twentieth century and beyond

Call for Papers: What’s Jewish about death? - A Special Issue of SHOFAR: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

Guest Editors: Laura Limonic, Assistant Professor of Sociology, SUNY Old Westbury; Tahneer Oksman, Assistant Professor of Academic Writing, Marymount Manhattan College

Journal Editors: Eugene Avrutin, University of Illinois; Ranen Omer-Sherman, University of Louisville

In the American cultural imagination, the Midwest embodies the “home” or “heart” of the nation associated with frontier and rural values of promise, fertility, order, and stability, according to Joanna Jacobson in “The Idea of the Midwest.” Jacobson argues that the Midwest has come to symbolize the quintessentially “American,” speaking to “the impulse to invent a myth of commonality rooted in the physical landscape at the center of the continent and for the insufficiency of that myth as a response to the conditions of urban industrial culture.” While the idea and image of the Midwest in American culture serve as resources of recovery and refuge from the ill effects of urban industrialism, it is increasingly evident that these visions of a pastor

Seminar at the Northeast Modern Language Association 50th Anniversary Convention in Washington, DC, March 21-24, 2019.

Please submit your abstract (300-500 words) through the NeMLA system: www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/17589 

‘What happens when Derrida, a great thinker, becomes silent? What becomes of Derrida, what becomes of his friends, those who read him, think through him, speak to him?’(Douzinas, “Adieu Derrida”) With this rhetoric question, Costas Douzinas starts a book Adieu Derrida, in which renowned contemporary thinkers (Jean-Luc Nancy, Alain Badiou, Gayatri Spivak, Slavoj Žižek and others) reflect on the intellectual legacy of one of the most important philosophical figures of 20thcentury, Jacques Derrida. Indeed, what does it mean now, after almost 15 years after Derrida’s death, to read him, to think through him, to speak to him? 

The ongoing comparison of the current administration to the Nixon administration calls for a reexamination of the scandal that brought down the latter. Befitting NeMLA’s conference location, this panel seeks to reexamine classic and contemporary depictions of Watergate in order to illuminate the scandal’s connections between literature, film and American politics and culture from the seventies to the present. Accordingly, this panel seeks readings of Watergate, past and present, as depicted in film, literature and culture. Readings can also reexamine Watergate as a moment in American cultural memory and its contemporary ramifications.