twentieth century and beyond

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 October 11, 2020 [deadline extended] 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.

Stories from ancient Greek myths dot the literary landscape of the early 21st century. To some extent, this has been the result of deliberate planning, as when Canongate began publishing a series of mythological retellings by well-known authors in 2005. But alongside and independent of such coordinated efforts to keep old tales alive for contemporary audiences, offerings from both established authors (David Malouf, Barry Unsworth, Colm Toibin, Pat Barker) and successful newcomers (Madeline Miller, Daisy Johnson) have likewise retold and reimagined mythical narratives in recent years.

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

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

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).

Caribbean novelists, poets, and playwrights have contributed inestimable riches to the world of literature. How have the themes and styles of established Caribbean voices, including Brathwaite, Walcott, Cliff, and Naipaul, been adapted or diverged from by younger Caribbean voices? Abstracts should be a maximum of 300 words and be submitted via the Northeast Modern Language Association website. Go to http://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention/callforpapers/submit.html

To what extent have 19th-century British novelists, such as Austen, Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy, influenced the works of contemporary British writers? Is there a continuity of themes and styles, or have 21st-century British authors fundamentally broken away from examples of the past? Abstracts should be a maximum of 300 words and be submitted via the Northeast Modern Language Association website. Go to http://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention/callforpapers/submit.html

Music and Nationalism
3rd Global Interdisciplinary Conference

Friday 16th April 2021 - Saturday 17th April 2021
Vienna, Austria

Music is commonly regarded as a universal language, and yet it is also through music that the fiercest of nationalistic sentiments and inspirations for protest and rebellion have been expressed.

Call for Papers – CLOSURE: The Kiel University e-Journal for Comics Studies #8 (November 2021) / Thematic Section: »Non-Narrative Comics«

Open Section

In the fall of 2021, CLOSURE will once again offer a forum for all facets of comics studies. From literary, cultural, media, social and image research to the sciences and beyond: the seventh edition of CLOSURE continues our ongoing search for the best and most innovative articles and reviews representing the state of the art in comics research. We welcome detailed close readings as much as comics theory and pioneering approaches to the medium — our open section comprises a diverse range of interdisciplinary studies of all things ›comic‹.

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