**Deadline for abstracts has been extended to June 15, 2008.**

University of Colorado at Boulder
SEPTEMBER 19-20, 2008
Graduate Student Conference in association with the Department of English
and the American Literature Colloquium at CU-Boulder

Keynote Speakers:

Ralph Bauer, University of Maryland - College Park
Lisa Lowe, University of California - San Diego

Complicating the Compass: Displacing Directionality within American Studies

This conference will examine new methodologies, configurations, and
mappings of directionality within American Studies. Whether Daniel
Richter’s turn to “facing east,” the rise of a “global south” within
Southern Studies, or the larger transnational and hemispheric turn within
literary studies, new modes of directionality continually structure and
inform the study of literature. We welcome papers which address these new
turns of the compass within American Studies, as well as papers which
create unconventional routes between, and outside of, the traditional
“north,” “south,” “east,” and “west” of the American literary landscape.

Possible paper topics may include, but are not limited to:

-directionality and travel/travel narratives
-nationalism and directionality
-American regionalism and directionality
-how ideologies and/or cultural norms move/re-map/translate in texts
concerning immigration, borders, travel, migration, or transnationalism
-direction as metaphor (cognitive mapping, empires of love and care,
personal boundaries, safe spaces, imagined homelands, states of exception)
-cartographies of desire
-interrogating the center/ periphery model of East-West spatiality
-reexamining north/south weather-mythologies
-refiguring Pacific vs. Atlantic spaces and discourses
-affect and the American "West"
-documenting the “West” through new technologies
-relationship between persistence of "Western" ideologies in popular
culture (film, television, music) and literature's movement away from this
rhetoric.
-cosmopolitanism as a gateway to "frontier" regionalism
-the “west-West” dialectic/dialogue: the relationship between the American
West and the Aristotelian West

Please email 250-word paper abstracts (no attachments please) by June 15,
2008 to: gradconferencecuboulder_at_gmail.com

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Received on Thu May 15 2008 - 11:39:59 EDT