Dominant representations of old age depict it as a period of debilitation and decline, frailty and dependence, isolation and loss of selfhood. Other accounts emphasize the experience of exceptional lucidity, insight, and wisdom that accompanies aging. This seminar invites participants to rethink and interrogate these two descriptive poles and attempt a more critically nuanced engagement with aging and old age. Papers can address aging from different humanistic and theoretical perspectives and approaches. They can also consider literary and filmic representations of aging that go beyond the accounts provided by the news media and sociological reports.

Possible topics include:

CALL FOR PAPERS

We invite proposals for chapters in a volume on disability and graphic literature for the new Literary Disability series from Palgrave Macmillan edited by David Bolt, Elizabeth Donaldson, and Julia Miele Rodas. Feats of Clay: Disability and Graphic Narrative will scrutinize the ways that disability has been employed in comic books, graphic nonfiction, graphic novels, underground comix, and/or webcomics.  Our aim is to interrogate standard assumptions about disability and sequential art in order to open up new approaches and potential collaborations between both of these vital areas of study.

Some possible but not exclusive topics include

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the reconfiguration of women's roles in both the domestic and the social spheres in countries across the globe. Women's vital roles as mothers and educators to the future citizens of the nation/world were capitalized upon by female writers and activists who called for the improvement of women's social rights and their inclusion in the workplace. The discourses of motherhood and domesticity as gendered cultural capital(s) have thus long been engaged, reconfigured, and deployed in transnational women's movements.

Unconventional Archives: Literature and the Uses of History is a two-day workshop to be held at Ertegun House, Oxford on the 17 and 18 of January 2014.

The College English Association, a gathering of scholar-teachers in English studies, welcomes proposals for presentations on Rhetoric and Composition for our 45th annual conference. Submit your proposal at http://www.cea-web.org

Submission Deadline: November 1, 2014

Special Topic: Composition and Rhetoric
We invite papers on Composition and Rhetoric that draw on the conference theme "Horizons." Proposals may conceive the conference theme broadly. Practical and theoretical responses encouraged.

Cannibal Modernisms

King's College London Programme in Comparative Literature Annual Graduate Conference, 7th-8th November, 2013.

Keynote Speaker: Professor Xudong Zhang, Professor of East Asian Studies and Comparative Literature, New York University.

The teaching of music, dance, painting and other arts is well-respected in the academy, but in creative writing a myth lingers in the minds of many: you either have "it" or you don't. As instructors much of our time is spent attempting to dispel this myth; indeed, Kelly Ritter and Stephanie Vanderslice go so far as to title their anthology of creative writing pedagogy essays Can It Really Be Taught?