Deadline extended for panels:

------------------------------------------------------
Where is Now?: Articulating Post-Post-Modernity

With the publication and popularization of Lyotard=92s The Post-Modern
Condition in 1979 came a contradictorily tangible articulation of a
contemporary social ethos. Whether we in 2005 read postmodernism as an
extension of modernism, or a reaction to it, depends on where we locate
ourselves=97what and how we read. Here in Canada, there are those who follo=
w
the loping trajectory of Charles G.D. Roberts who writes that =93with us, i=
t
[is] not revolution, but evolution,=94 and there are those devout
Kroetsch-ites who believe that Canadian writers skipped directly from
Victorianism to postmodernism. But where are we now? Has postmodernism
been exhausted by a parasitic branch of deconstruction? Are we in
post-post-modernity, and if so, what is the framework/fragmentation by
which we may mark our location? This panel calls for papers which
investigate these questions by probing the subcutaneous layer of
literature, theory, and criticism. What lies beyond text and texts? Are we
simply regurgitating the now-dated mission statements of postmodernism by
extending it, or are we somehow reacting to it?

Questions and topics could include, but are not limited to:

-the articulation of a post-post-modernity
-the return to realism
-deconstruction as finite or infinite
-where is now?
-hypertextuality
-re/turning to the past
-the limits of literature and criticism

Papers should be between 15-20 minutes in length. Abstracts are due 25
January, 2006. The conference will be held on March 10th and 11th at the
University of Calgary in Calgary, AB, Canada. Please submit 250-word
abstracts to: Owen Percy odfpercy_at_ucalgary.ca

Canadian Literature: A Bush Garden Gone to Weed

Canadian literary theorists such as Northrop Frye traditionally defined
Canadian literature in relation to Canadian writers=92 representations of
nature and our landscapes: E.J. Pratt=92s crashing seas of =93tide and wind
and crag;=94 Sinclair Ross=92s =93implacability of snow-swept earth,=94 Geo=
rge
Eliot Clarke=92s =93cabals of rock, wreckage, sobs of wet death,=94 or Lorn=
a
Crozier=92s =93rows of ripened barley.=94 Such representations of nature a=
nd
landscape supported a concept for a central unifying force in Canadian
Literature. Canadian writers continue to engage in defining character,
action, and conflict through images of water, weather, vegetation, the
animal, or the geological.

This panel will address issues such as these within the context of select
Canadian fiction writers and poets.

Possible paper topics include:
=09contemporary ecocritical approaches to nature and landscape
=09representations of nature and landscape vis-=E0-vis postmodernis=
m
=09ecocriticism in Canadian poetry
=09ecocriticism in Canadian fiction
=09intersections between regionalism and ecocriticism in Canadian
literature
=09landscape and the construction of the Canadian national identity

Please submit paper proposals or full papers, along with a 50 word bio, to
Diane Guichon d.guichon_at_shaw.ca Please keep in mind that presentations
should be between 15 and 20 minutes.

Creative Non-Fiction: The Politics and Future

As a relatively new genre distinction, creative non-fiction has both
produced and defied a multitude of definitions. It is also a genre
gaining popularity and critical attention. But its very proliferation
provokes questions of what this genre should look like, who writes in it
and why, what causes does it best address, and what are its pitfalls and
strengths. At heart, creative non-fiction seeks to be transparent and
depoliticized, but in reality, there are complicated racial, gender and
identity politics being played out on its terrain.

This panel calls for papers that either address the genre of creative
non-fiction or consider a work of creative non-fiction in relation to the
above concerns.

Possible paper topics may include:
=09authority and authenticity
=09who has the right to speak using the medium of creative non-fict=
ion
=09representation and portrayals of history and subjectivity in
creative non-fiction
=09the relationship of creative non-fiction to narrative and oralit=
y
=09explorations of the liminal status of creative non-fiction
=09defining creative non-fiction as a genre

Please submit paper proposals or full papers, along with a 50 word bio, to
Kathryn Willms at knwillms_at_ucalgary.ca Please keep in mind that
presentations should be between 15 and 20 minutes.

Literature, Politics, and the Future: The Role of Creative writing

In recent history, much of the discourse in the social sciences has sought
to undo, redefine, and challenge the institutional and intellectual
boundaries of the study of art, culture, politics, and other forms of
human interaction. In an attempt to follow the complex network of power
relations, which structure our secular and intellectual lives, academic
studies have crossed traditional disciplinary boundaries to develop
theoretical approaches that account for a wide array of material evidence.
 Similarly, creative writing continues to evolve as a medium of social and
political critique.

The University of Calgary=92s English Graduate Conference is soliciting
creative panel proposals for its upcoming interdisciplinary conference on
Language and Literature, which is to be held on March 10th and 11th at the
University of Calgary. The creative panel, held in conjunction with the
conference's critical panels, will take place in the evening with a round
table discussion following the presentations. We are pleased to announce
that the Markin-Flanagan writer-in-residence, Melanie Little, will be the
keynote speaker for this event.

Abstracts for creative pieces should be approximately 250 words long.
Creative pieces should be between a maximum of 10-15 minutes in length
(including preliminary remarks) and may take the form of poetry, short
fiction, or creative non-fiction. All abstract submissions will be vetted
by a committee.

We encourage a wide interpretation of this theme.

Creative Paper Proposals must be submitted by January 20th. Approved
panelists will be contacted by early February. Papers should be submitted
by email to freeexchange_at_hotmail.com

De-centering the Urban Centre: Traces of Empire in the Contemporary Novel

By the end of the nineteenth century, London had become the world=92s
largest city and, many scholars will argue, the greatest. According to
John Clement Ball, =93=91London=92 served as a metonym for imperial power
itself; its point of origin, the place where the empire was built and
around which it evolved.=94 Recently, several novels turn to the high poin=
t
of British imperialism, inspired by, or based on, artifacts from this era:
letters, journals, historical records, photographs, or newspapers
previously outside, or on the periphery of, dominant imperial history.
Conversely there are contemporary novels that re-present the colonizer=92s
objects; for example, as Ball investigates, in Arundhati Roy=92s The God o=
f
Small Things, the gift that Sophie Mol gives each of her Indian cousins
is a souvenir pen from London bearing the images of Buckingham Palace and
Big Ben.

Artifacts not only inform the writing of historical novels but appear as
=93traces=94 within them. As a consequence, while readers may expect to rea=
d
fiction, they will also unwittingly encounter histories previously
excluded from literature. This panel seeks papers that investigate
contemporary postcolonial novels that juxtapose historical documentation
with the fictional commentary that the writer creates in order to mediate
the past. How do current subversive literary representations of London or
other large urban centers, as a capital City and an imperial Centre,
reconfigure our understanding of the postcolonial present?

Possible topics:

-=09Traces and Re-presentations of the city and/or Imperialism in
Contemporary Postcolonial Novels
-=09Traces and Re-presentations of the city and/or Imperialism in
Contemporary American Novels
-=09Traces and Re-presentations of the city and/or Imperialism in
Contemporary Novels
-=09Re-presentations of a particular social, cultural or historical moment,
or event, in nineteenth century cities
-=09How the age of the Internet, of information and hybridity, has change=
d
the writing of historical novels
-=09The changing nature of author/ity in contemporary historical novels

Papers should be between 15-20 minutes in length. Abstracts are due 25
January, 2006. The conference will be held on March 10th and 11th at the
University of Calgary in Calgary, AB, Canada. Please submit 250-word
abstracts to: Robyn Read rjread_at_ucalgary.ca

Decoding Desire: The Revolutionary Potential of Desire

The term jouissance has no English equivalent, however theorists from
Roland Barthes to Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida to Luce Irigaray use the
term to indicate a certain kind of pleasure. While Barthes uses the term
to refer to a cultural enjoyment of identity and the ego, the so-called
French feminists have taken jouissance to refer to the disruptive
potential of female sexuality. How can introductions of jouissance into
the public area work to create social change? Is capitalism merely a
desiring machine, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest? Or can desire
productively disrupt the existing social order?

This panel is concerned with disruptive desire in all its manifestations:
how can=97and does=97desire interrupt the rigid structures of life and text=
?

Possible paper topics may include:
-=09Feminist renderings of desire
-=09The relation between language and erotic drives
-=09Psychoanalytic readings of desire
-=09Experimental or performative writing as enacting desire
-=09The absence of desire

Papers should be between 15-20 minutes in length. Abstracts are due 25
January, 2006. The conference will be held on March 10th and 11th at the
University of Calgary in Calgary, AB, Canada. Please submit 250-word
abstracts to: Erin Wunker freeexchange_at_hotmail.com

L=92avenir: Jacques Derrida and the Unknown Other to Come
No justice . . . seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some
responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the
living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are
already dead, be they victims of wars, political or other kinds of
violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of
exterminations, victims of the oppressions of capitalist imperialism or
any of the forms of totalitarianism.
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx.
In Specters of Marx, Derrida argues that there must be a way of thinking
of the absent other beyond the metaphysics of absence and presence=97a way
of thinking in a beyond where presence includes the spectral forces of the
not quite present: the past other, the future other, the altogether
other. Much of Jacques Derrida=92s later work addresses the politics of
imagining, awaiting, enabling the coming of an absolutely unknown other.
Whether it be the evasive other of diff=E9rance, the disruptive other of th=
e
supplement, the haunting other of the trace, the constitutive other of
psychoanalysis, or the unknown other of the messianic, the other plays an
important role in much of Derrida=92s theories. This panel seeks to discus=
s
the role of the other in Derrida=92s writings. Papers are invited on the
function of the other within any of Derrida=92s theories.

Please submit paper proposals or full papers, along with a 50 word bio, to
Brett Parker at bdparker_at_ucalgary.ca Please keep in mind that
presentations should be between 15 and 20 minutes.

Narratives of (un) Belonging/ Diasporic Writings

Changes in the world over the last few decades have refocused attention on
the displaced person or the migrant; people dispossessed and separated
from their identity and history. This experience has to been viewed in the
context of a new global economy characterized by complex, interacting and
disjunctive transnational flows. The conjunction of this historical moment
with both the emergence of a diasporised generation of hyphenated writers
(Asian-American, Black-British and so on) and the theoretical developments
of post-modernism and post-colonial theory necessitates an exploration of
what Stuart Hall has called, =93new ethnicities: identities that are
somewhere in-between.=94
A way to focus on these issues is to examine migrant writing, both fiction
as well as non-fiction where each textual journey over multiple ethnic,
linguistic, cultural, national and political-economic borders has to be
articulated with the historical and contemporary journey of the exile,
immigrant and the refugee. Even when the experience is that of those born
in the migrated space, the narratives constructs journeys of displacement,
alienation, pain and loss.

Suggested topics:
1.=09Memory and silence in migrant writing/ fiction
2.=09Hybridity in diasporic writing
3.=09Home/ homelessness as the trope of migrant fiction
4.=09Race, nation and identity
5.=09Hyphenated identities
6.=09Migrant writing as =91writing back=92
7.=09Refugee narratives/ narratives of dislocation/ forced exile
8.=09Geopolitical transformations in/made through diasporic writing.
9.=09Imaginary homelands
Papers should be between 15-20 minutes in length. Abstracts are due 25
January, 2006. The conference will be held on March 10th and 11th at the
University of Calgary in Calgary, AB, Canada. Please submit 250-word
abstracts to: Navneet Kumar nkumar_at_ucalgary.ca

Domesticating discontent

Gyan Prakash writes that =93as capitalism expands, it expresses itself in
ever-changing forms, inhabiting pre- and noncapitalist forms,
domesticating and subordinating them=94 (197). Whether you call it
capitalism, or modernity, or bourgeois complacency, or globalization, or
Godzilla, the monolithic transnational/transcultural beast is adept at
swallowing resistance whole and regurgitating it for mass consumption.

And so techniques of experimental film transform into the basic grammar of
rock videos. Disney colonizes hybridity with movies such as Lilo & Stitch.
Like hippies-turned-stockbrokers, will today=92s culturejammers become
tomorrow=92s brand managers?

This panel invites proposals for papers, or creative works of prose poetry
or performance, that explore the domestication of discontent. Length: 20
minutes. You are encouraged to consider any historical period in any area
of study of the humanities or social sciences. Topics of interest might
include but are not limited to:

disciplining ideas, movements, writers
avant-garde histories
gender and sexual orientation
fame/infamy
selling out/buying in
careerism
idealism
utopias
(in)effective discontent
interdisciplinary art production
funding of art or research
scientific discourse

Papers should be between 15-20 minutes in length. Abstracts are due 25
January, 2006. The conference will be held on March 10th and 11th at the
University of Calgary in Calgary, AB, Canada. Please submit 250-word
abstracts to: W. Mark Giles wmgiles_at_telus.net
_____
Work Cited

Prakash, Gyan. =93Who=92s Afraid of Postcoloniality?=94 Social Text 49 (Win=
ter
1996): 187-203.

All Past, Future Tense: Contemporary Approaches to Early Modern Studies

=93At what point does theory cease to be theoretical? When does a political
challenge to the established order lose its radical nature because, to a
greater or lesser, extent, it has become the establishment it once
confronted?=94
-Andrew Hadfield, =93Shakespeare and republicanism: history and cultural
Materialism=94

Cultural Materialism, New Historicism and the raft of theoretical
approaches to the Early Modern period that emerged from the nexus of
theory and literature in the early 1980s have come under increasing
attacks over the past few years. The representation of these theoretical
approaches as =93ossified, predictable and institutionalized=94 is vehement=
ly
opposed by those who argue for the continued use Cultural Materialist and
New Historicist theoretical modes, given the present political climate.
Others note the failure of the political impetus behind these movements to
effect any appreciable change in their respective countries of origin as a
sign of their poverty as approaches to literature.

This panel solicits papers addressing the future of Early Modern criticism
given the contested space of the predominant theoretical approaches to
Early Modern texts. If the theoretical approaches that were crafted in
the early 1980s are on the wane, then what comes next? Are they on the
wane at all, or, given Stephen Greenblatt=92s new biography of Shakespeare,
are they simply turning to address a different audience? What,
fundamentally, are we studying when we approach Shakespeare & his
contemporaries through the New Historicist/Cultural Materialist model?

Papers should be between 15-20 minutes in length. Abstracts are due 25
January, 2006. The conference will be held on March 10th and 11th at the
University of Calgary in Calgary, AB, Canada. Please submit 250-word
abstracts to: Andrew Bretz free.exchange_at_gmail.com
OR If you wish to use snail mail, please send your hard copy to:
Free Exchange Committee
c/o The Department of English
University of Calgary
Social Sciences Tower, 11th floor
2500 University Drive
Calgary, Alberta, Canada
T2N 1N4
Making Media: The Social Responsibility of Experimental Art
Marshall McLuhan wrote that =93in experimental art, men are given the exact
specifications of coming violence to their own psyches from their own
counter-irritants or technology=94 (Understanding Media 71). The social
responsibility that McLuhan places upon the experimental artist has been
taken up by practitioners in various disciplines, evident in the
production of experimental work highlighting the process and circumstances
of its construction. Despite the volume and depth of such work,
experimental art has been largely ignored by mainstream culture.
Increasingly, all media is subsumed into the overarching superstructure of
the Internet, the social effects of which are only beginning to be
understood.

Paper proposals are being accepted for a panel concerning the social
responsibility of experimental art, with a focus on the relationship
between art and technology. Possible topics include (but are not limited
to):

-the role of experimental art in advancing understanding of new media and
its social effects
-public resistance to experimental art
-the avant-garde in relation to technology
-the possibilities the Internet offers in the production or distribution
of art
-the responsibility of the experimental artist to predict, examine, and
insulate the public against the =93coming violence=94 of new technology

Papers should be between 15-20 minutes in length. Abstracts are due 25
January, 2006. The conference will be held on March 10th and 11th at the
University of Calgary in Calgary, AB, Canada. Please submit 250-word
abstracts to: Jonathan Ball jonathan_at_jonathanball.com.

The Future of Modernism, in a Time, where Literature is No Longer the Cente=
r

There will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the
slightest indication of a change anywhere. The cancer of time is eating
us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves.
The hero, then, is not Time, but Timelessness. We must get in step, a
lock step, toward the prison of death. There is no escape.

=09Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

Much of high modernism, from Joyce to Stein to Hemmingway, develops out of
a faith in the ability of literature to act as a cultural centre that is
able to interrogate the disjunction of the present and perform
realignments of our forms of social organization. Much of the modernist
avant-garde, relies on the possibility that art is able to shock the
unthinking masses into a state of hyper-thought. However, in a time,
where high modernism is no longer high and where the avant-garde is no
longer avant-hier, in a time, where the high-minded cultural superiority
of high art is displaced and the shock of the never before is undermined
by a proliferation of images, the future of modernism as modernism is
uncertain. And, yet, amidst this turn away from the modern as modern, the
study of modernism is characterized by a withdrawal into the archives,
where the tedious details of life in modernism are privileged as new
twists to tired studies.

Papers are invited for a panel on the future of modernism. What is the
future of teaching modernism? Is there a future of modernism outside the
academy? What is the use of a high modernism that is no longer high or an
avant-garde that is no longer avant-hier? Is there a beyond to the return
to the archive?

Please submit paper proposals or full papers, along with a 50 word bio, to
Brett Parker at bdparker_at_ucalgary.ca by 25 January, 2006. Please keep in
mind that presentations should be between 15 and 20 minutes.

Whatever Else? Is Poetry Freedom?

Uncertainty about the future (to say nothing of the past) has plagued
poets and philosophers since Plato. In the canonical memory, the
modernists articulated this dis-ease most definitively=97their time and
works marked boldly by global strife, political violence, and the broken
promises of older generations. What then can be said of our own age=97our
20th and 21st centuries, which, with their unprecedented military and
xenophobic barbarity, have proven the legitimacy of Pound, Eliot, and
Auden=92s terrified distress? Has poetry indeed made nothing happen?
Whatever else, is poetry still freedom? Have our global and national poets
since WWII given up hope amidst the charred rubble of the
approaching/passed millennium? The nations of the globe have recently
bared their guns again, and the poets of those nations have surely
reacted. Haven=92t they?

This panel seeks abstracts for papers that will imbricate the spirit of
these questions and mis-facts=97papers that will elucidate, highlight, deny=
,
affirm, or suggest that the textuality and performance of poetry is still
able to address contemporary social, national or global issues while
allowing some room for positive negotiation into the future. Papers taking
up the work of poets from the late modernists to the avant-garde are
welcomed, all in hopes of rearticulating hope.

Possible topics and questions=85

-the physicality of books vs. online works
-the dissolution of nationalism in the face of globalization
-the dissolution of globalism in the face of neo-nationalism
-the impossible escape from realism/reality
-historical appropriation
-the politics of public poetry- spoken word, performance, visual, and sound
-the influence of the avant-garde
-the denial or engagement of postmodernism
-the survival/decimation of the lyric
-protest poetry
-the politics of language/language of politics
-the maintenance/moderation of staid poetics

Papers should be between 15-20 minutes in length. Abstracts are due 25
January, 2006. The conference will be held on March 10th and 11th at the
University of Calgary in Calgary, AB, Canada. Please submit 250-word
abstracts to: Owen Percy odfpercy_at_ucalgary.ca

Creative Writing Pedagogy: Imagination, Invention and Implementation
This year, Professor Tom Wayman introduced a pilot graduate course at the
University of Calgary in creative writing pedagogy. Part of Wayman=92s
rational for starting the course was that many writers in Canada earn
their living as teachers. Thus the seminar was designed to teach graduate
students who were also creative writers how to organize and manage
introductory creative writing workshops, and provided an opportunity for
each student to teach a section of a three genre introduction to creative
writing course: poetry, fiction or scriptwriting.
This panel calls for papers about the teaching concerns of creative
writing instructors; how does a creative writer adapt his or her writing
philosophy into a teaching platform that will achieve long term
pedagogical goals?
Possible topics can range from syllabus and curriculum design, workshop
management and writing exercises, to an analysis or comparison of creative
writing textbooks and how they can be adapted for classroom use=97for
example, Stephen Minot=92s Three Genres: The Writing of Poetry, Fiction and
Drama or Janet Burroway=92s, Imaginative Writing: The Element of Craft. Thi=
s
panel is designed to generate discussion about the challenges encountered
in the classroom, potential solutions, and the personal interests and
investments in the art of creative writing that drives the teaching of the
discipline.
Papers should be between 15-20 minutes in length. Abstracts are due 25
January, 2006. The conference will be held on March 10th and 11th at the
University of Calgary in Calgary, AB, Canada. Please submit 250-word
abstracts to: Robyn Read rjread_at_ucalgary.ca
The Future of Resistance: The Postmodern, The Postcolonial, and Beyond

The politics of theory conceived as a form of social activism will always
be that it intervenes in a particular institutional, social or cultural
framework against the presuppositions or politics of its adversary. Once
that context has passed, or been changed, then for the most part, the
political impact of a strategic intervention is lost. Theories also have
a history, and must be historically situated if their politics are to be
understood.

=09Robert Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction.

In much recent writing the rigid distinction between the postmodern and
the postcolonial is called into question. Here, the future of
poststructural thought, postmodern art, and postcolonial politics can be
found in the coming together of the micropolitics of the postmodern and
the macropolitics of the postcolonial. That is, the post-Enlightenment
tradition that culminates in the postmodern deconstruction of essentialism
(of self, race, gender, god) and the post-Enlightenment tradition that
culminates in the postcolonial challenge to the persistence of cultural
and material inequalities are brought together to undo both the
essentialist politics of the postcolonial and the contortionist politics
of the postmodern. In turn, the coming together of the postmodern and the
postcolonial opens up a space in which the recognition of an unjust
political, material, cultural reality can develop into a multifaceted,
diverse, and active offensive on the complex network of power relations,
which work to maintain the status quo of any particular moment.
Papers are invited on the politics of blurring the boundaries between the
postmodern and the postcolonial. What is the critical resistance of the
theory, the novel, the play, the poem, the short story, the
nonfiction-prose of the future present?

Please submit paper proposals or full papers, along with a 50 word bio, to
Brett Parker at bdparker_at_ucalgary.ca by 25 January. Please keep in mind
that presentations should be between 15 and 20 minutes.

Borders of Becoming: Women writing Woman

Gilles Deleuze posits that Woman is a privileged sign of Otherness within
western discourse: =93there are as many sexes as there are terms in
symbiosis=85they cannot be understood in terms of production, only in terms
of becoming=94 (A Thousand Plateaus 242). Deleuze goes on to suggest that
these lines of deterritiorialization are ways of loosening constraining
concepts of sexuality. Rosi Briadotti, among other feminists, has argued
that this concept is highly important to feminist discourse. This panel
is concerned with issued of border-crossing in feminist discourse. Can the
concept of Woman as priviledged other be taken up in a useful manner, or
is this a misguided phallogocentric commentary? How do women take up
issues of identity and otherness, whether through writing, performance, or
activism? Can the feminist project of deconstructing phallogocentrism take
into account the material reality of the multiplicities of women=92s lives?

Possible paper topics may include:
-women and globalization
-feminism and poststructuralism
-racialized women=92s writing
-women writing class
-gender identity/cultural identity
-border-crossing in women=92s writing

Papers should be between 15-20 minutes in length. Abstracts are due 25
January, 2006. The conference will be held on March 10th and 11th at the
University of Calgary in Calgary, AB, Canada. Please submit 250-word
abstracts to: Erin Wunker freeexchange_at_hotmail.com

Works Cited

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schzophrenia.
=091977. New York: Viking P, 1977.

         ==========================================================
              From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List
                        CFP_at_english.upenn.edu
                         Full Information at
                     http://cfp.english.upenn.edu
         or write Jennifer Higginbotham: higginbj_at_english.upenn.edu
         ==========================================================
Received on Fri Dec 16 2005 - 14:12:16 EST