Collecting, anthologizing, binding, archiving, conservation, reproduction -- forms of textual "curatorship" as they come to define forms of writing (from Gutenberg to Google).

Special session, MLA 2011.

Marilynne Robinson

Author of
Housekeeping (1980) – winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award;
Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution (1989);
The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998);
Gilead (2004) – winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award; and
Home (2008) – winner of the Orange Prize.

We are seeking scholarly essays of 15,000 words by August 1, 2010 on any aspect or approach to a work by Marilynne Robinson. We encourage submissions on the following suggested topics for an essay collection to be released in 2011:

DEADLINE EXTENSION: "Dialogues of Displacement: Intersections Between the Literary Texts of African and Asian Diaspora(s)"

The proposal deadline has been extended to January 10th. Please see the CFP below, and forward to any interested parties. Thank you.

The Circle for Asian American Literary Studies (CAALS) invites papers that explore the literary connections between African and Asian diasporic communities. What might we learn by looking at the texts of African and Asian migrants comparatively?

We welcome papers that particularly compare and/or contrast ways in which the experiences of both African and Asian diasporic peoples open new textual possibilities. Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

International Federation for Theatre Research
Translation, Adaptation, and Dramaturgy Working Group
World Congress, Munich, 26-31 July 2010
Call for Papers/Participants

Theatrical Production as Collaborative Translation

_In-between_ invites full length articles on _Hamlet_ (four to eight thousand words) which focus on current critical preoccupations with the play in the academy as well as outside of it. Please (i) air-mail one hard copy along with (ii) a copy of your cv if you have one handy, and (iii) email the text of the article along with (iv) a hundred word note for the contributors' column.

Please use any software, double space, single quotes, double quotes for quotes within quotes, outside punctuation, en dash flanked by single space in place of two hyphens, British spelling except, of course, for quoted matter, single space between sentences, no space between paragraphs, and auto-footnotes.

Panel title: WAR AND POSTWAR LITERATURES (to take place at the ALCQ-ACQL conference during Congress for Social Sciences and Humanities at Concordia University, Montreal, May 28-30, 2010

"We must more than ever stand on the side of human rights. We need human rights. We are in need of them and they are in need, for there is always a lack, a shortfall, a falling short, an insufficiency; human rights are never sufficient." (Jacques Derrida, Philosophy in a Time of Terror)

If human rights are insufficient yet necessary, we must then ask what to do with "rights." This conference will explore historical and theoretical definitions, constructions, and performative notions of rights. How do texts challenge predominant conceptual narratives of rights? In what ways does literature explore notions of rights outside of the juridical realm? Can we have a discourse on rights that exceeds the anthropomorphic field?