Call for Papers

"Representations of Textual and Contextual Boundaries

in Academic Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Film"

Kaunas, Lithuania

27-28 April 2017

Session

organized within the framework of the

 “Texts and Contexts: The Phenomenon of Boundaries” conference

Vilnius University Kaunas

Faculty of Humanities

In 1968, Donald Barthelme had one of his narrators declare: “Fragments are the only forms I trust.” The last decades have brought a number of acclaimed novels in Britain and the US that illustrate their authors’ interest in fragmentary structures. David Mitchell constructed Cloud Atlas (2005) out of six stories with different settings, characters and generic features. David Markson produced an 800-page-long tetralogy, culminating in The Last Novel (2007), which juxtaposes several thousand succinct anecdotes and quotations with metafictional references to the elusive authorial figure.

The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies

Call for Papers:

Published by The International David Foster Wallace Society, The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies is a double-blind, peer-reviewed print journal aimed at the international academic and professional communities engaged with Wallace’s work. The goal of the journal is to publish the most recent scholarship in the development of Wallace Studies and to encourage and identify new lines of inquiry for the discipline.

This proposed panel will attempt to collect perspectives about literary tourism, particularly regarding immigrant and ethnic communities from the nineteenth century to the present. The late 1830s and early 1840s marked the beginning of the tourist industry in North America, particularly in the Northeast United States. Representing the scores of European travelers upon his tour of the United States in 1842, Charles Dickens wrote about the visual splendor of Boston’s private houses, the State House, the Boston Common, and its immigrant populations. New York City, meanwhile, welcomed nearly 70,000 tourists annually by the mid 1830s, as travelers visited Manhattan’s noted parks and churches as well as its hidden slums.

Refuge, as a condition of displacement, seeking place, and placement, and the experience of moving oneself from a position of real or perceived harm to a position of real or perceived safety, interacts in complex and illuminating ways with perceptions of home and homelessness, belonging, citizenship, state and statelessness, personhood, language, loss, as well as with everyday practices and modes of dwelling, and the emotional and cognitive strategies used to configure the past, the present, and the future. Prompted by real historical transformations and mass displacements on an unprecedented scale, the notion/condition of refuge operated vigorously, if ambivalently, in the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century.

Breaking New Ground: Pluralistic Approaches to Global Ecocriticism
Graduate Colloquium of the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
University of Maryland-College Park
Friday, March 3, 2017 – Saturday, March 4, 2017
www.breakingnewgroundumd.weebly.com

Keynote speaker: Dr. Stephanie Posthumus, McGill University
Abstract proposals due: January 9, 2017