In her essay "Slow Death: Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency," cultural theorist Lauren Berlant contrasts "lateral agency" with the sovereign agency of the neoliberal subject. Where sovereign agency builds, intends, and extends the self via a purposive and propulsive will, lateral agency floats, spreads, hovers, and spaces out, interrupting the breakneck pace of capitalist production and suspending the self's forward motion. For Berlant, lateral agency symptomizes the exhaustion and attrition of the individual's will, particularly individuals of the working class, at the same time as it expresses a kind of pleasure in practices of self-abeyance.

The MVSA invites proposals for a Pedagogy Roundtable at the 2014 MVSA conference on the campus of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Presenters will introduce innovative and successful strategies for teaching Victorian literature, history, music and culture in the classroom.

Presentations for this session need not be linked to the conference theme of "Victorian Violence."

Reflecting on the critical reception of The Wanderer in October 1814, Frances Burney hoped that, in future years, her fourth and final novel, "when read fresh, & free from local circumstances of a mischievous tendency," would "by no means be found the lowest in the scale" of her works (J&L VII: 484). Selling out in its first edition and yet notoriously excoriated by William Hazlitt and John Wilson Croker and condemned for its perceived French sympathies, The Wanderer continues to evoke attention as Burney's darkest, most contentious, and most overtly political novel.

We are interested in any and all topics about or related to the study of BDSM, sexual kink, or sexual fetishes in all genres, all media, all countries, all kinds, and all eras.

All representations of BDSM, Kink, and fetishes in popular culture (fiction, stage, screen—large or small, commercial, advertising, music, song, dance, online, real life, etc.), from anywhere and any-when, are welcome topics of discussion.

We also welcome any academic discussion of the real-life practice of BDSM, sexual kink, or sexual fetishes, as well as the lived experiences of people identifying as kinky.

CEAMAGazine, the peer-reviewed journal of the College English Association-Middle Atlantic Group, appears once a year and publishes studies based on writing research, discussions of pedagogy, literary criticism, cultural criticism, and personal essays concerned with the teaching of English. We will also consider for publication poems and fiction related to literature or teaching and book reviews.

'Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation'

'We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.'

Call for Papers: Postcolonial Filmmaking in French-speaking Countries

Black Camera invites submissions for a Close-Up devoted to a critical assessment of Postcolonial Filmmaking in French-speaking Countries to be published Fall 2014.

We seek essays on films by African filmmakers that challenge "absolute otherness" in postcoloniality. Consider, for example, films by Ousmane Sembène, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Merzak Allouache, Moufida Tlati, Joseph Gaï Ramaka, Jean-Marie Teno, Sylvestre Amoussou, Mahmoud Zemmouri, and Nadia El Fani.