Comic books, graphic novels and webcomics generally combine words and images to create narratives. Perhaps we can see them, therefore, as monstrous: beasts that combine the elements of verbal and visual, narrative and static communication forms. Like a monster composed of pieces of other animals, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This panel will examine a social understanding of comics forms and the kinds of literacies required to accept and interpret them. Abstracts of 300 words to lauere@sunysuffolk.edu; Deadline: September 30, 2012. Include: name, affiliation, anticipated a/v requirements.

The period of the French Revolution has long been recognized as a privileged moment in which sovereign violence and cultural production come together and erupt into new visions of civilization and history. Yet how is the relation between sovereignty, culture and violence understood in the decades leading up to the Revolution? Where are the contradictions and tensions that inhabit visions of Ancien Régime literature, the arts and Enlightenment thought that make the encounter between culture and violence unavoidable or necessary? What cultural image does violence give rise to and how does violence come to be understood as being a fundamental aspect of culture?

Imagining Middle Eastern/Oriental Women in the West: An Orientalist Legacy Borrowed from the Past?

This panel seeks papers which investigate the image of the Middle Eastern/Muslim women in the West constructed throughout centuries and the manner in which these images are deployed and interpreted by the Western audiences. Thus, the panel is open to a wide range of literary periods, such as the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Long Eighteenth Century, Victorian Period, as well as Modern and Post-modern Literatures. Due to the multidisciplinary nature of the topic under investigation papers dealing with history, sociology and religion which build on literary texts are welcome as well.

"It is at this point a political action to tell it like it is, to say what I really believe about my life instead of what I've always been told to say."

Carol Hanisch, "The Personal is Political" 1969

"We [need to] recognise space as the product of interrelations; as constituted through interactions, from the immensity of the global to the intimately tiny."

Doreen Massey, "Space, Place and Gender" 1995

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Jenny Bavidge, University of Cambridge

CFP

THE WESTERN FASCINATION WITH CANNIBALISM

44th Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
March 21-24, 2013
Boston, Massachusetts
Host Institution: Tufts University

This panel invites papers on the theme of cannibalism – whether a trope within travel literatures of wonders, an ethnographic report, an account of survival, a fiction of horror, an anthropology of the aberrant, a metaphor, or anything between and beyond these categories. Please send 300-500 word abstracts and brief biographical statements to Elena Daniele: elena_daniele@brown.edu

Deadline: September 30, 2012

Call for contributions
Belphégor – Popular Literature and Media Culture
http://etc.dal.ca/belphegor/
Fantastic Narratives and the Natural World

Books Have Their Histories: Medieval Chronicles and Their Scribes, Manuscripts,
and Early Editions – In Memory of Lister M. Matheson

International Medieval Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan: May 9-12, 2013.

Deadline: September 15, 2012

For information, contact dominique.hoche@westliberty.edu or dominique.hoche@gmail.com