modernist studies

The Evelyn Scott Society invites abstracts of 1-2 pages on the American writer Evelyn Scott (1893-1963). Papers may focus on any of her works (novels, short stories, memoir, poetry, young adult literature), and they may take any contemporary critical approach. We encourage papers that engage with the themes of the 2021 Society for the Study of American Women Writers Conference: Ecologies, Survival, Change. Scott’s work showed keen awareness of the “dynamic, interlocking systems that make up our world,” and often revealed stresses and fault lines where systems conflicted. She also frequently represented resilience in the face of change and hardship, but also probed characters and situations where change was experienced irrevocably as loss.

Proposals are invited for a volume in the MLA's Approaches to Teaching World Literature series entitled Approaches to Teaching the Works of Jorge Luis Borges.

Essays in this volume could address teaching Borges's work by focusing on topics such as philosophy, religion, mythology, detective fiction, gender relations/gender conflict, politics, the fantastic, history, popular literature, film and other arts, translation. Borges’ works are taught in so many different courses and contexts (Modern Languages, English, History, Philosophy, Religion) that we welcome essays teaching Borges in non-traditional settings or to non-literature students. Contributors are also invited to propose essays on topics not mentioned above.

We are proposing the following CFP for ACLA 2021, which will be held virtually.

This is a call for papers for a panel to run at NeMLA 2021, which will be conducted virtually March 11-14, 2021. Submit an abstract by October 19, 2020 [deadline extended] here: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/18807

This panel seeks to convene a conversation that theorizes the relationship between the detective novel, the art novel as it has been understood since modernism, and professional literary study—and in doing so move the critical study of detective fiction beyond the impulse to validate the genre as an object of study or redeem it from the stigma of genre.

Originally an 18th-century German innovation, the bildungsroman became a popular literary genre across the Anglo-American world during the 19th century. A ‘coming of age’ novel about young adults in search of meaning, the genre was the literary medium of choice for many Western writers exploring the moral and psychological developments of characters traversing unfamiliar worlds and encountering new challenges and adventures.

What is boredom and why do we feel bored? Recently, research on boredom has gained momentum in the scientific community, particularly in neuroscience and clinical psychology, where the symptoms of boredom and the behavioral patterns of the bored person are scrutinized (i.e. Boredomlab). Boredom, however, has been explored by philosophers for centuries and has been making a persistent appearance in the modern novel from nineteenth and century to present, in the moments of contemplation, waiting, idleness or complaints of bored characters.

This panel is a part of the 52nd Annual Convention of the The Northeast Modern Language Association. The conference will take place at the Marriott Hotel Downtown in Philadelphia, PA, with the support of the University of Pennsylvania, the local host institution.

The deadline for abstracts is September 30, 2020.

We invite participants to explore some of the ways in which Afro-Latin American experience was narrated by writers, scientists, and politicians in Latin America 19th to mid-20th century and beyond. We encourage participants to address Anglophone, Hispanophone, and Lusophone contexts of the said regions and the ties between these.

Caribbean novelists, poets, and playwrights have contributed inestimable riches to the world of literature. How have the themes and styles of established Caribbean voices, including Brathwaite, Walcott, Cliff, and Naipaul, been adapted or diverged from by younger Caribbean voices? Abstracts should be a maximum of 300 words and be submitted via the Northeast Modern Language Association website. Go to http://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention/callforpapers/submit.html

52nd Northeast Modern Language Association Convention

March 11-14, 2021 / Philadelphia, PA

In light of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and public debate about who or what kind of work is deemed “essential,” this panel seeks to examine the intersection of literature and labor, prioritizing depictions of precarious workers who are sacrificing their personal well-being for the public good, but also to maintain their own economic security.

A chapter which explores the fiction of middlebrow author Molly Keane (alias: M.J. Farrell) in realtion to the Gothic is sought to round off the edited collection Middlebrow Gothic: Dark Domesticity in British Popular Fiction, 1920-1960.

The original CfP is as follows:

Call for papers for Northeast Modern Language Association conference in Philadelphia, PA

March 11-14, 2021

Details:

In this session, we will especially focus on how the British classic literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries have been adapted concerning Thatcherism, the heritage industry, colonialism, Britishness (Englishness). The so-called "Heritage Fever," which hit British society in the 1980s, was largely supported by national-led policy. In the 1980s, for example, cultural heritage preservation movements spread nationwide; museums and heritage centers around the country were created. A great deal of British interest in the so-called “Old England,” such as visiting historic sites, became an honor factor.

Panel Session in Italian / Cultural Studies and Media Studies at the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) Convention Chairs

Lauren Surovi (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Corie Marshall (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Abstract

Commitment—a concept which names the title of Theodor Adorno’s 1962 critique of a text’s thematic engagement with politics—entails a work’s capacity to mark a site of historical intervention. “When I am committed,” says Jean-Paul Sartre, “I reveal the situation by the very intention of changing it…I strike at its very heart, I transfix it, and I display it in full view…with every word that I utter, I involve myself a little more in the world." For scholars of the modernist documentary, commitment serves as a starting point for attempts to better understand the historical import of literary experiments in reportage.