popular culture

From King of the Jungle to Cultural Icon will be an interdisciplinary essay collection marking the 100th anniversary of Tarzan of the Apes. Since its debut in serial format in 1912, Edgar Rice Burroughs' narrative about an orphaned white boy being raised by a band of black apes in the African jungle has become a transnational literary classic, frequent cinematic, film and comic book icon and powerful—as well as problematic—cultural archetype. This collection will allow critics from a wide range of disciples to explore the past place, present status and future importance of Tarzan in popular print, visual and material culture.

CFP: Disney's Documentaries

Contributors are being sought for articles to complete an edited volume (working title "Beyond the Mouse: Disney's Documentaries and Docudramas") that is designed to explore the full range of Disney films designed to educate viewers about specific people, places, things, events and concepts from the real world.

The Virginia Woolf Miscellany seeks short essays (2,000 words maximum) investigating Virginia Woolf's interactions with periodicals. Particularly welcome are essays that read periodicals themselves as complex cultural texts while contextualizing and/or historicizing Woolf's contributions. Essays that shed new light on Woolf's evolving attitudes towards journalism and the print marketplace are also welcome.

Submit essays via email attachment to Patrick Collier at pccollier@bsu.edu.

Call for Papers and Panels
What Postcolonial Theory Doesn't Say

A conference at the University of York, UK, 3-5 July 2010, in partnership with the University of Leeds and Manchester Metropolitan University

Postcolonial Studies is firmly ensconced in the Anglophone metropolitan academy: the field has its own specialised journals, academic posts, postgraduate courses, and dedicated divisions within learned bodies. But how well have these configurations travelled to other locations, institutions and disciplines? What topics, questions and approaches remain unexplored? And what's 'theoretical' about postcolonial theory anyway?

The editors of Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History, the journal of the Reception Study Society, invite submissions for its second issue, which will appear in the fall of 2009.

This panel will examine the practice of importing characters and plot lines from one literary work to another. This panel hopes to reveal how the relationship between the newer work and its source material affects the way the way that readers and audiences receive both works, particularly when this relationship crosses cultural, chronological, and genre divides. Please send abstracts to Michael Rio and William Duffy at wsduffy@buffalo.edu.

ANARCHISM AND THE LITERARY IMAGINATION

Chapters are sought for the collection Anarchism and the Literary Imagination. This volume examines historical and contemporary engagements of anarchism and literary production. Anarchists have used literary production to express opposition to values and relations characterizing advanced capitalist (and socialist) societies while also expressing key aspects of the alternative values and institutions proposed within anarchism. Among favoured themes are anarchist critiques of corporatization, prisons and patriarchal relations as well as explorations of developing anarchist perspectives on revolution, ecology and ecocriticism, polysexuality and mutual aid.

The Philosophical Society of Nepal, and its reviewed Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry, seeks articles in a wide range of philosophical topics and from a wide range of perspectives, methodologies, and traditions within philosophy, and the broader humanities, particularly literary theory, cultural theory, aesthetic theory, disciplines dealing with religion (e.g. religious studies, history of religions), and semiotics.

In current debates about the War in Iraq, it has become commonplace for politicians and journalists to conjure the specter of the Vietnam War as a means of quantifying the impact of the current war in American culture and throughout the world. Surprisingly, though, few have scrutinized these comparisons to examine the differences between the popular music of the Vietnam era and the music of the current post-9/11 era. While the Vietnam era found countless bands and musicians responding in protest to that war, there has arguably been a significantly smaller amount of contemporary musicians who have taken overt stances, in their music, about the politics of post-9/11 life, in America and elsewhere.

Call for Papers:
Critical Theory: The Text and the World
September 17th 2009, University of Exeter
Keynote Speaker: Professor Colin MacCabe

Critical Theory: The Text and the World is a one-day Postgraduate conference designed to provide a venue for students and early-career academics to explore a multitude of critical approaches to literary and filmic texts. This event will provide a collaborative research forum which can direct contemporary debates in critical theory towards concrete socio-political issues. These issues include climate change, the global economic crisis and the war on terror.

Western scholarship has historically adopted a vision of contemporary aboriginal literature and art as categorizable along racial, cultural, regional and historical characteristics. This tends to homogenize and de-nationalize the tribal, while simultaneously confining the Native artist to a North American narrative of "ethnicity." The editors of this project hope to highlight and perhaps challenge these "captive" conceptions of North American indigeneity with essays from prominent scholars situated throughout the Pacific Rim whose exposures to and experiences of Asian and Pacific indigenity in all its diversity enables them to undertake refreshingly new readings of Native American writing and art.

Challenging the Virtual: Women's Cultural Experiences in Second Life

Please join us for the biennial John R. Milton Writers' Conference, held October 29-31, 2009, at The University of South Dakota in Vermillion, South Dakota.

We are seeking panel and round table proposals, scholarly papers, and creative writing related (either explicitly or implicitly) to the theme of Frontier Technology/Techno-Frontiers: Technology and the American West. Possible topics or approaches might include, but certainly aren't limited to:

• Frontier Technology/Techno-Frontiers in Western American literature, history, and culture;

• Frontier Technology/Techno-Frontiers in American Indian literature, history, and culture;

South Atlantic MLA Atlanta GA 11/6-11/9/2009

This panel will interrogate the upsurge of the new(?)
homicidal/suicidal religiosity in the West. Some possible perspectives are literary, sociological, artistic, or historical, and interdisciplinary approaches are always
welcome. Some possible ideas, not intended to restrict panelists but rather to spur thinking on a few possible approaches:

- the suicide bomber as Kierkegaardian hero

- religious mania as a reaction to/ byproduct of Western modernity

- leaps of technological faith: the new high-tech cargo cults (Heaven's Gate, etc)

- the faith of Abraham vs the faith of Andrea Yates