Midwest Modern Language Association's 48th Annual Convention
November 9-12, 2006
The Palmer House Hilton
Chicago, Illinois

Deadline for abstract: 25 April 2006

*"Vagrancy and Criminality in Literature."
(Please circulate)
*

The criminal and the vagrant have often been conflated in literary
texts. This panel seeks to investigate how representations of vagrancy
and criminality are constructed and circulated. Within the framework of
structural binaries such as high/low one might think of this literary
type of the vagrant-criminal as a projection of undifferentiated
otherness. But how might we historicize this conflation, this erasure of
difference? In other words, how does the vagrant become the criminal in
literature? How is the boundary between a strictly socio-economic
category of vagrant, bound to particular social conditions and
structures, and a more properly ethical notion of criminality traversed?
The panel welcomes papers that interpret and address the issue broadly,
both in terms of methodological questions and particular literary
manifestations of the vagrant-criminal.

Send abstracts of about 300 words to Anupam Basu basu_at_wisc.edu
<mailto:basu_at_wisc.edu>

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Received on Fri Apr 07 2006 - 10:39:11 EDT