twentieth century and beyond

Sixth Annual Post45 Graduate Symposium

February 19-20 and 26-27, 2021

Keynote Speaker: Annie McClanahan 

Additional Faculty Participation by Srimayee Basu, Chris Fan, Oren Izenburg, Virginia Jackson, Joseph Jonghyun Jeon, Theodore Martin, and Rahda Radakrishnan

Post45 seeks graduate-level works-in-progress related to post-1945 literature and culture. We particularly welcome submissions that expand our conception of post-1945 literature’s histories, boundaries, and future trajectories, or place it in a comparative, transnational, or hemispheric frame.

We invite presentation proposals for the 2021 NeMLA Annual Conference, to be held virtually Mach 11-14.  

The current COVID-19 pandemic highlights the relationship between disaster, racism, and comedy in unexpected ways. Fear, hostility, and open acts of violence towards Asian bodies, the perceived carriers of disease, are naturalized in part through their exaggerated and comic portrayals. The images of Oriental “gross” food consumers in Hazmat suits and masks circulate via internet memes and anecdotes of personal encounters, generating a shared normal response of derision and repulsion. What is so funny, though? 

What is boredom and why do we feel bored? Recently, research on boredom has gained momentum in the scientific community, particularly in neuroscience and clinical psychology, where the symptoms of boredom and the behavioral patterns of the bored person are scrutinized (i.e. Boredomlab). Boredom, however, has been explored by philosophers for centuries and has been making a persistent appearance in the modern novel from nineteenth and century to present, in the moments of contemplation, waiting, idleness or complaints of bored characters.

The Spanish Flu of 1918-19 killed somewhere between 50 to 100 million people, but it did not infect every country. The Covid-19 pandemic of 2019-20 has not killed nearly as many people, but is arguably the first event in human history that affects every person on the planet. The Greek word pándemos means “belonging to all the people.” The Covid-19 pandemic belongs to everyone. It shows, in dramatic fashion, how we are all connected.

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES

2023 SPECIAL ISSUE

THE BOREDOMS OF LATE MODERNITY

 Twożywo, Kiedy wreszcie będzie wojna (When there will finally be a war), 2001

CALL FOR PAPERS

Description: 

This session will analyze representations of armed conflict in contemporary media, exploring how these representations might influence the popular understanding of global and civil conflict and the way that these representations of conflict might be read as an attempt to change (or maintain) a certain world. We welcome a broad range of papers, particularly aiming for a global perspective on the ethical debate of representing armed conflict in stylized media, as we interrogate how these representations might affect popular imaginations of conflict and how we as researchers might form an analytical approach to representations of conflict.

Abstract:

Call for Papers

Poetry & Poetics (Critical)

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

42nd Annual Conference, Week of February 22-27, 2021

http://www.southwestpca.org

Submission Deadline: November 13, 2020

For the 2021 Conference, SWPACA is going virtual! Due to concerns regarding COVID-19, we will be holding our annual conference completely online this year. We hope you will join us for exciting papers, discussions, and the experience you’ve come to expect from Southwest.

POPULAR CULTURE ASSOCIATON -- PULP STUDIES AREA

Call for Papers, Caribbean Literature at CEA 2021April 8-10, 2021 | Birmingham, AlabamaBirmingham Sheraton Hotel The College English Association, a gathering of scholar-teachers in English studies, welcomes proposals for presentations on Caribbean Literature for our 52nd annual conference. The general conference theme is “justice,” so we are especially interested in presentations that feature topics relating to justice in texts, disciplines, people, cultural studies, media, and pedagogy.

We welcome individual and panel presentation proposals that address Caribbean literature in general, including—but not limited to—the following possible themes:

Northeast Modern Language Association 2021 (Panel) - Virtual Conference, March 11 - 14, 2021
Updated Submission Deadline - Abstracts due by October 11th

Proliferations of Lovecraft
A Global Interdisciplinary Conference

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

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.