Era

Hosted by Durham University and InGame International

In-person Conference to be held in Durham 8-9 September 2022

  Outline

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

Women and their bodies share a close connection with (im)purity, filth, and dirt as unavoidable elements in their routines of care and caring. It could be said that the words like filth, dirt are loaded with colonial meanings and can become extremely complicated when understood from the socio-cultural-political lens. Through the postcolonial appropriations, these meanings have subsequently contributed to the patriarchal assumptions and gendered ideas of women’s roles, especially, in handling filth and dirt, in their daily duties of selfless care, nursing, cooking, cleaning, and mothering.

The Burney Journal

Call for Submissions

Volume 19

The Burney Journal is now accepting submissions for volume 19, to be published in 2023, and for subsequent issues to be published annually. A peer-reviewed publication of the Burney Society, The Burney Journal is available in print and indexed online by EBSCO Host and MLA International Bibliography.

NeMLA 2023: Niagara Falls, NY. March 23-26, 2023.

As we continue to transition our daily lives “back to normal”—or rather to our understanding of “normal” from a pre-pandemic perspective—how do we negotiate the lessons learned during the pandemic? Quarantine, lockdown, self-isolation, social distancing, and the many other necessary health measures we have taken, currently take, and may continue to take, have forced a reconsideration of how we work and how we teach. What are our key pedagogical takeaways to help build and foster resiliency during these times?

CALL FOR PAPERS

Reconfiguring Corporeality in 21st Century

How would it be possible to think the reality of the mind, of the I-subject, without a lived body?

—    Husserl

In concert with the theme of the 2023 NeMLA annual convention, “Resilience,” this panel will consider in what forms sustainability and resilience (broadly conceived) appear in the literature and philosophy of ancien régime France. In the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, France and Europe more broadly faced a variety of social, political, economic, and environmental crises, from the brutal Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century, to the “Little Ice Age” climatic downturn that affected agricultural production, to more international disputes, political uprisings like the Fronde, the 1720 outbreak of plague in Marseille, and the Lisbon earthquake of 1755.

CALL FOR EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST: DIGITAL DICKENS There has been a growing number of online projects in Dickens studies over the past few years, but discussion of the role Digital Humanities has to play in Dickens scholarship (and vice versa) has been limited so far to conference papers and individual articles.

We are seeking contributors for an edited collection of scholarly essays on these recent changes in the complexity of time-travel media (film, television, gaming, or literature). Submissions that are interdisciplinary in theory and method are welcome, especially those in popular culture, science fiction, fantasy, genre studies, critical media studies, narratology, etc. Abstracts and papers discussing recent time-travel media, approximately within the last decade, may include but are not limited to research concerning narrative structure, theme, genre, reception, comprehension, and other relevant topics.

Tramp Press (f. 2014) is one of the leading voices in independent publishing, launching well-known writers from Ireland and beyond such as Sara Baume and Emilie Pine, and reissuing impactful past women writers. A globally-minded local press, Tramp’s list queries fixed ideas of “Irish” writing and of what can constitute the contemporary. 

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.