Call for Papers - Panel on the Work of Cairns Craig

2nd World Congress of Scottish Literatures

June 21-25, 2017 (Vancouver, BC)

This panel invites proposals which pursue critical dialogues with the work of the Scottish theorist and literary critic Cairns Craig. From his early work as editor of the Determinations series through Out of History (1996), The Modern Scottish Novel (1999), and Intending Scotland (2009), Craig’s scholarship has helped shape the emergence and consolidation of Scottish literary and cultural studies as an institutional discipline. At the same time, he has used his theorization of Scottish culture as an expression of counter-modern critique to challenge key thinkers in the academic formations of English Literature, British cultural studies, postmodernism, and postcolonialism. The panel seeks to both extend these dialogues and generate new ones by resituating Craig’s thought in 21st century sociopolitical and cultural contexts. While the panel is specifically interested in exploring the relevance of Craig’s thought to the conference theme—dialogues and diasporas—also welcome are proposals which address issues including, but not limited to:

--20th and 21st century Scottish literature as/and counter-Enlightenment ‘theory’

--Scotland as/against British Cultural Studies

--Scotland, devolution, and the postcolonial

--‘Otherworlds’: Scotland as/against Science Fiction and Fantasy

--Dialects and Dialectics in the Scottish novel

--Scotland and the post-Brexit political imagination

--Dialogues with the Black Atlantic: Craig’s Scotland as a ‘Counterculture of Modernity’

--Scotland and/as World Literature

--Scottish personalist philosophy after the Affective turn

--Textual interventions: reading Craig reading Scottish Literature

Interested applicants should email abstracts (300 words) to Erik Jaccard (amory79@uw.edu) by January 1st.