twentieth century and beyond

Who are the unsung heroes of fantastical literature? Who deserves to be recognised for their significant contribution to contemporary Anglophone Fantastika literature but are pushed out of the limelight? This edited companion to fantastical literature hopes to address gaps in research by bringing together considerations of important but underexamined authors and artists. Depending on the number of abstracts received, the collection may be further divided into separate sections – or even individual volumes – taking into consideration different media:

The editors of Tinakori: Critical Journal of the Katherine Mansfield Society are seeking scholarly essays for publication in the sixth volume of the journal. Essays that address any aspect of Mansfield and her writing will be considered. Tinakori is committed to publishing innovative and rigorous research into one of the most significant women authors of the early twentieth century. It is an official online series recognised by the British Library with its own ISSN number: ISSN 2514-6106.

Speculative fiction covers a broad range of narrative styles and genres.  The cohesive element that pulls works together under the category is that there is some “unrealistic” element, whether it’s magical, supernatural, or a futuristic/technological development: works that fall into the category stray from conventional realism in some way.   For this reason, speculative fiction can be quite broad, including everything from fantasy and magical realism to horror and science fiction—from China Miéville to Margaret Atwood to Philip K. Dick. This panel aims to explore those unrealistic elements and all their varied implications about society, politics, economics, and more. 

CALL FOR PAPERS

MONSTERS & MONSTROUS BODIES IN AMERICAN CULTURE AND SOCIETY

SPONSORED BY THE MONSTERS & THE MONSTROUS AREA OF THE NORTHEAST POPULAR CULTURE/AMERICAN CULTURE ASSOCIATION

PROPOSALS BY 13 MARCH 2022

CFP Fair Unknowns: Extending the Corpus of Arthurian Texts

Sponsored by the Alliance for the Promotion of Research on the Matter of Britain

Collection edited by Carl Sell, Lock Haven University, and Michael A. Torregrossa, Independent Scholar.

Proposals due by 1 June 2022

This traditional session welcomes submissions on any representation of nonhuman animals or animality in southern literature from the last century. With the development of posthumanism and human-animal studies over the last few decades, nonhuman animals in literature invite readers to no longer consider them as only symbols of human experience, but instead as literary agents of cultural change for both human and nonhuman worlds. Particularly, this panel seeks to explore how those nonhuman animals are active in southern literature. Panelists may be interested in examining nonhuman animals or animality in a single southern text, a southern author’s oeuvre, or an entire southern genre.

CUNY Graduate Center English Student Association Conference (virtual/online)

Friday, April 29 & Saturday, April 30, 2022

CFP EXTENSION to 03/27/2022

Breakin’ BLACK Reachin’ Back is an experiential conversation engaging with Black intellectual, political and creative concepts through the primary disciplinary nodes of Black studies, Hip Hop and DJ scholarship. This virtual two day gathering centers practitioners as theorists, interdisciplinarity and public humanities through roundtable panel conversations, keynote presentations including musical and dance performances followed by discussion/Q&A, and breakout sessions. 

This panel considers Wynter’s letter as a call to challenge present truths of biocentrism, classifications of humanness, and the condemnation of “the speech of the street” to cultivate new modes of knowing/feeling. 250 word abstract. Contact: Amari Mitchell (amari.mitchell@rutgers.edu) or Diana Molina (diana.molina@rutgers.edu). 

• If you are invited to participate in a 2023 session, you must be an MLA member by 7 April 2022. 

• All session participants must register for the convention.

Topics may include but not limited to:

This week-long workshop will bring together both critical and creative writers to support one another in the development of new written work across a wide range of “popular” genres, forms and approaches. “Genres Against the Market” aims to foster a temporary community to encourage radical writers to explore new methods for reaching unconventional audiences toward a critique of economic limitation and possibility. Leaving aside the familiar form of the conventional academic essay and monograph, we aim to host a gathering to explore how radical ideas that challenge reigning forms of social and economic power can be expressed and broadcast using “popular” formats of writing.  

Paul Ricoeur insisted there is always more meaning than can be articulated, appropriated, or understood. This session seeks enactments, explorations, and reconsiderations of his Interpretation Theory 50 years later. Though the book was published in 1976, Ricoeur delivered the lectures in fall 1973. It was a period of social and intellectual reckoning similar to our own. Ricoeur had recently relocated to the University of Chicago from Paris-Nanterre under criticism for his attempts to mitigate conflicts during the 1968 student uprisings. In parallel with this personal crisis, Ricoeur was turning in his thought from considerations of symbolic interpretation to considerations of texts and their social and political dimensions.

Penn State’s Center for American Literary Studies presents

“Now What?” What Now?: Approaching a Present in Precarity

Friday, March 18, 2022, Noon–1:00 p.m. EST via Zoom

 Register here

https://psu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_0pGKj_fCSnKc6u7ViHV4Ig

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email

 containing information about joining the webinar.

Religion and Literature

“Post-Now” in Religion and Literature: MMLA Convention

Minneapolis, MN. November 16-22, 2022

The Religion and Literature Permanent Section invites proposals that engage with the 2022 Midwest MLA conference’s theme: Post-Now. Proposals might consider the following questions: How does literature speculate about religion? How do writers shape and reshape the religion that they imagine? How do writers create belief systems? How do different writers construct their vision of future religion? How and why did writers of the past get things wrong?

After D. H. Lawrence’s mother died, his father “struggled through half a page” of The White Peacock. After he had finished reading, he asked his son what he had been paid for the novel. When Lawrence told him his father

looked at me with shrewd eyes, as if I were a swindler. “Fifty pounds! An’ tha’s niver done a day’s hard work in thy life.”

How has the Covid-19 pandemic changed or disrupted the contours of childhood both as a cultural concept and a lived experience? The term childhoods in this panel refers simultaneously to the complex and infinitely varied experiences of people called children while also evoking a shifting set of cultural investments, projections, desires, and disavowals.