Call for Papers: Africana Area
Southwest/Texas PCA/ACA 31st Annual Meeting
February 10-13 2010
Albuquerque, New Mexico

We are soliciting abstracts (250 - 500 words) for "Discourses of the Living Dead: The Proliferation of Zombie as Metaphor," an edited volume that we will seek to publish in 2010.

Baz Luhrmann ("Strictly Ballroom", "Romeo + Juliet", "Moulin Rouge!" and "Australia") has an ouevre ripe for examination, as it includes opera, songwriting and film-making. The editor of the proposed collection is Dr. D. Bruno Starrs ("I woke Up Feeling Thailand", "Dutch Tilt, Aussie Auteur: The Films of Rolf de Heer") and submissions will be received until the release of Luhrmann's next film, his adaptation of "The Great Gatsby" (date as yet unknown). Immediate expressions of interest, however, are encouraged.

This roundtable discussion invites analyses that strive to map out, the aesthetic, socio-political, and/or pedagogical parameters of Contemporary American Literature. A decade into the 21st century, does "post-1945" or "post-war" literature still function as a productive category? Have we moved beyond the postmodern? Should multicultural literature still be primarily the province of what we call contemporary? Theoretical investigations are welcome, as are those that examine more practical contingencies (e.g., syllabi construction, anthology development, etc.). 300 word abstracts by Sept. 30, 2009 to Andrew Schopp at schoppa@ncc.edu.

The 18th Annual 18th- and 19th-Century British Women Writers Conference
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX

"Journeys"
April 8-11, 2010

Keynote Speakers: Kate Flint and Felicity A. Nussbaum
Plenary Panel Speakers: Mary E. Fissell, Jillian Heydt-Stevenson, and Erika Rappaport

Call for Papers

This year's conference will explore the abundant varieties of journeys found in 18th- and 19th-century British women's writing. We encourage interdisciplinary considerations of topics such as migration, travel, exile, exploration, tourism, border crossing, religion, travel writing, art, fantasy, children's literature and more.

In The Dialectic of Enlightenment (Dialektik der Aufklärung, 1944) Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno invoked the voyage of Odysseus—especially his encounter with the Sirens—as a sustained metaphor for the emergence of the "subject" of knowledge, judgment, and discourse out of the mythic substratum of Homeric poetry. The authors understood Odysseus to be an emblem of the modern bourgeois individual, comparable to the Socratic "self" derided by Friedrich Nietzsche and designated by Max Weber as the calculating ratiocinator who gave us "progress" in its various forms: capitalist, socialist, technocratic, and utilitarian. The Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School which the authors founded was designed to provide a groundbreaking position.

Call for Papers, "Thomas Merton: Voice of the Poet and the Prophet" at CEA 2010

Annual Conference | March 25-27, 2010 | San Antonio, Texas
Sheraton Gunter Hotel; 209 East Houston Street, San Antonio, TX 78205

The College English Association, a gathering of scholar-teachers in English studies, welcomes
proposals for presentations on "Thomas Merton: Voice of the Poet and the Prophet" for our 41st annual conference.