The annual conference of the American Literature Association will meet at the Westin Copley Place in Boston on May 23-26, 2019 (Thursday through Sunday of Memorial Day weekend).

The Jonathan Bayliss Society will sponsor one roundtable discussion on Experiments in Narrative Form in American Fiction.

American fiction abounds in experimental narrative form, from Melville, Dos Passos, and Djuna Barnes through Faulkner, Kerouac, Barth, Kathy Acker, Jonathan Bayliss, and many others.  The Jonathan Bayliss Society invites proposals on American novels that engage in such experiment.

The roundtable will be comprised of several brief (8-10 minute) presentations.

Graduate students are especially welcome to submit proposals.

ABO: An Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830 (https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/abo/) solicits articles that provide practical, theoretical, and critical ways of engaging women and the arts, 1640-1830, through digital means.

Among other topics, articles might analyze or encourage new ways of looking at texts connected to women and the arts, or women’s presence and absence in electronic collections, projects, or data sets. ABO also solicits peer reviews of digital tools and projects focusing on women in the arts, 1640-1830, and invites submission of digital tools and projects for peer review.

British nature writing can be understood as both a product of and a challenge to a western-style modernity that has created the conditions for its own unravelling. The tense that best captures these conditions is the future anterior. Scottish writer Kathleen Jamie, wandering through Bergen’s Natural History Museum, marvels at the ‘decaying bones of twenty-four cetacean skeletons crowded under the ceiling’. One whale skeleton alone, that of a gigantic blue, is ‘less an animal, more a narrative’. The different cetacean narratives add up to a devastating commentary to which even words such as ‘waste’ and ‘slaughter’ and ‘holocaust’ and ‘shame’ cannot do full justice.