"New Worlds, Lost Worlds": Discovery, Change, and Loss in Literature
McGill University, Montréal
13th Annual Graduate Conference on Language and Literature
March 10-11, 2007

The English Graduate Students Association of McGill University is pleased to
announce its 13th annual Graduate Conference on Language and Literature, and
is seeking panel and paper proposals on the theme "New Worlds, Lost Worlds":
Discovery, Change, and Loss in Literature. The conference will be held in
Montréal, Canada on March 10th-11th, 2007.

Call for Panels and Papers

This conference will address how literature serves as a site for grappling
with monumental changes and upheavals of all kinds: in politics, religion,
human relationships, language, taste, literary trends, geography, science.
The theme "New Worlds, Lost Worlds" is borrowed from the title of Susan
Brigden's work on Tudor history (London: Penguin, 2001). While she uses it
as a framework for understanding British history in the sixteenth century,
we encourage panels and papers to engage with this theme in its widest
application: how great changes cause loss as much as they introduce
innovation, and how literature is a record keeper, sometimes a fallible one,
of such transitions.

Some questions that can be explored are: How does narrative preserve memory
and the past? What effects have revisionist histories had on our reading of
literature? What strategies do postcolonial approaches to literature use to
recover what has been lost? How does literature not only reflect change,
but also resist or encourage change?

Possible panel and paper topics include:
-travel narratives
-literature as history; history as literature
-the evolution or representation of a displaced culture
-representations of utopias and dystopias
-translation of texts
-representations of change on the page vs. the stage
-literature and (scientific) revolution
-recovery of lost voices
-postcolonial approaches to literary studies
-artistic repercussions produced by a political event
-how children's literature helps young readers cope with change
-the history of the book (changes in the material production and circulation
of literature)

Please send panel proposals (300 words) or completed panel descriptions (300
words per paper) by November 15, 2006. Approved panels will then be posted
on the UPenn site by the end of November. Paper proposals (300 words) which
answer this general call, or which answer specific panels are due January 5,
2007.

To submit proposals or for more information, please contact Meredith
Donaldson Clark (meredith.donaldson (at) mail.mcgill.ca) or Amanda Cockburn
(amanda.cockburn (at) mail.mcgill.ca)

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Received on Fri Nov 03 2006 - 18:06:43 EST