american

  Jim Thompson, a writer of hard-boiled crime fiction, was born in Anadarko, Indian Territory (Oklahoma), in 1906.  Thompson’s literary achievements were little-recognized during his lifetime; however, many of his works were re-discovered and re-published in the 1980s. His work is often lauded, noting his ability to understand the criminal mind.  His work is largely critiqued and categorized as only hard-boiled fiction, but his work defies such a simple genre classification.  Thompson combines the genres of crime fiction and Westerns and in doing so, his works read as critiques of American history and culture. Certainly much of Thompson’s work can be read as a critique of post-WWII America.  As David Cochrane points out Thompson’s works serve as “portrait

Call for Panels

The Society for Contemporary Literature is sponsoring two panels at the annual meeting of the American Literature Association in Boston, May 23-26, 2019. We are looking for panel proposals that address themselves to topics in contemporary American literature (or about the last twenty-five years), and especially welcome submissions that address its full range and diversity. ALA welcomes both traditional and non-standard panel formats as well as roundtables, and so does SCL.

The world we inhabit is framed, driven, (re)produced, and conceptualised by and through science. Science as a mode of knowing contours the prevailing episteme, whilst technological innovation continues to remake work and leisure experience. At the same time, society is both reflected and in turn formed by science fiction (SF): as contributor to the nostalgia economy, as a dominant visual-commercial aesthetic, as a mimetic index of the present’s utopian and dystopian tendencies. The now is a time of extreme precarity. We face a raft of catastrophes – political, socioeconomic, and, most pressingly, ecological. And yet, even as our own survival comes into question, capitalism itself seems unassailable, primed to outlast ‘humanity.’

In honor of the 200th anniversary of The Sketch Book (1819-1820), which includes “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” the Washington Irving Society invites proposals for any topic related to The Sketch Book for the American Literature Association Conference in Boston, May 23-26, 2019. Please send an abstract of 250 words plus a brief bio to Dr. Sean Keck at skeck@radford.edu by January 15, 2019. For more information about ALA and the WIS, please see americanliteratureassociation.org and irvingsociety.wordpress.com.

Call for Papers: Nathaniel Hawthorne Society The Annual Conference of the MLA will meet in Seattle on January 9-12, 2020. The Nathaniel Hawthorne Society invites proposals investigating the topic, “Hawthorne, his Circle, and the Digital Humanities,” or “DH for NH,” for short. We welcome interest in all aspects of the intersection of digital humanities with Hawthorne’s circle, including figures such as Sophia Peabody Hawthorne (whose papers were digitalized alongside those of Hawthorne, Thoreau, Whitman, and 35,000 other items from the NYPL’s Berg Collection in 2012), Melville, Emerson, Fuller, and other local (Salem, Concord, Boston, the Berkshires) contemporaries. Proposals might include (but are not limited to) such topics as: