NeMLA 2020: The Politics of ‘Post’ in American Literature
updated:
Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - 3:00am
Meghan Burns and Kelly Mahaffy, University of Connecticut
deadline for submissions:
Monday, September 30, 2019
In a 2009 article in American Literary History, Richard Gray critiqued the production of post-9/11 novels, writing that such literary works “simply assimilate the unfamiliar into familiar structures.” Yet scholarly work on contemporary U.S. fiction seems to return again and again to a focus on literary production in terms of its relationship to the 2001 tragedy. In this panel, we seek to interrogate the way the concept of “post” has come to influence and, perhaps, even define the American literary canon.