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"Contingent Communities" (2010)
The Annual Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature Conference at University of Minnesota
Dates: 10/15/10-10/17/10
Keynote Speakers: Rey Chow and Peter Hitchcock
As a nation, we tend to homogenize Hispanics; even the term itself is problematic, due to the fact that it removes the specificity belonging to each Spanish-speaking nation and the cultures within it. As a multicultural nation, there is much to learn from Latinos and as our society expands to include these unique cultures, I hope this panel in Latina/o Studies will do its part in effacing stereotypes and prejudices that sadly, are still common-place today.
Papers that address the languages and/or identities of Latinas/os in literature, theatre, or film are welcome. Suggestions: the diverse histories, cultures, identity politics, migration patterns, or other aspects of Latina/o populations in the United States.
Think of reading your favorite childhood books again… The Panchatantra, the Ramayana, The Mahabarata; Aesop's Fables, Little Women, Alice in Wonderland, the Oz books: we all have our own lists. We invite you to celebrate "clouds of glory" in reconsidering the meaning of these books in your own life and especially in your teaching and scholarship.
Critics define children's literature classics in different ways. Christian Emmrich finds children's classics to be those that have succeeses with readers of different classes and different nationalities over several generations and are often best-sellers.
Emer O'Sullivan discusses three resources:
1. Adaptations of works from adult literature, such as Robinson Crusoe or Romeo and Juliet
The study of Shakespeare and performance has grown rapidly in recent years, and now encompasses the examination of different periods, cultures, and media. This special issue of Shakespeare Quarterly solicits submissions examining why we study performance and how we study performance. What are the important issues facing the study of Shakespeare and performance today? How might such study differ from the study of other categories of performance? How might it differ from other studies of Shakespeare? Different categories of submissions are being solicited for this special issue:
Intention and Intentionality (NEMLA, April 7-11, 2011)
(Please circulate widely & apologies for cross-postings!)
First Call for Papers: THE ANATOMY OF MARGINALITY
A Special Issue of "The European Legacy"
Guest Editors: COSTICA BRADATAN (The Honors College, Texas Tech University) & AURELIAN CRAIUTU (Department of Political Science, Indiana University, Bloomington)
Ecocriticism informs ecological activisms, and vice versa. What kind of change can the intersections and tensions between ecocriticism and activism bring about? While ecocriticism has become an increasingly popular field of inquiry, its positionality remains an issue for negotiation. From Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), which continues to influence mass eco-activisms, to the anti-GMO groups that shape discussions of bioethics, ecocriticism remains in dialogue with practical approaches in what Lawrence Buell has termed a "spirit of commitment to environmentalist praxis" (The Environmental Imagination, 1995). Moreover, current ecocritical scholarship underscores a general distrust of the romanticizing rhetoric of early ecocriticism.
The comedic and socially transgressive mode that Mikhail Bakhtin defines as "carnivalesque" primarily concerns literary forms of representation. This panel poses the question: what would it mean for the cinematic medium to be carnivalesque?
Bakhtin emphasizes the following key criteria for the carnivalesque: the replacement of order with chaos; temporary reversals of social hierarchies (crownings and decrownings); aesthetic defamiliarization through parodic or grotesque modes; and dialogical forms of communication that efface any dominant, authorial voice and that seek to negotiate more democratic relationships between "reader" and "text."
This panel welcomes papers that grapple with one or more of the following questions:
Changing Lives Through Literature is a nationally recognized alternative sentencing program for criminal offenders founded in 1991 on the power of literature to transform lives. CLTL sentences criminal offenders to a series of literature seminars instead of traditional probation. Studies have confirmed that program graduates are half as likely to commit additional crimes than their counterparts in the justice system.
Keynote Address: Professor Martin Puchner, Harvard University
ABOUT THE CONFERENCE:
Bad Taste: we know it when we see it, and yet we do not always know what to do with it. Sometimes celebrated and sometimes repudiated, the forms, genres, images, and topics associated with the category of bad taste are always provocative.
In celebration of our conference's 22nd Anniversary, we are interested in investigating bad taste. We seek to explore the ways in which bad taste is identified and utilized. How does the category of taste create and reify genres? What role does taste play in a consumer society? If Bad Taste can evoke shame or pride, how do we evaluate or classify it in terms of affect?
Speaking of literature in general, Larzer Ziff notes that the crowd is "at best…but a backdrop" against which the drama of the individual unfolds ("Whitman and the Crowd" 585). Henry James makes such a recognition a virtual dictum of realism, when, in the preface to The Princess Casamassima, he speaks of the necessity of the "finely aware" individual consciousness for registering the fleeting impressions of the crowded city streets (12). When the crowd does take center stage in the literary text, it is often, as Nicolaus Mills points out, represented as unruly, violent, and irrational (The Crowd in American Literature 4).
« L'Autre » représente un topos important de la littérature de l'immigration francophone dans la mesure où cette littérature suit le parcours de héros qui doivent faire face à une nouvelle culture, à un nouveau monde, à de nouveaux regards et ainsi, à l'Autre. A travers mon analyse du roman de Poulin, nous voyons comment l'exploration d'une nouvelle culture conduit les protagonistes à 's'explorer'. Si de prime abord le lecteur perçoit Volkswagen Blues comme le récit d'un simple voyage, il comprend vite que ce n'est qu'un prétexte pour (re)trouver son identité. Les héros cherchent en effet ce « quelque chose » ou « quelqu'un » qui rendra leur vie plus complète. Rapidement, l'introspection prend vite le pas sur l'exploration.
Sixty years after the publication of Wimsatt and Beardsley's 'The Intentional Fallacy,' the problem of intention continues to haunt literary criticism. Authorial intention exists--but as literary critics, we don't generally talk about it. Looking to recent work in the history of criticism, literary theory, philosophy, and the history of ideas, this panel asks why this is the case. The theoretical justifications for discounting authorial intention--whether from Wimsatt and Beardsley, Barthes, Foucault, or de Man--have slowly faded into history. But as a practice of criticism and as a practice of teaching literature, that attitude towards intention remains
Proposals are invited for an edited collection of scholarly essays and autobiographical essays on African Traditional Religions/African Diasporic Religious belief systems. The editors of this collection seek to explore the following questions: Who are ATR practitioners? How do they function in African Diasporic communities where Christianity and/or Islam religious practices are expected? Who is out of the "broom closet"? Should they be out of the "broom closet"? How do they define relationships, associations, and/or boundaries with other religious/cultural traditions—and where do boundaries become less certain? What are their intersections with other communities of faith or identity?
"Carnival is the place for working out, in a concretely sensuous, half-real and half-play-acted form, a new mode of interrelationship between individuals, counterposed to the all-powerful social-hierarchical relationships of everyday life" (Mikhail Bakhtin in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics).
The comedic and socially transgressive mode that Mikhail Bakhtin defines as "carnivalesque" primarily concerns literary forms of representation. This panel poses the question: what would it mean for the cinematic medium to be carnivalesque?