Current Writing 21(2) (October 2010)

Special Issue on 'Law and South African Literature' (guest-edited by Patrick Lenta)

An established field of interdisciplinary study, 'law and literature' has received little attention from critics working on South African literature. This is unfortunate in view of the entanglement of literature and the law in South Africa. Representations of law are frequent in South African writing: legislation, adjudication and law-enforcement feature in the works of Brink, Coetzee, Fugard, Gordimer, Modisane, Paton, Wicomb and others, yet work within the subfield of 'law and literature' commonly called 'law in literature' has been uncommon.

How do Victorian texts (novels, in particular) stage a confrontation between the sense of moral urgency and individual agency on the part of characters (or narrator) and the more distant, less personalized, and at times ironic sense of human lives as an effect of the invisible hand? What role does economic theory play in the sense of plot as beyond the control of any one human will? What generic or narratological innovations come about in response to this newly expressed form of fate? Is there a third path between individual agency and the invisible hand?

Please send proposals of 300-500 words and one-page cv to Ilana Blumberg (imb@msu.edu) by February 15.
Session subject to approval.

The IMS study group "Music and Media" (MaM) invites abstracts for papers in the fields of musicology and media studies. Papers should address the role of music in film, television, computer and video games, radio, live performances involving audiovisual media or other subjects related to the work of this study group. Please send your abstracts in RTF or MS Word format to Tobias Plebuch, tobias.plebuch@culture.hu-berlin.de by Feb 28, 2010. Your submission should include the following information: author(s), academic affiliation, e-mail address, title of your presentation, the abstract (300 words max.) and technical requirements (piano, overhead, power point, etc).

Proposals are invited for the American Association of Australian Literary Studies sessions at the 2011 MLA Convention, to be held January 6-9, 2011, in Los Angeles, CA. The "Indigenous Australian Literature" session seeks papers focusing on any aspect of Australian Indigenous literature in any genre. The "Transnational Approaches to Australian Literature" session seeks papers focusing on transnational approaches to Australian literature in any genre from any period. Send 250-word proposals to Nathanael O'Reilly (nathanael_oreilly@uttyler.edu) by March 1, 2010.

Seeking papers on alcohol or drug recovery narratives from any era, insofar as they inhabit, create, alter, or resist traditions of religious and spiritual life-writing in America. The panel will understand "spiritual" as broadly as necessary to accommodate any thoughtful or provocative take on addiction narrative.

In an effort to promote scholarly discourse in all disciplines and fields, the Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference at the University of Washington, Seattle invites graduate students to submit papers addressing notions of adaptation, a concept Dudley Andrew calls, "potentially as far reaching as you like" (Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory, 1984). The appearance of two journals dedicated to adaptation studies in the past two years along with the proliferation of theoretical texts on the subject testify to the ever-increasing reach of the topic.

International conference, 12-14 July 2010

http://www.swan.ac.uk/CREW/Conferences/TheorisingWales/

CREW (Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales)

C-SCAP (Centre for the Study of Culture and Politics)

GENCAS (Centre for Research into Gender, Culture and Society)

in collaboration with the Richard Burton Centre, all at Swansea University

Keynote speakers

Simon Brooks (Cardiff University)

Glenn Jordan (University of Glamorgan)

Gerardine Meaney (University College Dublin)

Chris Weedon (Cardiff University)