popular culture

Session Title: Teaching Language and Literature
Open Topic

We welcome papers that deal with any and all issues related to the teaching of language and literature. Proposals may be related to issues such as the language of gender, comics as literature, or teaching new media, but this is not required. Send your inspiring ideas!

By May 1st, please submit proposals of no more than 150 words by email – preferred – to luria@mailbox.sc.edu or by post to University of South Carolina, Arts Institute, Attention: Rachel Luria, 1212 Greene Street/228 Sumwalt, Columbia, SC 29208

The theme of this year's issue is Consuming Cultures. We are accepting submissions of articles, essays, creative work, reviews, and art that explore the ideologies, politics, and cultures of consumption fairly broadly. The deadline for submissions is June 15, 2009. Questions and submissions can be sent to disclosurejournal@gmail.com.

The regional meeting of the Conference on Christianity and Literature will explore a wide variety of approaches to the intersections between Christianity, literature, and the city. This three-day conference, held just west of Chicago at Wheaton College (IL) will include keynote addresses by Andrew Delbanco and Anne Winters, traditional panels, at least two undergraduate student panels with faculty moderators, poetry readings, art exhibitions, and associated excursions into Chicago. Proposals for panels, roundtables, or individual twenty-minute presentations are invited on the following or related topics:

Textual Echoes: Fan Fiction and Sexualities
CALL FOR PAPERS

We invite paper proposals for the symposium Textual Echoes: Fan Fiction and Sexualities, to be held at the University of Umeå, Sweden, 11-13 February 2010.

Keynote speakers: Kristina Busse, University of South Alabama, USA, and Elizabeth Woledge, The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, UK.

The 2009 World Picture Conference

October 23-24, 2009
Oklahoma State University
Stillwater, Oklahoma

Style

Keynote Speakers:

Edward Branigan (University of California, Santa Barbara)
&
Alexander García Düttmann (Goldsmiths College)

Proposals sought for a session on young-adult literature at the Pacific Modern Language Association conference in San Francisco, November 6-7, 2009. Proposals of 500 words and a 50-word abstract must be submitted at

http://pamla.org/2009/proposals

The official cfp is at

http://pamla.org/2009/cfp

Deadline extended to April 13th. Questions, please contact

Elise Ann Wormuth
San Francisco State University
earthman@sfsu.edu

CALL FOR PAPERS
The Global and the Local
in Contemporary Literature and Film

WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY
Thirty-Third Colloquium on Literature and Film
October 8-10, 2009

Submissions are invited on the many ways that contemporary authors and filmmakers find their inspiration in global and local issues. Topics include, but are not limited to the following:

The Southern Literature and Popular Culture area of the Midwest Popular Culture Association seeks panel and paper proposals for the annual Midwest Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association conference, this year to be held at the Book Cadillac Westin in Detroit, MI from Friday 30 October to Sunday 1 November.
The area seeks papers whose topics address any aspect of Southern literature or popular culture. This includes works by southerners OR about the south. Topics might address, but are not in any way limited to:
- Literature
- Film
- Drama and performance
- Humor (Blue Collar Comedy, etc.)
- Music and Visual art

We're looking for a third panelist for a proposed special session centering around Southern Literature and the 1930s. Judged "the Nation's No. 1 economic problem" by the National Emergency Council's Report on Southern Economic Conditions in the South, the South was particularly vulnerable to the dislocations of the Great Depression. However, even as tropes of the South's economic backwardness were employed to propel economic reform, Southern intellectuals - notably the Fugitive Agrarians - resisted such efforts, valorizing the region's agrarian economic base and sought to maintain the South's organic, communal society as a bulwark against industrialization.

The African Studies area of the Midwest Popular Culture Association seeks panel and paper proposals for the annual Midwest Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association conference, this year to be held at the Book Cadillac Westin in Detroit, MI from Friday 30 October to Sunday 1 November.

The area seeks papers whose topics address any aspect of popular culture on the African continent. Topics might address, but are not in any way limited to:
- Literature
- Film or media
- Theatre and performance
- Music
- Visual art
- Pedagogy and education

CFP: Modernist Studies Association 2009
MSA 11: The Languages of Modernism

Montréal, Québec, Canada, 
November 5-8, 2009

Wordless Modernism: Grammars of the Sensible

"Is there, we ask, some secret language which we feel and see, but never speak, …any characteristic which thought possesses that can be rendered visible without the help of words?"
— Virginia Woolf, "The Cinema" (1926)

Proposals are invited that explore connections between Victorian and Caribbean novels that have not heretofore been put in conversation with each other. Proposals should be 300 words and submitted by 4/30/09 to Marc Muneal, Emory University (mmuneal@emory.edu).

"Lost" Multicontributor Collection

One of the most remarkable television series in recent years has been ABC's "Lost." Beginning with an archetypal premise of castaways stranded on an island, the show has evolved into a complex network of obscure connections, esoteric mysteries, literary and pop cultural allusions, and baroque experiments in narrative temporality. The defining feature of the show is its atmosphere of radical suggestibility; the narrative and thematic strands of the story continually run away into hyper-interpretability in a way that invites not only the kind of internet speculation which has flourished around the show, but also the application of more theoretically informed critical examination.

We are currently accepting proposals for essays to be included in an edited collection tentatively titled Literature and Joss Whedon's Angel, which focuses specifically on the literary traditions and influences that shape and are reflected in the series. Our goal is to bring together a collection of essays that work primarily with Angel as a text to be addressed in the wider field of narrative and literature, since critical analysis of visual narratives in our culture is often related to our literary history and cultural consciousness. Often, our criteria for evaluating the quality of television draw heavily on the complexities of narrative structures and the reimagining of traditional tales or storytelling techniques.