ecocriticism and environmental studies

"Our Monsters, Ourselves"

This panel seeks papers on the historical significance and meaning of the monsters everywhere in our cultural moment. Following the line of thought that a society's supernatural monsters in many ways define them, "Our Monsters, Ourselves" hopes to open the discussion of the ways monsters in recent fiction and film represent the tacit panics, problems and pleasures of English-language, North American culture in 2010. Monsters are defined, for this panel, as those creatures presented as explicitly and literally "supernatural" or "artificial" by their authors.

A short list of dramatis personae might include vampires, ware-wolves, robots, ghosts, AI figures, witches and demons.

The Sidney Society will sponsor three open sessions on Philip Sidney and his Circle at the 45th International Congress on Medieval Studies Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo, Michigan). The conference website is here: http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/

May 13-16, 2010

Abstracts are invited on any subject dealing with Philip Sidney and his circle. As ever, we encourage proposals from newcomers as well as established scholars.

Papers should be limited to twenty minutes in reading time. Please do not submit an abstract to two different sessions of the conference in the same year.

The show is not the show,
But they that go.
Menagerie to me
My neighbor be...

Emily Dickinson

ZOO

Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference

Department of Comparative Literature, Yale University.

December 4, 2009

Keynote address by Professor Haun Saussy (Yale)

Discussants will include Yale faculty and graduate students.

The regional meeting of the Conference on Christianity and Literature will explore a wide variety of approaches to the intersections between Christianity, literature, and the city. This three-day conference, held just west of Chicago at Wheaton College (IL) will include keynote addresses by Andrew Delbanco and Anne Winters, traditional panels, at least two undergraduate student panels with faculty moderators, poetry readings, art exhibitions, and associated excursions into Chicago. Proposals for panels, roundtables, or individual twenty-minute presentations are invited on the following or related topics:

American ethnic authors are literary conjurers of memory and imagination, creating each character full of spirit and consequence, joy and irreversible pains. These authors interpret and provoke self-legitimization of the varied realms of ethnic experience and memory in American society. American ethnic literatures present an ongoing dialogue between ethnic individual and mainstream culture, history, class, religion and sexuality. All of these issues are at play for teachers attempting to establish ethnically inclusive literary curriculums. Teaching American ethnic literatures requires that instructors decide and develop a philosophical stance and pedagogical framework for their classrooms.

This panel seeks to investigate the way that suburban novels and films represent, critique, and construct notions of community in the context of a suburban landscape in flux: more immigrants now live in the suburbs than in the cities. Accompanying this increased diversity are new problems, including desperate need for housing, healthcare, and public transportation at a time when infrastructure is decaying and the economy has collapsed. How have recent novels and films reflected and negotiated these changes? Please submit 250-word abstracts to Kathy Knapp at kathy.knapp@uconn.edu

Deadline: September 30, 2009

Please include with your abstract:

Session: "The Importance of Country and City Settings in Charles Chesnutt's Works"

We are seeking panelist for a special session at the CLA Conference 2010, to be held in late March or April in New York, hosted by Brooklyn College/CUNY. Papers should focus on Chesnutt's use of setting in his short stories, tales, and/or novels. Scholars might think about the connection between setting and cultural memory, language and culture in relation to place and space, space and place (of black and/or white/male and/or female) in country and/or city settings, the "economy" of place, etc.

Please send abstracts of 150 words (please do not send by attachment) to Susan Wright,
smcfatt@cau.edu

Neo-Victorian Studies (www.neovictorianstudies.com), an inter-disciplinary, fully peer-reviewed e-journal, invites scholarly and/or creative submissions on any topic related to the re-visioning of the nineteenth century from twentieth/twenty-first century critical perspectives. The journal aims to explore continuities and ruptures between the Victorian and later (post)modern periods, and analyse the nineteenth century's cultural legacies and reverberations – aesthetic and ideological, material and residual/spectral – within literature, the arts and humanities, and present-day political, legal, and medical discourse.

Call for Papers: Queer Ecocriticism and Literature

41st Anniversary Convention
Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
April 7-11, 2010
Montreal, Quebec - Hilton Bonaventure

41st Anniversary Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
April 7-11, 2010
Montreal, Quebec - Hilton Bonaventure

"Communal Modernisms"

The Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS) invites proposals for Special Forums in upcoming issues. Each Special Forum will be a cluster of articles that speaks to a critical issue in transnational American Studies; we are particularly interested in innovative scholarship that is presented by coalitions of scholars from around the globe and which interrogates the geographical, topical, and ideological parameters of American Studies.

The Editorial Board will consider Special Forum proposals on a rolling basis. Proposals should be submitted in a Word document to Yanoula Athanassakis, the Associate Managing Editor for Special Forums, at: jtas.special.forum@gmail.com.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

THE CARTOGRAPHICAL NECESSITY OF EXILE

Derek Walcott identified a cartographical necessity of exile in his 1984 collection of poetry, Midsummer, when he wrote:

So, however far you have travelled, your
steps make more holes and the mesh is multiplied –
… exiles must make their own maps

The Cartographical Necessity of Exile

Derek Walcott identified a cartographical necessity of exile in his 1984 collection of poetry, Midsummer, when he wrote:

So, however far you have travelled, your
steps make more holes and the mesh is multiplied –
… exiles must make their own maps

Drawing from the language of ecology, environmental studies, and urban planning, the theme of this year's GEMCS conference focuses on the different valences and metaphorical possibilities of the footprint. We are especially concerned with exploring the many meanings of the footpring and expanding it as a paradigm for early modern representation. The ecological footprint is a measure of human demand on ecosystems; the representational footprint may be a measure of a variety of demonds on and by a text—social, historical, institutional, and textual.