NeMLA 46th Convention
Toronto, Ontario
April 30-May 3, 2015

Recipes for Power: Food and Literacy in French and Francophone Literature

Deadline for submissions: September 30, 2014

Showalter's definition of the fin de siècle as the 'golden age of hysteria' in her seminal work, The Female Malady, bolstered late-twentieth-century theory and criticism's association between 'hysteria' and European fin de siècle culture and medicine. Literary critics, historians, and cultural theorists are reopening the discussion of 'hysteria' and, in effect, shifting our understandings of its role in gender ideology, literary form, and politics beyond the turn of the century. This roundtable takes up the title of the authoritative, cultural history, Hysteria Beyond Freud, in order to foster and take part in this new discussion.

In his "Reflections on Exile," Edward Said asked "if true exile is a condition of terminal loss, why has it been transformed so easily into a potent, even enriching, motif of modern culture?" Arguably, this motif emerged in the eighteenth century, as
colonialism and the consolidation of the modern nation-state made more visible the movement--sometimes voluntary and sometimes forced--of peoples across and within political and geographical borders.
This interdisciplinary panel invites papers that address exile, migration, and statelessness in the long eighteenth century.

The relationship between the visual and the literary traces its origins to antiquity. In Rhetoric, Aristotle famously defines rhetoric as 'the ability to see the available means of persuasion' (I.2.1). Sight is a vital component of the human cognitive experience; neither education nor persuasion can take place without visualization. Throughout antiquity, philosophical concepts were often conveyed by artistic terminology and visual language, and all genres of Classical literature contain lengthy ekphrases.

What are the literary legacies of Malcolm X's life and death?

In 1965, after Malcolm X's life came to an end, The Autobiography of Malcolm X cemented his status as icon. Malcolm's death galvanized a nascent Black Arts Movement, inspiring the generation of black nationalist artists that Amiri Baraka termed "Malcolm's sons and daughters." This panel invites papers that engage with the enduring resonance of Malcolm X's life and death for literary and black studies.

Globalization via the digital age is upon us, demanding a new ethics and an intercultural aware-ness while the dialectics of globalism and cyberspace mandate a committed reflection on what the synthesis between the digital realm and global citizenship entails.