CFP: Wide Open Spaces (grad) (12/1/06; 3/30/07)

City University of New York Graduate Center
English Student Association Conference
Conference Date: March 30, 2007
Call for Papers

"Wide Open Spaces"

The recent success of popular fictions like Brokeback Mountain and
Deadwood has refocused audience attention onto the power and meanings
latent in the open space. These spaces are found not only in the
Western but also in narratives of exploration, of adventure, of
colonization and post-colonial resistance, as well as in genres of the
pastoral, of science fiction, and of ecological fiction, among others.
These "wide open spaces" frequently figure in the construction and
expression of desire or lack, law and order, creation and recreation,
bounded- and unboundedness, and definition and the indefinable.

"Wide Open Spaces" is a graduate conference organized and sponsored by
the English Student Association at the CUNY Graduate Center, located
in Midtown Manhattan. This conference seeks to bring together graduate
students from a wide variety of political, critical, and aesthetic
perspectives as well as a host of different disciplines to explore how
open space functions in literature, film, television, new media, and
critical theory. We invite papers that investigate the uses and
meanings of this space.

We hope to address the topics below, as well as many others:

The classic/revisionist Western in fiction, film, and television
Galaxies far, far away: science fiction frontiers
Literature and agriculture/ecology
Cartography and literature
Frontiers of identity (racial, ethnic, sexual, national, etc.)
Semiotic fields as open spaces
The open spaces and frontiers of critical theory
Narratives of exploration and conquest
Zones of cultural contact
The gendering of spaces: domestic, public, urban, rural
The sea as frontier
Border fictions
Constructions of the "rural" and/or the pastoral
"Middle" America
Diasporic communities
Vacant areas (physical, political, ideological, psychological,
intellectual, etc.)
Contiguous and overlapping areas
Queer Theory and open definitions of sexuality
The open space as a location of desire and projected desires
The open space as a location of the "creative"
The blank page
The "fields" of work/play/battle
The body as a field of exploration and colonization
Intellectual gap(s) and/or "gaps" in scholarship

Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words to Neil Meyer and
Brooks Hefner at esa.conference_at_gmail.com by December 1, 2006.

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Received on Sat Sep 09 2006 - 11:48:59 EDT