Panel Title: Writing for Hire: The Politics Surrounding the Publication of
Current News and Literature

Conference: Northeast Modern Language Association, Baltimore, Maryland, March
1-4, 2007
  
I am accepting paper proposals until September 10, 2005 for the panel mentioned
above. Before submitting your proposal, please consider the following short
panel description.
  

In the April of 1920 edition of The Crisis, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
states the following: "If only that news is published which is paid for, . . .
then we are indeed headed straight to the catastrophe of a venal, purchasable
press." A few years later, in 1926, Du Bois made a similar claim in reference
to literature, when, in his "Criteria of Negro Art," he stated that "the white
public today demands from its artists, literary and pictorial, racial
pre-judgment which deliberately distorts truth and justice, as far as colored
races are concerned, and it will pay for no other." Thus, the media,
newspapers and magazines in particular, seemingly shares with literature the
trait of the fabrication of truth and/or history for profit and/or acceptance.
A fresh look at the intersection of the press and literary protest and the
propagation of reality through each has become of tantamount interest. This
panel seeks papers that address how the press has served as a form of protest
literature and/or how protest literature has served as a form of the press,
broadcasting to an uninformed audience accepted and/or unaccepted philosophy.
Submissions may include, but are not limited to, issues with the early black
press and the politics of exclusion, domination, and/or suppression, issues
with the press as a literary art form, the function of literature as more than
for art's sake, issues with representation in presentation of reality and/or
truth, or literature's propagation of the ideal through distortion of the real.

Please send abstracts of 500 words or less pasted in the body of an email
message, or, if attached, in rich text format, by September 10, 2006 to Dr.
Sandra L. Staton-Taiwo, sls63_at_psu.edu. Email
abstracts only. All work should conform to MLA style.

Please include with the abstract the following information:
  
name,
position,
institution and/or contact information,
and email.

For other correspondence, contact information is as follows: Box 229, Department
of English, Penn State University, York Campus, 1031 Edgecomb Avenue, York, PA
17403
Sandra L. Staton-Taiwo
Assistant Professor of English
Penn State University, York Campus
717-771-4156

"Education and work are the levers to uplift a people. Work alone will not do it unless inspired by the right ideals and guided by intelligence. Education must not simply teach work—it must teach Life."

–William Edward Burghardt Du Bois b. 1868; from "The Talented Tenth"

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Received on Mon Jul 31 2006 - 22:02:51 EDT