american

One interpretation of the NeMLA 2024 theme of Surplus centers on embodiment, and the transatlantic long nineteenth century was arguably a key historical moment for envisioning material embodiment in terms of surplus, or lack thereof. Representation of both individual and corporate embodiment often turned to material resources like food to express approval or disapproval for various bodies’ relationships to each other. As David J. Hutson argues, during the nineteenth century “body weight was allowed to hold multiple symbolic positions, with thinness and fatness understood as both positive and negative” (2017).

Matter Really Matters: Materialism in Nineteenth-Century Literature

British and Global Anglophone Panel Session

55th Northeast MLA (NeMLA) Annual Conference

March 7-10, 2024 Boston, Massachusetts

Lifewriting Annual: Biographical and Autobiographical Studies (published online by the Open Library of Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London) seeks reviews of recent publications, including autobiographies, memoirs, letters, and so on. Word length: 1000-1500 words. Citation style: Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition (author/date). Once accepted, you will be asked to register on our website, which will also give you access to our house style sheet. Expected online publication of volume 6 is December 2023. Please get in touch with short proposals and questions. Robert_P_Ward@brown.edu.

Calling all Paul Auster fans to propose presentations for a roundtable discussion on all things Auster.

Do you want to do a scholarly reading of one or more of his novels? Would you like to do an analysis of any of his films? Are you thinking of doing a close reading of one of his poems? Do you just want to tell us why you love Auster’s work? We’d love to hear it!

Would you like to talk about…

Old stuff? (The New York Trilogy, The Music of Chance, Mr. Vertigo)?

New stuff? (4 3 2 1, Burning Boy)?

Borrowed stuff? (Squeeze Play…his early novel in which he borrowed a style/genre  that didn’t quite work out for him)?

Blue stuff? (Blue in the Face)?

Syndemic Motherhood: Exploring American Epidemics through Engaged and Applied Arts, a case study anthology, explores how various artistic practices and processes have been instrumental in processing, sharing, and learning about the intersectional epidemics unique to US-Americans and their experiences in motherhood. Issues related to social inequity such as gun violence, healthcare access, the COVID-19 pandemic, poverty, and childcare converge to create challenging circumstances for women and mothers in the United States. The arts provide a malleable yet rigorous framework to unpack these issues publicly.

* Please note: This Creative Writing panel will be part of the SAMLA (South Atlantic Modern Language Association) Conference in Atlanta, Georgia Nov. 9-11, 2023.

As the “Crisis in the Humanities” continues to witness a decline in all things humanities courses throughout post-secondary curricula under the echoing waves of COVID, teachers of English survey courses are left to do some cleaning up with regard to what we teach as far as the surveys go. In addition to the COVID slope, the number of English majors continues to wane, and some colleges are even restructuring semester scheduling. When the dust settles, where does that leave the last vestibule of the formal introductory map to English studies, the venerable “survey course” – the one, staunch and steadfast bastion of the once bustling English departments?

Imprisoned in 1642, Richard Lovelace penned the words that became his best-known: “Stone walls do not a prison make,/Nor iron walls a cage:/Minds innocent and quiet take/That for a hermitage” (“To Althea, From Prison”).

Lovelace’s poem points to the duality of the prison as both a physical structure and a mental and spiritual condition. Moreover, the poem submits that the mind can remain free even while the body is confined. For Lovelace, the only true prison is the prison of the mind and soul.

This panel will explore the topics of the prisoner and of the prison as a physical and/or psychological element in novels, stories, poems, films, television, and other genres and media.

This panel invites papers that explore literary representations of populations—immigrants, migrant workers, the racially or sexually marginalized, disabled persons, etc.—that are rendered ‘surplus’ by American society. This might be through economic, political, or interpersonal forces. This panel is especially interested in the ways these populations resist this dehumanization and forge their own communities. The label ‘surplus’ pushes these populations to the margins of society, deeply isolating them. Isolation is one of the most crippling afflictions that an individual can encounter, leaving them with no support system when forces like prejudices, poverty, or oppression affect them so deeply.

This roundtable invites critics and writers to rethink cities (or neighborhoods/areas within cities) that are essential to understanding “American writing,” yet still seem to remain outside or “extraneous” to discussions of “American literature.”  What historical cities, lost neighborhoods, or even ruins/necropoli are critical to enduring issues explored within American writing?  What stories seem lost within locales trimmed of their histories?  How does re-centered dialogue around these locations remap American literary production?  What trajectories or points of transit are central to discussions of “canonical texts” in the present moment?  How do these questions reframe concepts of diaspora or a “literature of the Americas?” 

Undue Burdens: Reproductive Rights and Bodily Autonomy in the Long Eighteenth Century 

Eds. Fiona Brideoake, Ula Lukszo Klein, and Nicole Garret  

Brandeis Novel Symposium CFP 2023: Percival Everett’s Erasure 

Friday October 20, 2023, Brandeis University Mandel Center for the Humanities

The seventh annual Brandeis Novel Symposium invites proposals for papers that think with and about Percival Everett’s Erasure. Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California, Percival Everett is the author of more than 30 books including most recently the Booker Prize shortlisted The Trees. Erasure (2001) is a satire of the American publishing industry and the pressures placed on African-American writers. 

NEASECS 2023“Old and New, Beginnings and Endings”

https://neasecs2023.wordpress.com/

Washington Plaza Hotel, Washington DC, November 17-19, 2023

Keynote Speaker: Marlene Daut, of the Department of African-American studies, at Yale University. (November 18)

                                                              Thinking about Intersectionality:

                                              Minorities and diverse Dominations in the United States

International conference

April 11-12, 2024

Université Bretagne Sud, Lorient