UPDATE: This panel has been designated a "guaranteed session" by MLA and the Forum on Psychology, Psychoanalysis, and Literature, meaning that its place on the 2023 MLA Convention program is assured.

What does psychoanalysis do for theory, criticism, and scholarship in US literatures today? Conversely, how do US literatures intervene on psychoanalysis?

The MLA’s Transdisciplinary Connections Forum on Psychology, Psychoanalysis, and Literature has noted extraordinary scholarly interest in these questions recently. We therefore invite abstracts on US literatures and any aspect of the psychoanalytic tradition for a proposed 2023 MLA panel.  Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Novel psychoanalytic readings of US literary texts, especially recent, BIPOC, queer, and noncanonical works
• Contemporary US representations, in all media, of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis
• Reexaminations of twentieth-century US psychoanalytic literary criticism
• Discussions of psychoanalytic thought in the US today, particularly its role in recent critical turns such as autotheory and Afropessimism

300-word abstract and CV to Dorothy Stringer (stringd@temple.edu) by March 15, 2022. Please use “CFP: US Literatures and Psychoanalysis” as your subject line.