The aim of this roundtable is to present possible guidelines and book selections for a hypothetical undergraduate course in “Novels of the Holocaust.” The panel will be resolutely international and open to books originally published in any language. As this roundtable is sponsored by NeMLA’s comparative literature director, participants are not obliged to use or refer to English translations if they wish to use original texts. The course that might be called the “target course” may be for any undergraduate level and for any country.

While this is roundtable is meant to follow the interests of its participants and not impose any institutional rigidities, seven particular themes or questions seem especially important.

The present literary reputation of Albert Camus is both fascinating and instructive. It is fascinating because, on the one hand, his work is all but absent from global university curricula; yet, he is one of the most widely read authors on the planet. Who has not read The Stranger or The Myth of Sisyphus?

Moreover, Camus and his work are instructive for many reasons.

In his lifetime, Nietzsche referred to over 150 nineteenth-century writers in both his published writings and Nachlaß. Nietzsche’s use of nineteenth-century fiction and poetry ranges from somewhat nonchalant to extremely systematic. Indeed, the cornerstone of his “Advent of European Nihilism” in the late 1880s is the decline or decadence of literature during Nietzsche’s lifetime.

The panel attempts to focus on passages, individual novels or poems, and complete bodies of work in order to assess Nietzsche’s use of these texts in his philosophical project.

Interface has become an increasingly important area of research not only in the fields of communication and technology, but also in the study of culture and media more generally. Expanding from a focus on human-device relationships to encompass larger contemporary issues of habit, identity, embodiment, and social interaction, interfaces and interface thinking seem to be everywhere, producing what Alexander Galloway has called an “interface effect.” This panel will offer multiple perspectives on interface as a concept and condition, considering how it may extend from seemingly straightforward media and technology applications to impact wider socio-cultural activity and transactions.

Supernatural Studies seeks contributions for a themed issue on teaching (and) the supernatural to be published in Summer 2017 as a special, open-access electronic issue. Supernatural Studies is a peer-reviewed journal that promotes rigorous yet accessible scholarship in the growing field of representations of the supernatural. The breadth of “the supernatural” as a category creates the potential for interplay among otherwise disparate individual studies that will ideally produce not only new work but also increased dialogue and new directions of scholarly inquiry.

MATLIT, 2017, vol. 5 Call for Sounds

Editors:

Nuno Miguel Neves (FCT PhD Programme in Materialities of Literature)

Tiago Schwäbl (FCT PhD Programme in Materialities of Literature)

MATLIT’s volume 5 explores what we call literature as VOX MEDIA: voice as a means for literature and the disturbances suffered by the medium from the combined effect of performance, and technologies for mediation, representation and reproduction. And also other instances, like the tensions between the body and technology, audibility v. in-audibility of the text, sound and meaning, physical presence and/or absence of the authors, and so forth.

The Journal of the Georgia Philological Association is now accepting submissions for its annual publication.  Submissions requirements can be on any area related to language, literature, and philology from any time period and discipline.  In fact, previous issues have included everything from ancient to postmodern works of literature, pop culture, history, religion, and even politics. The deadline for submissions is September 1, 2016.  Those accepted for publication must be/become members of the Georgia Philological Association.  Manuscripts should be no more than 8,000 words.