travel writing

In Atlas of the European Novel, Franco Moretti argues that discourse changes at the border. When we cross geopolitical lines our stories, style, and language all record the shift. As the geographical expansion of modernism continues to occupy an important place in the field, what do national border crossings indicate about the shape of our defined literatures and the disciplinary approaches we use to study them? Might writing, performing, or screening the border itself articulate the "cultural parataxis" Susan Stanford Friedman describes in her model of planetarity?

Central & Eastern Europe's cultural visibility has increased since the 1989 Fall of the Berlin Wall and with Romanian-born German writer Herta Müller's 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature. In light of this new visibility, how are Central/Eastern European cultures and history being taught, both within and outside the region? What has changed in the way these countries (past and present) contribute to the understanding of the cultural configuration of the region or the continent? How and what should educators include in various curricula? How do we teach the communist period to new generations and/or to the West and the rest of the world?

The University of North Texas Graduate Students in English Association (GSEA) invites submissions for its annual graduate conference, to be held on April 8-10, 2016. The GSEA welcomes submissions on a variety of topics related to literary criticism, literary theory, cultural studies, material criticism, rhetoric and composition, English pedagogy, technical communication, poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. Papers/presentations should last no more than 20 minutes.

Conference Location: Sant'Anna Institute, Sorrento (Italy)
Conference Director: Giovanni Spani (College of the Holy Cross)
Conference Coordinator: Marco Marino (Sant'Anna Institute)
Keynote Speaker: Eduardo Urios-Aparisi (University of Connecticut)

Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies
Vol. 43 No. 1 | March 2017

The City and the Anthropocene

Guest editors
Serena Chou (Academia Sinica, Taiwan) & Simon Estok (Sungkyunkwan University, South Korea)

Theorizing Borders in Children's and Young Adult Literature and Culture

English: The Journal of the English Association invites contributions to a special issue on literature, landscape and the environment.

In the years since the publication of seminal texts such as Carson's Silent Spring, and with environmental concerns never more pressing, ecocriticism has become firmly established in literary studies as a way to think about the challenges facing writers and their readers. Moreover, literary critical engagement with the environment has been enriched in recent years through intersectional work with fields as diverse as disability studies, spatial studies, gender theory, and post-humanism.

Issue 4.1: Black Lives Matter

albeit, an innovative, MLA-indexed online journal of scholarship and pedagogy, invites scholarly articles, detailed lesson plans, book reviews, creative pieces, and nonfiction essays exploring the theme of "Black Lives Matter."

Topics for this issue can include, but are not limited to:

Call for Papers

The 6th Issue of Localities

CFP: Academic Cover Versions

Intermezzo, a digital longform publication - http://intermezzo.enculturation.net/ - seeks submissions that deal with the topic of of academic cover versions.

The Centre for Travel Writing Studies (CTWS) at Nottingham Trent University invites postgraduates researching travel writing of all eras to join us in a one-day workshop exploring travel writing 'on the margins' on 30 June 2016.

The Conference will focus on Space and Cinema in order to examine the ways through which cinema deals with spatiality, in its bodily and geographical materiality, as well as in its symbolic and theoretical frameworks.

Heterotopic as it is, screen space juxtaposes several different spaces pertaining to different dimensions (Michael Chanan, The Documentary Chronotope, 2000): both mise en scène and cinematic dispositifs spatialize the gaze, the vanishing point where the filmic and the pro-filmic intersect. Space is therefore represented, conveyed and appropriated by the cinematic apparatus, calling into question the historical, political and philosophical aspects of an aesthetics of spatiality in a broad sense.

As queer theory continues to evolve and utopian studies dusts itself off from its relative dormancy until the late twentieth century, the two strands of thought have grabbed ahold of one another in hopes to uncover just what "The Future" might mean to those identifying as queer. This panel seeks papers wishing to join the vibrant conversation of the relationship between queerness and utopianism. Is queerness inherently utopic? Is the future inherently queer? How might queer individuals enact utopic desires? Can we find moments of the queerly utopic and utopicly queer in canonical and non-canonical literature?

The English Language Conference seeks papers from scholars in all fields of English, including but not limited to Literature, Rhetoric and Composition, TESL, Creative Writing, and Education. This year's theme is "First Contact." We are looking for stories of first encounters with uncharted themes and outlying characters, texts, and authors.