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Outside the Western Box—In Search of the Primary
Organized by the Charles Olson Society
American Literature Association, May 27-30, 2021
The Charles Olson Society will sponsor a session at the American Literature Association Conference, to be held in Boston, May 27-30, 2021.
This seminar aims to identify and investigate privileged genres in literature and film for the articulation and revision of state power in the Global North and South. In the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, theorists hailing from a variety of disciplines prognosticated a state with significantly diminished powers. Whether despite or because of “governmentality”(Foucault, Brown), “Empire” (Hardt and Negri), “the network society” (Castells), or “regionalism” (Söderbaum, Kai), recent history and current events bear witness to the consolidation of state power, as well as states’ increasing willingness to violently repress perceived threats within and without their own borders. Wherein lies this power? What sanctions the exercise of it?
Call For Papers: Anonymous Thought
Postmodern Culture
deadline for proposals: January 1, 2021 to pomoculture@gmail.com
https://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern-culture
From arborescence to the rhizome, plants have long served as models for thinking in philosophy, biology, and the arts. In recent years, scholars including Michael Marder, Catriona Sandilands, and Jeffrey Nealon have brought renewed attention to the agency and dynamism of the vegetal, at the same time that the future of plant life has come to be at risk in the wake of climate change and the impending collapse of ecosystems. This panel invites papers that explore ways of thinking about and with plants in the shadow of the Anthropocene. How do writers and visual artists, past and present, help us renegotiate our relationship to the vegetal today?
The idea that studying the humanities generates more empathy and compassion is one that is now commonly understood. However, the humanities have been at a crossroads for these past ten odd years, since the rise of the digital humanities as “the next big thing” (Panapacker, 2009). Staunch advocates of the traditional humanities would look back and defend the discipline's ongoing relevance from its inception. Although there has been much-needed innovation in the humanities in recent years, partly in response to greater funding and public fervor for so-called “STEM” fields, it has not been without controversy.
**DEADLINE EXTENDED **
This panel seeks presentations on Gloria Anzaldúa’s legacy in contemporary theory and literature. It welcomes discussions of displacement, duality, limit and boundary transgression, border culture as well as Chicanx and Latinx identity and experience today. The goal of the panel is not just to discuss the now but also to keep constructing a bridge of border consciousness and mestizaje.
It is 50 years since the publication of Jacques Derrida’s « La mythologie blanche: la métaphore dans le texte philosophique » in the journal Poétique (1971). As the proofs of La mythologie blanche held in the archives testify, the essay draws on the course Théorie du discours philosophique that Derrida taught between 1969 and 1971. The essay, which at the time sparked an important debate, has today receded from the forestage of philosophical discussion. In the original course, Derrida explores the relationship between philosophy and other discourses and the possibility of a theory of philosophical discourse.
Please consider submitting a manuscript for our special issue, Opening the Ecological Text, in the peer-reviewed, open-access journal, Humanities. Here is the call for papers and the link where you can submit:
Synthesis (14. 2021)
https://ejournals.epublishing.ekt.gr/index.php/synthesis/index
Abstracts of 300 words should be submitted to Aude Haffen at marie-aude.haffen@univ-montp3.fr and synthesisjournal2008@gmail.com by 20 December 2020.
Notification of acceptance will be delivered by 11 January 2021.
https://acla.secure-platform.com/a/solicitations/2/sessiongallery/166 EMERGENCY, My Friends!
Request for Chapters
Embodied Environmental Risk in Technical Communication: Local and Global Contexts
Deadline for Proposal Submissions: October 15, 2020.
We invite chapter proposals from both scholars and practitioners of environmental and disaster risk communication for an edited collection which the ATTW Book Series Editor, Tharon Howard, has invited us to submit for consideration for the research line of the ATTW Book Series in Technical and Professional Communication.
The fiction produced in a particular historical moment reflects a society’s values. So, what can we learn about our contemporary value systems from murdering, terrorizing, and drug-abusing characters like Patrick Bateman, Tyler Durden, and Mark Renton, who reject so many of the major cultural norms that constitute Western capitalist societies? Texts like Ellis’s American Psycho, Palahniuk’s Fight Club, and Welsh’s Trainspotting have been dubbed “transgressive fiction” because of the sense in which their characters cross and deconstruct boundaries by opposing, disregarding, and subverting hegemonic paradigms.
Abstract This panel will seek to explore the changing relationship between scientific paradigms and society’s self-understanding as it is manifest in the novel form. If the novel itself has functioned as a record of the social imagination—a narrative ideologeme as Jameson describes it – this social imagination often borrowed its models from contemporary natural philosophy and later the social sciences. We see examples of this in Balzac’s use of taxonomical zoology, Sterne’s use of Cartesian “animal spirits,” or Joyce’s phylogenetic process in “Oxen of the Sun.” Some of the questions this panel will ask include: how do naturalistic sociological models help to mediate political and aesthetic theories? How do these models affect stylistic developments?
Afro-pessimism and Black Optimism in the Afterlife of Slavery
Northeast Modern Language Association 52nd Annual Convention, March 11-14, 2021
Chair: Eugene Pae, State University of New York at Albany (epae@albany.edu)
The battle against COVID-19 provides the latest example of war used as a metaphor. That is, it exemplifies the persistent, if not seemingly obligatory way that we deploy war as a metaphor against “enemies” such as “crime” and “drugs.” This ubiquitous practice stages metaphorical battlefields and soldiers, including hospitals and healthcare professionals, grocery stores and delivery workers. We might consider how deploying the metaphor of “war” against coronavirus reaps various costs and benefits to its figuration as such. On one hand, local to global populations are recruited to band together against disease. Personal sacrifice and national resources receive renewed attention.
Afro-pessimism and Black Optimism in the Afterlife of Slavery
Northeast Modern Language Association 52nd Annual Convention, March 11-14, 2021
Chair: Eugene Pae, State University of New York at Albany (epae@albany.edu)
Co-Sponsored by Oklahoma Baptist University, The University of Texas at Dallas, and the Sigma Tau Delta Southwestern Region.
Date:
Saturday, November 7, 2020
Location:
Virtual
Purpose:
The Southwestern Region of Sigma Tau Delta contains a multitude of diverse narratives. During the 2020 Symposium, we want to encourage members to expand their own narratives by listening to and discussing the narratives of others. Our goal is to create a vibrant, unified identity for our Region built upon an appreciation and understanding of the diversity of narratives within it.
Description:
NeMLA 2021: Philadelphia, PA. March 11-14, 2021. Given the pandemic, remote participation on this panel is not only possible, but welcomed.
Short Description of the Panel
Following a wave of interest in care and care relations in literary studies and the scholarship of teaching and learning, this panel invites all manner of submissions that explore what it means to care about or care for the Digital Humanities, its practitioners, audiences, and material objects.
Submission Instructions
Theorising Caste: Castes of Theory
3 Day International Webinar
organized by
The Department of Sociology, West Bengal State University
(in collaboration with the IQAC)
Registration Link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdIZoX7wHc6js60GCgGVj_A9vSD6UxbHOnEtOufmhqCL3MrCA/viewform
In a letter to Lucilius, Seneca distinguishes between a person's being and "the trappings in which he is clothed," urging his interlocutor to "consider [the] soul" in order to distinguish true being from false appearance. In addition to the distinction he makes between being and appearance, Seneca indicates here an analytical tool by which Lucilius can learn to see beyond illusory appearances in order to comprehend the true nature of things (animum intuere). Seneca's instrumental approach to this analysis constitutes a major component of the Ancient tradition of introspective analysis: across genres ancient authors such as Virgil, Propertius, Martial, Horace, Tacitus, Plato, and Aristotle performed similar analyses.
In a time of unrest and division, the WEJ is interested in strengthening connections. While the WEJ remains focused on student writing in high school, community college, and university environments, it is also crucial for scholars to consider the transition from secondary to post-secondary education and how instructors at each level can work with students who are developing writing expertise. To that end, the WEJ would like to welcome submissions on a variety of related topics:
CFP / / What Goes Up Must Come Down: High and Low Theories of the Victorian Novel
This panel examines high and low theories of the Victorian novel. Value of the 19th-century novel has fluctuated over time and under the influence of critics. Taking core theories into renewed consideration, this panel aims to gain perspective over high and low culture in its relation to the novel.
In the mid-twentieth century, Kenneth Burke's massive body of work on the "new rhetoric" was widely considered to be a watershed for the rhetorical tradition and its interlocutors. Routing classical and new rhetorical concepts through contemporary understandings of the unconscious, ideology, media, discourse, literature, politics, ecology, and economics, Burke rendered "mere rhetoric" relevant to the concerns of modernity. In 2020, his trailblazing approaches to terms such as identification, orientation, attitude, hierarchy, interpretation, occupation, action, trope, etc.
Despite the proliferation of critical engagements with theories of reading by scholars of literary studies, it seems fair to say that relatively little has changed since Paul de Man claimed, “the resistance to theory is in fact a resistance to reading, a resistance that is perhaps at its most effective, in contemporary studies, in the methodologies that call themselves theories of reading but nevertheless avoid the function they claim as their object” (The Resistance to Theory 15). This panel asks, is this resistance brought to a theory of reading, as if from “the outside,” or is resistance internal to any theory of reading? In what ways does reading generate and/or depend on its own resistances?
The problem of method in literary scholarship continues, with the contemporary wave of “ways of reading” reanimating it through proposals of postcritique, surface reading, reparative reading, descriptive reading, distant reading, denotative reading, and so on. Many of these new approaches do their own critical work of locating and addressing the ideological implications of more traditional scholarly practices (as when Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick posits reparative reading against a tradition of paranoid reading, or when Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus advocate for surface reading against symptomatic reading). At the same time, many of these new approaches to methodology have also been brought to task for not being politically self-reflective enough.
THE MINEASTRY OF POSTCOLLAPSE ART AND CULTURE: CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS AND CULTURAL WORKERS NETWORKED FOR RESILIENCE BEYOND THE ANTHROPOCENE (VIRTUAL PANEL)
The MLA has recently opened slots for additional “just-in-time” sessions for this year’s convention (to be held virtually from January 7-10, 2021). The session organizers invite abstracts for 15-minute presentations exploring the work of William Wordsworth in light of this year’s convention theme of ‘persistence.’
This ACLA seminar seeks papers that reflect on the analytical bridges that might exist between post- political theory and the study of aesthetics broadly conceived. The main question the seminar aims to answer is the following: Decades after everything was declared to be political, what are the affordances, triumphs, and pitfalls of a post-political theory of aesthetics?