In 2011, Kenneth Warren made the provocative assertion that African American literature is now a dead genre; it grew out of the Jim Crow era when writers were explicitly engaged with representing black humanity. With the advances of the Civil Rights movement, the goals of this genre of literature are now antiquated. Warren's logic could be read as an extension of the current "post-race" mentality, which assumes that the ascendancy of President Obama is tantamount to the end of race in America. However, the real issue is the influence of post-race on the teaching of African American literature. This genre is still being produced, in part because race remains pertinent.

The Shakespeare Standard is looking for editors and occasional contributors to help expand our Saturday "Shakespeare's Language(s) feature." Currently, we have two editors who each write their own dedicated columns. Colleen Kennedy covers "Global Shakespeare News" (non-Anglophone and international Shakespeare performances, films, and adaptations) in her weekly column "A Great Feast of Languages" and Josh Magsam writes on "Shakespearean Languages, Digital Humanities, & Social Media News" in his monthly feature "Talking in Signs."

In the politically tumultuous nineteenth century, Spanish literature introduced a variety of public spaces constructed to shelter new political currents, social phenomena and alternative (sub)cultural practices. While there have been a vast number of critical studies that approach the presence of public spaces in the novel, little attention has been paid to the role of theater in this spatial configuration. Indeed, the Spanish nineteenth century is often studied as the "century of the novel," but as David T. Gies notes in his study on nineteenth-century Spanish theater, more than 10,000 theatrical works were produced in this century, most of which lie outside the canon.

Call for Papers: Alfred Hitchcock

Southwest Popular/American Culture Association Conference
35th Annual Conference
Albuquerque, New Mexico
February 19-22, 2014
Hyatt Regency Hotel and Conference Center
330 Tijeras Ave. NW
Albuquerque, New Mexico 87102 USA
Phone: 1-505-842-1234
Submission Deadline: November 1, 2013
Conference Website: (updated regularly)

The Charles Olson Society is sponsoring a panel titled "At the Edge of the Postmodern? American Poetry in the 1950s" at the 2014 ALA conference. Olson was perhaps the first American poet to use the contested term "postmodern" (in a letter to Robert Creeley, August 1951), and the 1950s may be taken as a pivotal or liminal decade in American poetics. The great Modernists (Eliot, Pound, Williams, Stevens) were still at work, as well as their epigones (Lowell, Bishop, Berryman, et al.), but new directions seemed everywhere--not only Black Mountain, but Beat, confessional, Deep Image, New York school, and many others (Don Allen would try to organize some of these in "The New American Poetry, 1945-1960").

In the Ground of the Image, Jean-Luc Nancy writes that "violence always makes an image of itself, and the image is what, of itself, presses out ahead of itself and authorizes itself." Here Jean-Luc Nancy draws attention to the intersection of image and violence that has been an abiding concern for scholars working at the interface of literary and photographic representation. Much recent scholarship including work by Dominick LaCapra, Georges Didi-Huberman, Susan Sontag, Cathy Caruth, and many others have focused on the ethical dimension of representing images of violence and trauma in literature and photography.

Department of English Studies
Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz

is seeking papers for the first issue of

CONTEXTS: JOURNAL FOR ENGLISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE

which will be concerned with the theme

John Bull and the Continent

Contexts: Journal for English Literature and Culture is seeking papers for its first issue, which will examine literary and cultural relations between Britain and Continental Europe. We invite contributions dealing with literary and cultural aspects of John Bull's encounter with the Continent, from the eighteenth century to the present.