twentieth century and beyond

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.

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.

This creative session will explore the craft of creating historically informed works of fiction, poetry, digital arts, and other media. Creative writers regularly draw from the past to deepen context, to expand possibilities for material and subject matter, and to potentially illuminate connections between past and present. However, the technical process of integrating historical elements creates many challenges. This session will ask creative writers to share methods they’ve developed to make the past resonate, to energize and pattern historical detail, to maintain an authentic voice, and to make contemporary readers emotionally invest in their material.

This two-day webinar, scheduled for February 19-20, 2020, centers on Muriel Rukeyser’s critically neglected cycle of ten Elegies, published over the span of a decade, from 1939-1948, and recently republished by New Directions.  Rukeyser’s Elegies offer a personal reckoning with failure, both personal and collective. They lament the defeat of liberatory struggles in Spain, the advance of fascism, the devastations of World War II and the Shoah, as well as heart-wrenching personal losses, among them the death of a beloved and the betrayal by friends and co-travelers.

This ACLA seminar seeks papers that reflect on the analytical bridges that might exist between post- political theory and the study of aesthetics broadly conceived. The main question the seminar aims to answer is the following: Decades after everything was declared to be political, what are the affordances, triumphs, and pitfalls of a post-political theory of aesthetics?

Unfurling Unflattening:  Tracing Pedagogical Possibilities within Higher Education

NOTE TO PROSPECTIVE CONTRIBUTORS:  This is a second round call for papers for an edited volume on teaching—and teaching with—Nick Sousanis’s graphic work Unflattening in higher ed.  Additional potential contributions are being sought.  The volume has interest from MIT Press, and is in the later stages of review.

2020 Siegel McDaniel Award for Graduate Research on Philip Roth

The annual Siegel/McDaniel Award, sponsored by the Philip Roth Society, recognizes high-quality graduate student papers written within the past year on any aspect of Philip Roth’s work.

To be considered for the award, eligible graduate students have two options:

1. They can submit a clean copy of their 10-15 page essay, double-spaced, in 12 point Times New Roman font to Maggie McKinley, the Philip Roth Society Program Director, at mmckinle@harpercollege.edu.

While it may be too soon to assess the long-lasting impact that the Covid19 pandemic will have on our societies and ways of life in the future, it is timely to consider how the collective experience of emergency and crisis tends to prompt reflections and critique —sometimes renewed, though not always— on the ways in which we live, as well as tending to inspire new conceptualizations and directions in thought, behavior, policy, and the arts.

22, 23 & 24 June 2021 (Le Mans University, France)
WAR MEMORIES (2020/21) - Sharing War Memories – From the Military to the Civilian
International Conference initiated by  Professor Renée Dickason (Université Rennes 2), Professor  Stéphanie Bélanger (Canadian Institute for Military and Veteran Health Research, Royal Military College of Canada, Kingston, Ontario) and Professor Delphine Letort (Le Mans Université)

"War Memories 2020/21" is delighted to welcome Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Professor Doctor Denis Mukwege as a Guest of Honour.