CALL FOR PAPERS: THORNTON WILDER AS AMERICAN WRITER Special Session at
The American Literature Association 17th Annual Conference
May 25-28, 2006 at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Embarcadero Center
Sponsored by The Thornton Wilder Society

Possible Approaches:

Wilder and his works as products of American culture:

early life in Madison, WI; Berkeley, CA; Oberlin College; Yale.
teaching career at Lawrenceville School, NJ; University of Chicago; Harvard.
novels, plays, screenplays, essays, letters.

Analysis of novels and plays as they depict American characters in
American settings acting in American ways in accordance with American
values

beginning with "The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act,"
then the novel "Heaven's My Destination," and on to the major plays: "Our
Town" (Pulitzer Prize), "The Merchant of Yonkers" (revised as "The
Matchmaker," adapted as "Hello, Dolly!"), "The Skin of Our Teeth"
(Pulitzer Prize). Also possible are his novels "The Eighth Day" (National
Book Award) and "Theophilus North," two play cycles "The Seven Deadly
Sins" and "The Seven Ages of Man" reprinted in "The Collected Short Plays
of Thornton Wilder Volume I" (TCG), and the Alfred Hitchcock film "Shadow
of a Doubt," for which Wilder wrote the first draft of the screenplay.

Wilder/his works compared to his American contemporaries (e.g., Hemingway,
Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Faulkner, Eliot, O'Neill, Odets, Williams, Miller)

The term "American" in any of the above is open to investigation, as in
the continuing process of redefining "America" and "American" for the
twenty-first century.

E-mail abstracts by January 10th, 2006 to

Lincoln Konkle
konkleli_at_tcnj.edu

or snail-mail to

Lincoln Konkle
Department of English
The College of New Jersey
P.O. Box 7718
Ewing, NJ 08628-0718

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Received on Sun Nov 27 2005 - 16:44:46 EST