The fantasy of sentient machines serving humans’ desires and needs connects world cultures and media as the film & TV industry is eager to produce eye-catching visual narratives of indestructible cyborgs like Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) in the Terminator Series or selfless servants like Andrew Martin (Robert Williams) in Bicentennial Man. However spectacular these films are, they often leave us uncomfortable, wondering if bionic humans or AI-operated machines are here to destroy humanity. Could it be that humans deceive themselves into thinking that the creation of such posthuman beings will resolve the paradox of the ‘master and slave’ power dynamics?

Latin American Children’s Literature and Culture

Call for Papers

The range, audacity, and radical commitments of Alice Notley’s poetry are unmatched in contemporary literature. Having published continuously for over 50 years, Notley is one of the most important and celebrated American poets of the 20th and 21st centuries. This NeMLA roundtable aims to address the full scope of Notley’s writing and aesthetic activity from 1970 to the present, from the slant domesticity of her early volumes in the 1970s, to the investment in gendered urban publics in the 1980s, to an attention to environmental crisis in the early 1990s, to the more oracular interest in the relationship between “one” and “world” in recent volumes, in order to variously describe a poetics of care in Notley’s work.

Full CFP here: https://bevismanuscripts.wordpress.com/call-for-papers We warmly invite submissions for a workshop taking place in Düsseldorf 2-4 December 2021, hosted by Heinrich-Heine University. The multi-text manuscript was a key medium for disseminating popular narratives including romances and epic or hagiographical texts across the cultural and linguistic borders of late medieval Europe. The manuscripts that have survived from this period can therefore be read not only as windows into the literary, social and linguistic environment in which they were created, but also as cultural objects whose evolving contents shaped the adaptation and reception of the texts they contain.

Sesssion on the 2022 NeMLA Conference in Baltimore (March 10-13th)

Research centre S:PAM (Studies in Performing Arts & Media) of Ghent University (Belgium) is delighted to announce From the Scenic Essay to the Essay-Exhibition. Expanding the Essay Form in the Arts after Literature and Film, an international conference from 27th-29th of April 2022 in Ghent (Belgium) and the corresponding call for proposals to contribute to this event.

Theme of the conference:

This panel asks a follow-up question to the so-called "urban turn" in the humanities and social sciences in recent years: what lies beyond or at the margins of the urban. The city itself has evolved into something that transgresses the traditional formations of the urban/rural, the fictional/material, the state/institutional, and the resistant/popular. By seeking to address the interrelation between the notions of the center and the peripheral within media urbanisms across the world, the panel aims to go beyond the binary of the center and the margin well as the urban and the non-urban, and in doing so, rethinks urban marginality as well as the processes that create it.