theory

In the years leading up to the publication of The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot decried what he called the moral cowardice endemic to post-war London, and particularly to its literary circles.  D. H. Lawrence was similarly preoccupied with morality in his literary critical essays, writing, for example, that "Morality in the novel is the trembling instablity of the balance [between opposing forces].  When the novelist puts his thumb in the scale, to pull down the balance to his own predilection, that is immorality."  And, finally, Hemingway once suggested to a group of professors that of all his novels, the best to teach is The Sun Also Rises because, he said, it is a "very moral novel."

This session welcomes papers that delve deeply into the shared spaces between literature and philosophy for this year's PAMLA Conference in Los Angeles, California (Nov. 11-Nov. 13, 2022).  Literature has had a long history of being discerned and practiced through the philosophical. From the early writings of Plato to the contemporary work of Martha Nussbaum, literature has generated invaluable resources of epistemology, normativity, aesthetics, and studies of language and consciousness (among other critical fields of study).

“A metaphor,” wrote philosopher Monroe Beardsley in his Aesthetics (1958), “is a miniature poem, and the explication of a metaphor is a model for all explication.” Beardsley recognized the interpretive value of the trope, and metaphor offers a rich site to deepen cultural, artistic, and literary understanding of the early modern period. This panel seeks papers across disciplines that offer new theoretical frameworks for engaging with early modern metaphor. It also aims to foster transdisciplinary dialogue among panelists. Possible topics include visual metaphor, scientific and mathematical metaphor, metaphor in translation, poetic and literary metaphor, legal metaphor, Renaissance theories of metaphor, and problems of interpretation.

Panel Description:

Puppets tread the threshold between human and object. On the one hand, they can appear as ideal revisions of the human, on the other as profoundly inhuman entities, characterized by their impertinent refusal to obey human laws, whether of language, feeling, or even mortality. Puppets exist at the nexus of the conference theme: quotidian objects invested with a fantasy of animation, of interiority, of drives, and independent goal states.

The Object in/of PsychoanalysisCornell University Psychoanalysis Reading Group Conference September  23-24, 2022 (in person) 
Keynote Address: Joan Copjec (Brown University)  Deadline for Paper Submissions: June 1, 2022 (300 words abstract)e-mail: conferenceparg@gmail.com 

 

The Object in/of PsychoanalysisCornell University Psychoanalysis Reading Group Conference September  23-24, 2022 (in person)  Keynote Address: Joan Copjec (Brown University)  Deadline for Paper Submissions: June 1, 2022 (300 words abstract)e-mail: conferenceparg@gmail.com 

Call for Special Issue paper proposals:

Wombs and Tombs: Hauntings and Generational Trauma in Arab Women’s Writing

To be aimed at Contemporary Women’s Writing or the Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies

 Verdades con minúscula. Confrontaciones con la realidad en la narrativa contemporánea

Anglo Saxonica is a multidisciplinary journal that publishes original and innovative research on a variety of issues relevant to the study of English(es), broadly understood both as language and as all the literatures and cultures of the English-speaking world. In so doing, Anglo Saxonica also promotes dialogue among English-speaking geocultural areas. Its editorial policy promotes the thematic cohesion of each volume, open to different academic approaches on current issues in English and American studies, including original research articles, reviews, interviews and selections of creative writing. The journal also publishes special issues with a particular thematic focus that are guest-edited by leading scholars in the field.

Recent essays and articles in publications like The Atlantic and Vox have voiced growing concerns about the increasing elasticity of “trauma.” Even so, those same texts note the value of recognizing others’ trauma and of responding ethically to their stories. This worth is particularly evident in the wake of the many Covid-related traumatic events and the most recent racial reckonings (that may or may not have occurred) in the US and around the world.

From Language to Psychology and from Ideology to Destruction: Exploring the Fossilization and the Liberation of the Mind

Call for chapter proposals

Dr Chris Shei

I am currently soliciting chapters for the Routledge Companion to Working-Class Literature, which is under contract and scheduled to appear next year. Most of the contributors are already confirmed, so I am looking for essays on particular subjects. These include:

• theories of working-class literature

• pre-industrial literature by workers

• working-class literature in the Global South

• African-American, Asian-American, and Latinx working-class literature

• queer working-class literature

• the future of working-class literature and literary studies

When mass movements are rising up against so-called “gender ideology” and succeeding in implementing anti-trans and anti-queer legislation across the globe, has the time come to reconsider—or perhaps even suspend—radical critiques of queer liberalism, homonormativity, and homonationalism? Elżbieta Korolczuk and Agnieszka Graff, for instance, have asserted that “while feminists, mostly from the global South, have long critiqued the discourse of universal human rights and the neocolonial elements in UN population policies, today it is clear that a wholesale rejection of universalism plays into the hands of right-wing populists” (816).

https://www.ncgsjournal.com/cfp.htmlThe term aslant slips between categories: as an adverb it indicates a direction or orientation, but as a preposition it moves across. Neither is it straight nor does it ever quite arrive, remaining in transition. A vowel away from Emily Dickinson’s imperative for poets to “tell it slant,” it strays even further.