rhetoric and composition

"Culture and Crisis"
A Call for Papers for
A Special Issue of CULTURAL LOGIC

Edited by Joseph G. Ramsey, appearing Winter 2009/2010

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Talk of crisis is everywhere. Financial. Environmental. Geopolitical. Cultural. A Crisis of Crises...

In an ever-changing world, words appear to have more power than ever. Indeed, words can be weapons when inappropriately or ineffectively used. This ambiguity can lead to grave misunderstanding and miscommunication as our global networks are ever increasing. Many times the intent of the USA to convey its purpose is poorly represented. How can we, as educators, effectively teach English in a manner that can avoid literal denotation, while embracing the subtleties, innuendos, and connotations so important to clarity and deeper understanding? This panel will address all subject related topics.

Call for Papers: GENDER

The editors invite contributions for the forthcoming issue on the theme of GENDER from postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers working across the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Suggested areas for articles include, but are not restricted to:

Cinema, Film & Television
Embodiment, Space & Time
Feminism, Anti-feminism, & Masculinism
Equality & Liberation
Gender, Sex & Androgyny
Language & Linguistics
Stylistics and Discourse
Teaching, Learning & Acquisition

Please send submissions in Microsoft Word format to: e-pisteme@ncl.ac.uk

All submissions must contain the following information:

The Clearing House, a peer-reviewed journal, publishes material of interest to middle level and high school teachers and administrators, as well as postsecondary education faculty members and their students. The journal contains articles reporting on useful practices, research findings, and experiments. We also publish a limited number of first-person accounts and opinion pieces on controversial issues.

This is a critical and creative new online journal. It is created to find, edit and publish superior works of fiction, non-fiction, art, multi-media and the like. The Pennsylvania Literary Journal is created to make a positive contribution to literary criticism and to the arts around the world. There are no geographic boundaries or genre boundaries in the first, summer issue – only the restraints of a website template.

States of Crisis
Friday, 9 October 2009
Brandeis University
Department of English and American Literature
Seventh Annual Graduate Conference

Since its origin in the ancient Greek krisis, "decision," related to krites, a judge, the term crisis has referred to ideas of discernment, evaluation, criticism, and sifting of evidence. In literary studies, for example, one can see moments of crisis in shifting aesthetics and changing genres as well as in literary tradition(s), character representation, and ideas of narrative. Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches and scholarship, this conference will explore different responses to the idea of crisis in the humanities and social sciences.

35th Southern Comparative Literature Association Conference, Arizona State University

"Translating and Mapping: Rethinking Literature in the Age of Globalization"

October 1-3, 2009

Panel: "Detours de Babel" between East and West: Theorizing Translation in Early Modern Europe

Seminar Organizer: Katharina N. Piechocki, New York University

"If the past is a foreign country, it follows that even the most monoglot of historians is a translator." (Paul Cohen/Peter Burke)

The early twentieth century witnessed not only a variety of aesthetic experiments with language, but also a new wave of writing about language theoretically. The most well-known is the work that shaped what was to become twentieth-century linguistics: Saussure, Meillet, Benveniste, Jakobson, and the like. But it was not just linguists who tried to frame new conceptions of language: a wide variety of intellectuals from other fields decided, as if in concert, that understanding language was the key to understanding the basic problems of their disciplines and, in many cases, the very fate of European society. A few of these intellectuals, like Wittgenstein and J. L.

PopMatters Call for Papers: Pixelated Brains and the New Media
Pitch Deadline: 30 April 2009.
Contact: Karen Zarker

The invitation to "revisit, rethink, revise, renew" in the 2010 CCCC Call for Proposals suggests the important work done when Composition was a young field and scholars such as Richard Braddock and Mina Shaughnessy revisited common wisdom about the teaching, learning and practices of writing; their revisitations allowed them to rethink seeming truths and prompted the field to revise our understandings of error, of the thesis, of the teacher's role in the classroom. This panel proposal undertakes a project in the spirit of these earlier revisitations. Specifically, I am seeking papers that revisit and rethink the intersection of commenting and genre in our freshman writing classes in order to renew our conversations about the work of Composition.

Wikis are becoming increasingly common as pedagogical tools in composition classrooms, as the nature of a wiki allows for easy collaboration among students and increased communication beyond the face-to-face classroom.

I'm hoping to put together a CCCC panel that questions and/or explores commonly held assumptions or beliefs about the wiki. Proposals might also explore how elements found in the traditional classroom change when moved to a wiki.

For example:

- How does the collaborative nature of a wiki change writing?

- Is the wiki truly more democratic than a face-to-face classroom?

- What is the relationship between students and teachers when using a wiki?

- How does the level of engagement change?

Cultures of Recession
An Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference Hosted by The Program in Literature, Duke University
November 20 & 21, 2009

Keynote Speaker: Stanley Aronowitz (CUNY), author of How Class Works and Just Around The Corner: The Paradox of a Jobless Recovery

Eldred and Mortensen, in their article "Reading Literacy Narratives" published in College English (1992), call for the movement of literacy studies "in one important direction: into the study of literary texts" (512). Toward this goal, the article identifies categories of literacy-centered literary texts: the "literacy myth," "narratives of socialization," "literature of the contact zone," and "literacy narratives" (Eldred and Mortensen 512-513). However, to date, this article has failed to make a significant impact on literary criticism.

This panel submission to the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) will examine literacy narratives (broadly defined) that show a link between human dignity and the acquisition or practice of literacy (reading or writing), or the influence of literacy on interpersonal communication and relationships. In particular, we are interested in

*Links (positive or negative) between literacy (the ability to read and/or write) and human dignity

*Portrayals in narrative fiction or creative nonfiction of the acts of reading and writing as a means to understanding of human dignity

*Literate techniques of interaction ("reading" others' actions or personalities) as a means of humanizing or dehumanizing the Other