modernist studies

Luxuries of the Literary Mind: Readings of Commodity and Privilege

"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity." G. K. Chesterton, Defendant (1901)

The McGill English Department's Seventeenth Annual Graduate Conference on Language and Literature will take place in Montreal from March 4 to 6, 2011. The conference will centre on issues of luxury, commodity, and consumption in literature, and other texts and cultural artefacts.

Potential areas for study include, but are not limited to the following:

-class and social standing

-wealth and poverty, images of excess and need

-human rights (sexual freedoms, disability rights, etc.) versus social privilege

-the racialization of wealth and status

We are seeking a third presenter for a proposed panel at the American Literature Association in Boston (May 26-29, 2011). This panel aims to explore representations of poor whites and/or the intersections of whiteness and social class in twentieth-century works.  One confirmed paper will examine intertextuality as a form of poor white class consciousness in Barbara Robinette Moss's _Change Me Into Zeus's Daughter_; the other will explore white femininity and class mobility in Zora Neale Hurston's _Seraph on the Suwanee_.  Comparative approaches--across races, works, time periods--and papers examining individual works related to the panel theme are equally welcome.

Deadline: November 15, 2010

Book Reviews for Schuylkill graduate journal: Mind/Body
Relationships -- Special Issue

2010 EGSC FALL SYMPOSIUM: "Contemporary Interpretations: Expanding Boundaries with Inquiry"
CSU, Chico Performing Arts Center November 13, 2010

Schuylkill graduate journal is seeking submissions from all disciplines for our 9th volume of critical essays and book reviews to be published in Spring of 2011 (online and in print). We are seeking papers on the relationships between minds and bodies, 10-15 pages in length; double spaced; MLA format; no footnotes. Current graduate students should send their work to the Article Editors at skook@temple.edu by November 15, 2010. No simultaneous submissions please.

In a famous chapter-long digression in Samuel Beckett's _Murphy_ (1938), the narrator pauses to justify the expression "Murphy's mind:"

The Irish Association of American Studies invites papers on the theme of American Appropriations, American Interventions for its annual conference to be held at Queen's University Belfast on April 15 & 16 2011.

This year the conference will be held in lovely San Antonio, TX from April 20-23 at the Marriott Rivercenter San Antonio, 101 Bowie Street, San Antonio, Texas 78205 210-223-1000. Please see the official web-site for more information at http://www.pcaaca.org/conference/national.php. Contemporary Southern literature remains a growing area for further/future discussion(s) and criticism(s) within the context of society.

Eudora Welty Society, Call for Papers
American Literature Association Conference
May 26-29, 2011, Boston, MA

Glamorous Scoundrels, Vaunting Heroes, Protective Fathers, Wandering Lovers: Masculinity in Welty's Fiction

IMAGINING EUROPE - PERSPECTIVES, PERCEPTIONS AND REPRESENTATIONS FROM ANTIQUITY TO THE PRESENT

REMINDER: CALL FOR PAPERS - LUICD Graduate Conference 2011

Leiden University Institute for Cultural Disciplines
27 and 28 January 2011

Confirmed keynote speakers:

Professor Edith Hall, Royal Holloway, University of London
Professor Jonathan Israel, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University

THE CONFERENCE

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Submissions are now being sought for the first ever collection of essays on the life and work of Edward P. Jones. The collection, entitled Edward P. Jones: New Essays, will be published in the second half of 2011.

Essays should take the form of full-length scholarly articles approximately 5,000 words in length, and may be submitted either in full (if already completed or nearing completion) or provisionally as 500-word abstracts outlining the central thesis of a proposed article. Longer articles will receive consideration, but contributors who wish to submit such articles should first send a brief query to epjessays@gmail.com.

Call for Papers: Scottish Literature at CEA 2011
March 31- April 2, 2011 | St. Petersburg, Florida
Hilton, St. Petersburg, 333 First Street South, St. Petersburg, FL 33701; (727) 894-5000

The College English Association, a gathering of scholar-teachers in English studies, welcomes proposals for presentations on Scottish literature for our 2011 annual conference. The fortunes of Scotland, her literature, and the study of it have seen their fortunes rise and fall over the course of centuries. Papers that address the relationship between fortune and Scottish literature are particularly encouraged, but papers dealing with broader topics in Scottish literature are also invited.

The Journal of South Texas English Studies is now welcoming submissions for its third issue, themed "Reworking the Classics: The Intersection of Popular Culture and English Studies."

Fat Studies is becoming an interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary field of study that confronts and critiques cultural constraints against notions of "fatness" and "the fat body"; explores fat bodies as they live in, are shaped by, and remake the world; and creates paradigms for the development of fat acceptance or celebration within mass culture. Fat Studies uses body size as the starting part for a wide-ranging theorization and explication of how societies and cultures, past and present, have conceptualized all bodies and the political/cultural meanings ascribed to every body.

In the current moment of economic and environmental crisis, the concept of sustainability has become a popular touchstone of both neoliberal and conservative agendas. Whether arguing for a green industrial revolution or economic dematerialization, both groups fail to realize the deeper contradictions between sustainability and capitalism's mode of production. But if "we're all environmentalists now," as Neil Smith has suggested, it becomes necessary to engage ecological politics without participating in late capitalism's appropriation of "green" rhetoric.