twentieth century and beyond

CFP: Special Issue: MAST Journal
TOTAL SCREEN: Why Jean Baudrillard, Once Again? 

Guest editors:
Katharina Niemeyer (University of Québec in Montréal)
Magali Uhl (University of Québec in Montréal)

Extended deadline for full submissions: 15th November 2020 (for publication in May 2021).

Bengali author Rabindranath Tagore, the first non-Westerner to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, was a prolific writer in diverse literary genres, including both long and short-form fiction. This panel explores similarities and differences between Tagore’s short stories on the one hand, and his novellas and novels, on the other. Did the Bengali author tend to treat specific themes at length while reserving other motifs for his shorter fiction? Concerning setting, characterization, and plot trajectory, what are similarities and differences between Tagore’s shorter tales and his novels? Are there differences between Tagore’s stories and his novels regarding their accessibility and currency in the present day and for transnational audiences?

Re-reading Adrienne Rich in the quickly shifting crises of the year 2020, one senses the renewed urgency of her ethico-political project as a citizen poet seeking to “believe the fever can break, the sick body politic come back to life” (A Human Eye 98). Throughout her poetic career Rich challenged the perceived disconnect between poetry and material social good, and while her early and mid-career poems may be the most frequently anthologized, the poetry and prose she published in the second half of her six-decade project continues an extraordinary trajectory of expanding solidarities and poetic technique.

Sustainability in the Time of Covid-19
A Global Interdisciplinary Conference

Sunday 18th April 2021 - Monday 19th April 2021
Vienna, Austria

This is a call for papers for a panel to run at NeMLA 2021, which will be conducted virtually March 11-14, 2021. Submit an abstract by September 30, 2020 here: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/18807

This panel seeks to convene a conversation that theorizes the relationship between the detective novel, the art novel as it has been understood since modernism, and professional literary study—and in doing so move the critical study of detective fiction beyond the impulse to validate the genre as an object of study or redeem it from the stigma of genre.

While the expressive potential for programming and writing is closely associated with corporate use (such as customer-facing chatbots, aggregate sentiment analysis of product reviews, and text generators), there are authors who build and use these tools to reveal something about, and generate, literature. Out of this emerges a poetics of programming that can serve to reconceptualize how we think of and consider the place of programming in a creative writing classroom. The rich history of digital poetics is being rapidly advanced by authors like Allison Parrish, Nick Montfort, Milton Laufer, Rafael Perez y Perez, Stephanie Strickland, and more.

52nd Northeast Modern Language Association Convention

March 11-14, 2021 / Philadelphia, PA

In light of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and public debate about who or what kind of work is deemed “essential,” this panel seeks to examine the intersection of literature and labor, prioritizing depictions of precarious workers who are sacrificing their personal well-being for the public good, but also to maintain their own economic security.

Giant Steps: Coltrane, Space, and Innovation

The Savoy Ballroom in New York, Preservation Hall in New Orleans, the intersection of 12th Street and Vine in Kansas City, and the Green Mill on Chicago’s North Side all stand as cradles for jazz tradition.

How does one site those spaces though that have housed jazz innovations, like 1511 North 33rd in Philadelphia, John Coltrane’s Strawberry Mansion?Where are the places that jazz can call home? Improvisations and experimentation certainly, but what spaces and which places make those transitions in the artform, its delivery, and reception?

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?

Seeking proposals for an edited book of chapters on “theatre-fiction”, i.e. novels and stories about theatre.

This panel will consider Jennifer Egan’s work in light of the post-90s literary and cultural movements emerging after postmodernism. While these contemporary trends have different names and aims (post-postmodernism, metamodernism, new sincerity, post-irony, digimodernism, performatism, the neoliberal novel, and many more), they all attempt to critique and move beyond postmodernism in some concentrated way. We invite papers that locate and complicate Egan’s work in relation to these contemporary movements.

ennifer Egan will be the convention's keynote speaker this year.

Popular culture scholars often refer to a 40-year cycle of nostalgia, and so it is not surprising that there has been a recent wave of movies and television shows set in the 1980s.  The Netflix series Stranger Things, the film IT: Chapter One, the interactive film Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, and the ninth season of American Horror Story, titled “1984,” all provide prominent examples of recent texts that have used the semantic texture of the 1980s as a dramatic setting.  The fact that these texts all use the ’80s as a context for horror stories suggests the sense that an undercurrent of demonic violence undergirds the glittering fads, suburban affluence, and Reaganite yuppieism associated with the 1980s, even as these te

In the late 70s, the protraction of the Cold War’s tensions and the shift from Fordism towards neoliberal economics reshaped the political and public sphere within the Western block. The traditional spaces of politics lost their pivotal role, resulting in what was perceived as a general crisis of militant politics. In a 2011 interview with Justice spatiale | Spatial Justice, rereading Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey posited that this perception stemmed from the inability of the Left to include the urban dimension in its analytical framework.