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)

We are honored to announce the 9th International Conference on Language, Literature & Culture and Crossroads III Conference. This combined conference is organized jointly by the University of Białystok (Poland) and Çankaya University (Ankara, Turkey) on October 14-15, 2021 in Białystok, Poland, and the topical theme of the conference will be “Risk and Safety” in different areas of human sciences. 

Our Keynote Speakers

                                                                                               CALL FOR PAPERS

No Country for Old Men?

Ageing Masculinities in Irish Life & Culture

NUI Galway,June 3-4th 2020

EXTENDED Proposal Deadline: 31 January 2020

In the past decade, modernist studies has been animated by the issue of periodization. As a concept, modernism has been projected backwards and forwards in space and time. Attempts to clarify the “when” of modernism have ultimately led modernist studies to the doorstep of contemporary. If we now have late modernism, metamodernism, and cosmodernism broaching the present, we also have arguments “against periodization” (Hayot), proposals for “literary transhistory” (Bronstein), and assertions that modernism is nothing more nor less than the “creative and expressive domain” of any modernity (Friedman). But what does it mean to propose the contemporaneity of modernism when modernism itself is being detached from time and history?

This panel will broach the topic of shaping a poetic identity through the prism of a traumatic experience of displacement. How does the poet present a disturbing personal history on the page? Coming from one place and being forcibly moved to another also involves confronting a different language and culture: how is such an occurrence translated to the page? Is poetry a space where cultures and languages clash with one another, or does the expression effect a reconciliation? How does this potential blend of languages and cultural references (including code-switching and code-mixing) inscribe a troubled identity, trying to reconstitute oneself via a poetic text?

Masculinity—that hard to define notion of “being a man” or “acting like a man”—is largely understood through cultural expectations and images of masculine performance. Masculinity can seem nebulous, but literary and popular cultural representations of the idea help to solidify it both as a concept and as an identity. Westerns, noir, thrillers, war narratives, working class narratives, and even apocalyptic films and novels have shaped our definitions not only of what it means to be a man, or to be masculine, but indeed what it means to be American.