I am soliciting abstracts for a planned special session
submission for the 2006 Modern Language Association
convention in Philadelphia, Dec. 27-30.

I’m planning a panel for this year’s MLA, “Collecting
Persons in 19th-Century U.S. Culture.” The panel will
examine centripetal and centrifugal forces of authorship,
print, and institutions such as museums and libraries, and
how those forces shape the 19th-century imagination. Its
specific focus is on the person of the ‘collector’ â€" the
author, museum curator, the librarian, and the book
collector â€" and the subject positions s/he invents,
inhabits, and circulates. The applications of studies of
the people, places, and things of collections include, but
certainly aren’t limited to, the following: cognitive
models, local and national political identity and
participation, experiments with and conventions of literary
form and genre, configurations of geography and space, civic
virtue, and the distinction between public and private.

Abstracts by March 10, 2006. I am only soliciting proposals
in order to submit a completed panel or roundtable to the
MLA program committee; the session has not yet been accepted.

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Received on Sat Mar 04 2006 - 15:04:07 EST