rhetoric and composition

Creating Texts, Breaking the Rules: Galdosian Narratives (at SAMLA 92) 

52nd Northeast Modern Language Association Convention

March 11-14, 2021 / Philadelphia, PA

Today, many thousands of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people are crossing borders and building bridges between communities as they fight against injustice and for alternatives to mass incarceration. This volume, edited by a collective of Northeastern Illinois University faculty and students, some either currently or formerly incarcerated, will tell the stories of these justice leaders.

This session proposes a re-examination of the undergraduate student writer's concept of agency during times of crisis. We aim to expand our critical understanding of what it means to teach students in a way that empowers, offers agency, and acknowledges the voice of the student during times of crisis, whether such crisis is a result of a global pandemic such as Covid-19, national issues such as police brutality, or the result of a personal struggle such as anxiety or loss and, thus, we welcome contributions that address agency, empowerment, and voice from a variety of academic perspectives.

The global COVID-19 crisis, and its economic fallout, have re-established two facts - that the economy is a fictive category, and that its inimitable centrality derives essentially from the power of its narratives. Prior to actual policies of austerity or re-openings of the economy, there exist narratives of weathering storms as character-building or the inalienable connection between economic and individual freedom. These narratives help us imagine the economy as a system; most often it becomes palpable because we have learned to tell stories about its origins, maintenance, purity, precarity, and futures. These stories acquire unique characteristics in the global south, a geopolitical category itself that narrativizes economic agon.