This conference seeks to open up discussion and reflection on silence in Irish writing from a range of perspectives. Irish writers have attempted to conjure silence to signify intimacy, desire, fulfilment, grief, terror, trauma, boredom, linguistic and cultural loss, being and nothingness. From W. B. Yeats to Samuel Beckett and beyond, silence persists, both as a theme and as a dimension of writing itself. Silence threatens all messages – spoken and written – in their need for pause or interval to make them transmissible. At the same time, all attempts at writing silence may be doomed to fail. The dilemma seems singular in the writing of Beckett, but is by no means confined to him.

Proposed Panel for the 2014 American Literature Association Annual Conference (ALA) to be held in Washington, D.C., May 22-25, 2014

"New Directions in Sherwood Anderson"

This panel seeks paper proposals that offer new perspectives on the fictional and non-fictional works of Sherwood Anderson. We invite a broad range of Anderson related topics that include his influence on /relationship with writers of his era, such as Jean Toomer, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner; his current reception among literary critics; and his future within an expanding literary canon.

Papers on any aspect of British seventeenth-century literature, for the annual meeting of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, October 9-11, 2014 in Boise, Idaho. Email 200-300 word proposals by March 1, 2014 to clayldaniel@live.com or daniel@utpa.edu. All proposals are acknowledged. You do not have to be a member of RMMLA to propose a paper, but you should become a member by April 1 to be listed in the program.For further conference information, access the RMMLA website at http://www.rmmla.org/.

Call for Papers
Literati 2014: Speaking Bodies
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI
www.museuw.com/call-for-papers

Textual bodies have long served as a battleground for conceiving of the human body. Through the lens of literature, people have fathomed the body's limits, its relationship to identity, its ability to liberate or enchain. Literati 2014's theme, "Speaking Bodies," asks, What does it mean to be embodied, and what are the consequences of conceiving of human or textual bodies as "legible"? Who or what gets to establish the limits of these bodies? How are they able to transform or be transformed?

This special issue for Black Camera, titled "Fugitivity and the Filmic Imagination," ponders whether American mainstream and/or independent cinema—primarily with regard to the current string of films being released that take up chattel slavery—engages or disavows black fugitivity as the imaginative condition for film; a reassessment of the frameworks that are most generative for exploring black fugitivity's complexities; and a rethinking of how online social media now informs the discourses that shape the filmic imagination.

Call for Papers: "Technological Futures" at the National Women's Studies Association Conference (November 13-16, 2014 Abstracts due 2/1/2014)