Verdades con minúscula. Confrontaciones con la realidad en la narrativa contemporánea

*Selected papers will be published in a post-conference volume.

In an ever-changing world swept by online news, global flows of information and stories, entertaining platforms of films and music, understanding media products and outlets has become urgently important and simply fundamental. The steady development of the world has brought a 24/7 attachment to TV sets, mobile phones, PCs, Tablets and all other gadgets and devices.

The Midwest Modern Language Association’s 2022 conference theme is “Post-Now.” The conference will take place November 16-21 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (https://www.luc.edu/mmla/convention/callforpapers/)

The Writing Across the Curriculum permanent session will explore this theme by exploring our ethical responsibilities as instructors of writing, our pedagogy, and our work with students as they seek to find their voice in composition classrooms. 

Topics might include, but are not limited to:

We seek paper abstracts for a panel on the short story (and other forms of short narrative broadly conceived). This panel will be conducted at SCMLA’s 79th Annual Hybrid Conference, to be held in Memphis, Tennessee from October 13-15, 2022. The conference offers options for both In Person and Virtual attendance to suit presenters’ needs.

Papers might cover any variety of topics, including studies of the traditional 'short story' literary genre as well as other types of short narrative — like short-program multimedia, short films, music videos, short-episode video games, social media micro-literature, and anything else that pushes at the boundaries of literature studies.

Recent discussions and debates in literary and creative writing studies have invited fiction writers, scholars, and readers alike to re-evaluate the form and the function of the short story. The rise and prominence of online literary magazines and e-texts have forced writers to adapt to lower word counts and the challenges of on-screen reading: writers have responded with fragmented and braided narratives that eschew the “long-read” short story published in venues like The New Yorker or Paris Review. Handheld gaming on consoles like Nintendo’s 3DS and Switch systems have brought genres like the visual novel to the West—transforming short-form narratives into portable and interactive hybrid works of literature.

In anticipation of the 2022 Annual Convention of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Languages Association (to be held at UCLA, November 11-13, 2022), we seek proposals on the intersections of politics and poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  This session affords a space to assess the past century’s poetic/political interventions, exploring how poetry and poetic experience have lent themselves to critiquing the status quo, imagining radical futures, mobilizing collectivities, and resisting the present in various ways.  Of particular interest are abstracts that are adjacent to the conference theme –“Geographies of the Fantastic and Quotidian” –or which specifically engage with the poetry of Los Angeles as

Recent essays and articles in publications like The Atlantic and Vox have voiced growing concerns about the increasing elasticity of “trauma.” Even so, those same texts note the value of recognizing others’ trauma and of responding ethically to their stories. This worth is particularly evident in the wake of the many Covid-related traumatic events and the most recent racial reckonings (that may or may not have occurred) in the US and around the world.