"George Bernard Shaw at 150: Theater, Criticism, Contemporaneity"
Special Session at MLA 2006

Now Sponsored by the International Shaw Society (ISS)

In acknowledgment of Bernard Shaw's sesquicentennial, the International Shaw
Society is sponsoring a special session at the 2006 MLA December meeting that
will explore Shaw's writings, both dramatic and non-dramatic, in a contemporary
context. Since Shaw often figured himself as a prophet, in what ways did Shaw
anticipate twenty-first century approaches to theater and performance, social
reform, politics, and critical and literary theory? How does Shaw's
theatrical-critical project still speak to us today? Approaches grounded in
either current events and mass culture (e.g., "Creative Evolution,"
Creationism, and Intelligent Design in Kansas and Dover, Pennsylvania) or
contemporary (inter)disciplinary and theoretical discourses (e.g., Back to
Methuselah and the Post-Human) are encouraged. Other possibilities for areas
of discussion include stage practices and metadrama; gender roles, family
issues, and marriage; social class, poverty, and war; religion; Science
Studies; deconstruction, poststructuralism, and the death of theory; depth
psychology; narrative, history, literary/dramatic historiography, and
periodization; film, video, television, hypertext, and other New Media, etc.

Please send, preferably via attachment to an email to dietrich_at_cas.usf.edu (but
otherwise by snail mail to R. F. Dietrich, ISS President, P. O. Box 728,
Odessa, FL 33556-0728), a 300-word abstract for a 15 to 20 minute talk, with a
one-page summary c.v. or bio, by March 15, 2006. Your proposal will be
evaluated by a committee of scholars, and you will be notified of the
evaluation results by May 1. The co-coordinators of the session will be
Charles Joseph Del Dotto of Duke University (cjd_at_duke.edu) and Jean Reynolds of
Polk Community College (jreynolds_at_polk.edu). You must be a member of the MLA by
April 7, 2006 to participate in the session. You need not be a member of the
ISS to participate, but you are welcome to join. See the homepage of the
International Shaw Society at www.shawsociety.org for an application.

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Received on Mon Jan 30 2006 - 17:45:22 EST