cultural studies and historical approaches

Symposium: The Weird Russian 19th Century 

April 28, 2023

Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ (via Zoom)

Organizers: Arpi Movsesian and Chloë Kitzinger (Rutgers University)

Keynote speaker: Jacob Emery (Indiana University Bloomington) 

Presentation

Digital technology and internet access have expanded the ways of making meaning and of building and accessing audiences across the globe. Though unevenly available to refugees (UNHCR, Space and imagination: rethinking refugees’ digital access, 2020), digital technology has nonetheless offered previously unknown platforms for refugees to speak directly to global audiences.

IL PARLAGGIO

ISSN 2280-6849

This section of the academic journal “Sinestesieonline” is open to contributions about theatre and performing arts in all historical ages, forms and variations, in English, Italian and foreign languages. We use double blind peer review.

“Il Parlaggio” is the name created by Gabriele d’Annunzio for the amphitheatre in Vittoriale – a place of empathy, a cradle of emotions, a crossroads of cultures, a connection between antiquity and contemporaneity, an emblem of the “neverending show”.

Consortium: An International Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies welcomes original, unpublished submissions from interested academics, independent scholars and activists for Volume III, Issue-I. In addition to research articles, Consortium also publishes book reviews, journalistic and reportage works, field reports, and interviews with public intellectuals, literary figures and activists. Submissions can only be made electronically through online submission.

This proposed volume of interdisciplinary essays reexamines the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) as a labor project. We are working with a publisher to feature this book, Working through the Federal Writers’ Project: Labor, Place, Archive, and Representation, as part of a potential series on the FWP,  on the burgeoning field of FWP studies, and on how FWP studies fits in the larger framework of labor studies. Labor, in this sense, is not a narrow category. It encompasses trade unions, working conditions, labor power, political economy, and the everyday reality of working lives.

This MLA panel invites critical and ethical interrogations that underpin the urgency to look beyond the single-issue strategies of reading and creating South Asia in critical discourse. Incidentally, the scholarly trajectory of issues on South Asia has flattened the diversity of the geopolitically, culturally rich discursive space and its experiences to increasingly refer to India-centric discussions.

The year between December 29th 2022 and December 29th 2023 would have been the hundredth of William Gaddis’ life. Between 1955, when he published The Recognitions, and 1998, when he died shortly after completing Agapē Agape, Gaddis was notorious for a disproportion between reputation and readership. Being reflexively labelled “difficult,” with his own novels’ wry figurations of characters writing “for a very small audience,” and with a tendency to be categorized (though not always actually read) alongside the increasingly unfashionable “high postmodernists”… all this might have made it hard to envisage his work surviving into the 2000s.

The majority of research on 19th-century literary representations of sexual violence variously restricts the field by 1) explicitly or implicitly treating rape as an exceptional crime; 2) limiting analyses to what Erin Spampinato has termed “adjudicative reading,” or legalistic approaches that evaluate rape stories as if they were real-life court cases; and 3) attending only to narratives about cisgender men’s violations of white cisgender women, especially within the middle-class home, to the exclusion of nonheterosexual, queer, and colonial contexts.

Call for Papers for Women in French

2023 Midwest Modern Language Association Convention

Cincinnati, Ohio

November 2-5, 2023

I am pleased to announce the Call for Papers for WIF at the 2023 MMLA Convention (to be held in person November 2-5 in Cincinnati, OH). We welcome proposals that relate the study of French and Francophone women authors, the study of women’s place in French and Francophone cultures or literatures, and feminist literary criticism to this year’s theme: “Going Public: What the MMLA Owes Democracy.”

Recent work like George Edmondson’s The Neighboring Text or Seeta Chaganti’s Strange Footing models close engagement with medieval manuscripts that offers new modes of experiencing literature beyond the historically positivist, empirically material, or hermeneutically suspicious, either by recognizing the limitations of theoretical lenses or by approaching language beyond information. This session asks how looking at the character of the medieval text on the manuscript page–its calligraphy, titles, rubrics, initials, performance cues, polysemy–might allow us to consider anew readers’ encounters, medieval and modern, with that text.

Several recent, celebrated studies of late medieval English literature present their anchoring motivations as including one or more twenty-first century activist concerns – for example, scholarship that considers Chaucer and rape culture, examines the medieval roots or affinities of contemporary white supremacy, thinks ecocritically about the medieval beyond-human, juxtaposes medieval political events with modern ones, etc. Methodologically, such studies have involved explicit interleaving of analysis of late medieval English literary texts with considerations of texts, events, or discourses of the present.

Confluences of Writing Studies and the History of the English Language

Guest editors: Chris C. Palmer, Kennesaw State University; Amanda Sladek, University of Nebraska-Kearney; & Jennifer Stone, University of Alaska Anchorage

Call for Proposals as PDF

The 15th Annual Louisiana Studies Conference will be held September 23, 2023, at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana. The conference committee is now accepting presentation proposals for the upcoming conference. Presentation proposals on any aspect of the 2023 conference theme “Louisiana Works,” as well as creative texts by, about, and/or for Louisiana and Louisianans, are sought for this year’s conference.