popular culture

The seventh annual Université de Montréal English graduate conference seeks to examine the constructed nature of human life and thus invites 250-300 words abstract for papers dealing with the notions of performance and performativity in literature and the arts. Although performance was traditionally associated with theatre and the interpretation of a written text by actors, the idea of performance also applies to everyday life, to the behaviour individuals are obligated to adopt in order to function in society. Every face-to-face encounter becomes a performance especially if we think of performativity as the internalization of a script.

From the debut of Superman in 1938 through recent tales of narrative crisis and politically divided superheroes, superhero comic books have made an indelible mark on American culture. The current popularity of stories and characters originating in comic books has expanded interest in the medium and in the superhero genre which itself incorporates a mixture of other genres. Recent scholarship has striven to define the superhero's unique relationship to American culture. Submissions that address the ways the comic book superhero represents, constructs, and distorts American culture are welcomed. Submissions on comic culture, characters, and comics-inspired media are welcomed at the FCH annual meeting.

CALL FOR PAPERS: POSTCOLONIALISM IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
 

Call for Papers

Analytic Philosophy and the Novel

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

This panel participates in a growing fascination with the connections between the narrative conventions of the novel and the field of analytic philosophy. Subjects may include (but are not limited to) theories of reference, speech acts, intentionality, metaphor, translation, demonstratives, propositional attitudes, pragmatics, meaning and use. All novel genres, periods, and languages are welcome, as are relevant implications for the study of objects, plots, characters, and fictionality.

Multi-Cultural Voices in Literature and the Arts of the 1920's—
An Interdisciplinary Symposium

The Department of English at Texas Southern University will host the Twelfth Annual Interdisciplinary McCleary Symposium, March 25-26, 2010, Houston, Texas.

The general topic for the presentations is "Multi-Cultural Voices in Literature and the Arts of the 1920's." Scholarly research and presentations are invited that cover a wide area of interest, including but not limited to the following:

Please forward to all interested researchers, practitioners, and students.

General Call for Papers. Second Issue of Wide Screen, a peer reviewed open access journal of screen studies.
Vol 1, Issue 2, 2009

Wide Screen encompasses a broad range of perspectives and approaches and we invite papers on film studies from a diverse range of perspectives. Thus we welcome papers on (not limited to):

CALL FOR PAPERS

The 2nd Annual University of South Florida Symposium on Poetry and Poetics will take place on the Tampa campus of the University of South Florida on February 25 & 26, 2010.

The Symposium invites proposals for twenty-minute research papers addressing any aspect of poetry and/or poetics; proposals for collaborative panels of two or three papers; and proposals for poetry readings. We welcome work--by creative writers as well as scholars--on poetry from all periods and countries, on single authors or groups of authors, on all schools of poetry and poetic movements and work concerning any aspect of the poetic process, poetry/creative writing pedagogy, poetry in translation and literary publishing.

LYING, CHEATING, AND DISSIMULATION: THEORIZING DECEIT

The Inaugural Issue of Pivot: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies and Thought

Published by the Graduate Program in English at York University

York University's Graduate Program in English is pleased to announce the inaugural issue of Pivot, a newly established online scholarly journal dedicated to fostering interdisciplinary work in the humanities. Pivot is a biannual, peer-reviewed publication committed to publishing outstanding work by emerging as well as established academics. Each issue will cohere around a particular topic or theme, illuminating the intersections and divergences of different disciplinary and methodological approaches to a given object of study.

Writing in 1940, Walter Benjamin suggests that "the historical progress of mankind" be immobilized so that we may respond to, rather than overlook, social injustices in the present. This panel seeks to examine through the theme of looking back how American literature of the Twentieth Century represents activism and defines its relationship to activism. How does a literature or literary history understand the distinction, if at all, between the world of words and that of action? Along these lines, papers might examine whether symbolic forms, namely literature, are themselves politically effective or if they must be valued as primarily heuristic formations. How, furthermore, can one create praxis through literature?

This inter- and multi-disciplinary conference seeks to explore ways in which particular screen technologies and media are displayed and spectacularised – that is, instances in which attention is drawn to the medium or technology itself rather than simply to its content.

Forgotten Bodies will provide a forum in which postgraduate researchers can explore often overlooked discourses, representations and practices relating to embodiment, sexuality and gender. Previous research into this field has often urged overly simplistic hegemonic models of practices, desires and identities, which this conference hopes to reassess. Our main objective is to explore the challenges of not only researching, including but also re-positioning so-called 'forgotten bodies' in academic programmes.

http://english.louisiana.edu/laconference/Home/index.php

The Louisiana Conference invites papers and creative work on the effects of transformative moments and experiences—textual, cultural and academic. Topics might include but are not limited to: effects of historical and political crises on literature and culture; revolutions; linguistic transformations; bodily transformations; religious conversions; personal turningpoints in autobiographies, literary characters, academic careers, etc.; genre transformations; texts into film; dissertation into book; academic turning points.

Guidelines for Submission:

Imagining Other Histories: The SW/TX PCA/ ACA in the area of Historical Fiction invites papers on the role of history and alternate history in fiction. To what extent have fiction writers, poets, filmmakers, myth makers, and other producers of pop culture bent the paths of history into different directions, into ur worlds, friendlier worlds, bleak worlds, parallel worlds, idealist worlds? Take, for example, the way that the reality of African American history was initially omitted from standard American historical accounts and the paths of history were bent toward the hegemony of a White world.

The University of Florida's 9th annual English Graduate Organization conference will explore nostalgia, focusing on the contradictory relations among desires for recovered pasts as well as deliberate attempts to manipulate the present through representations of the past. Of particular interest will be the extent to which both nostalgia and the desire for utopia are linked to historical trauma, as textual manifestations of an extratextual cause.