ACCUTE 2020 (May 30-June 2) - Member Organized Panel

“This Book is Trash!”: Genres and Forms of Disposability, Ephemerality, and Disintegration

Panel Organizer: Kelly McDevitt (kelly.mcdevitt@queensu.ca)

The canon of English literary studies is founded upon texts that endure, narratives that create bridges across centuries and cultures. Conservation, anthologising, translation, and allusion all serve to carry the meaning of these enduring texts into new media and new cultural contexts. This panel, however, invites papers to consider texts and genres that eschew durability. From pulp magazines, to spoken word poetry, to digital platforms like Snapchat, artists have capitalized on media of disposability, transience, and plain old trash to expand the categories of literature and posit new narrative possibilities. This panel invites papers that rummage through the ruffage and question the role of literary scholarship in valorizing narrative durability.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Genres considered “trashy”: erotica/romance, smut, Young Adult fiction, comics, Science Fiction/cyberpunk, Fantasy, fanfiction, vernaculars
• Genres of transience: airport literature, waiting room magazines, public advertising
• Performance and public forms: spoken word, Fringe theatre, stand-up comedy, protest speeches/chants
• Digital media: text messages, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, online magazines, blogs
• Disposable forms: pulps, newspapers
• Immaterial forms: projections, holograms
• Found poetry, collage, sampling
• Dying/obsolete forms

• Please submit paper proposals by November 15, 2019 through the ACCUTE Proposal Submission Form available here: https://accute.ca/accute-conference/proposal-submission-form/. In your submission, please include a 300-500-word proposal without personal identifying marks, a 100-word abstract, and a 50-word bio.