interdisciplinary

American Comparative Literature Association Annual Conference 8-11 April 2021

Rabindranath Tagore was the first Nobel Laureate of Asia. He was a multi-talented genius. He experimented in several fields of creativity namely, song, dance, poetry, dramas, short stories, novels, novellas, essays, education, painting and social reformation to name a few. Even after 150 years of his birth, how or why does humankind across the globe still find Tagore universally relevant? This panel aims to explore these diverse facets of Rabindranath Tagore as perceived from a contemporary perspective. The panel welcomes papers which examines Tagore’s works in comparison to other practitioners, either his contemporaries or in contemporary society.

Synthesis (14. 2021)

https://ejournals.epublishing.ekt.gr/index.php/synthesis/index

Abstracts of 300 words should be submitted to Aude Haffen at marie-aude.haffen@univ-montp3.fr and synthesisjournal2008@gmail.com by 20 December 2020.

Notification of acceptance will be delivered by 11 January 2021.

Inspired by the (intended) original location for the 2021 ACLA conference (Montreal), we are soliciting papers on the role of place in Canadian literature and drama for this year's online conference. 

Life Writing as World Literature, ACLA April 8-11, 2021 (Virtual)

This panel brings the fields of world literature and life writing together to explore social, economic and ideological contexts informing the circulation, translation and reading of auto/biographical texts. Redefinitions of world literature highlight the “effective life” of works “within a literary system beyond that of its original culture” (Damrosch 2003) or underscore that literature now “is unmistakably a planetary system” (Moretti 2000).

Concept Note: The research on men and masculinities traces back to the women’s and gay liberation movements that challenged existing understandings of gender and power. Though the initial formulations of Masculinity Studies had started much early around the 1970s, it was not until the empirical research around 1980s-1990s that it began to develop as a newly formed discipline. As a logical extension of Feminism, Masculinity Studies looks into sex and/or gender as a discursive social construct and tries to understand them through theoretical hermeneutics.

“Stuff leaks through such that the real manifests not just as gaps and inconsistencies in reality.” 
                                                                                   Tim Morton, Humankind  

2020 marks the centennial celebration of the publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise. Because a centennial is also a time to look back in order to reevaluate, reassess and then speculate on the future, we invite scholars to explore and analyze not only the lasting significance of Fitzgerald's oeuvre, but also the many possible parallels and/or tensions between his work and that of other writers and artists. Essays that turn to new perspectives and expand upon connections between Fitzgerald’s work and other literary and artistic expressions are also especially welcome.

Topics may include (but are not limited) to:

Recently we all must have noticed that there had been numerous memes doing rounds on social media platforms acknowledging, albeit in sarcastic ways, the role of the Covid-19 virus in teaching mankind some of the most-neglected values of life heretofore.  Such cultural texts with their nuanced sub-texts have been rapidly gaining access to our lives and activities as the subsidiary effects of this present pandemic situation. However, the pandemic is not something new to human civilization. There are references galore in various literary and non-literary texts of its sweeping destructive force before. But this present threat from Covid-19 seems to be a kind of a shock to the anthropocentric worldview.

Our research centers on British literature in the long nineteenth century, and we are interested in proposing a panel for this year’s CES conference, “Europe’s Past, Present, and Future:

We invite presentation proposals for the 2021 NeMLA Annual Conference, to be held virtually Mach 11-14.  

The current COVID-19 pandemic highlights the relationship between disaster, racism, and comedy in unexpected ways. Fear, hostility, and open acts of violence towards Asian bodies, the perceived carriers of disease, are naturalized in part through their exaggerated and comic portrayals. The images of Oriental “gross” food consumers in Hazmat suits and masks circulate via internet memes and anecdotes of personal encounters, generating a shared normal response of derision and repulsion. What is so funny, though? 

In After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (2015), Jedediah Purdy describes what he calls the "environmental imagination," which comprises “how we see and how we learn to see, how we suppose the world works, how we suppose that it matters, and what we feel we have at stake in it. It is an implicit, everyday metaphysics, the bold speculations buried in our ordinary lives” (6-7). Amidst the gravity of the Anthropocene today, Purdy examines the linkages between environmental imagination and “ways of acting, personally, politically, and legally, that have shaped the world in concrete ways” (7).

UPDATE:

• Deadline extension for proposals now due October 11, 2020
• All-virtual platform for conference
• Reduced registration fee for all-virtual platform

Northeast Modern Language Association 52nd Annual Convention, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, March 11-14, 2021

Roundtable sponsored by NeMLA's Women's and Gender Studies Caucus

Abstract This panel will seek to explore the changing relationship between scientific paradigms and society’s self-understanding as it is manifest in the novel form. If the novel itself has functioned as a record of the social imagination—a narrative ideologeme as Jameson describes it – this social imagination often borrowed its models from contemporary natural philosophy and later the social sciences. We see examples of this in Balzac’s use of taxonomical zoology, Sterne’s use of Cartesian “animal spirits,” or Joyce’s phylogenetic process in “Oxen of the Sun.” Some of the questions this panel will ask include: how do naturalistic sociological models help to mediate political and aesthetic theories? How do these models affect stylistic developments?

• PCA/ACA National conference meeting location and dates

Popular Culture Association (PCA) National Conference

March 31-April 3, 2021

Boston, MA