Special Session at MLA 2024 in Philadelphia, January 4-7, 2024

How might we better understand colonialism, and ways of being and knowing against or outside of it, by foregrounding the maritime: oceans, sailing, ports, cargo, navigation, crews, shoals, shipwreck, piracy? “Water is the first thing in my imagination,” writes Dionne Brand in A Map to the Door of No Return: “I knew that everyone here was unhappy and haunted in some way” that “had something to do with the Door of No Return and the sea.” Following Brand’s method, the gambit of this roundtable is that approaching colonialism via the sea can help us see it better and imagine paths past it.

The field of narrative medicine recognizes that stories articulate the language of the body. Rita Charon, the founder of the field of narrative medicine, brought both patient and practitioner to a fuller recognition of stories as a source of medical insight and intervention: stories that may take shape in words but originate through bodily drives. Drawing lessons from psychoanalysis about “attention, drives, and relationships,” she reminded us that the nineteenth-century photographs of hysteria captured images of bodies telling stories not yet spoken.

Literary, theoretical, and philosophical engagements with “the everyday” have a broad, transhistorical scope—from stoic philosophy to canonical hours, or medieval books of precepts; from Locke and Kant in the eighteenth century to Wittgenstein, Austin, and the ordinary language philosophy of the early twentieth century; from Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau to Toril Moi and Stanley Cavell; from considerations of the realist novel of the nineteenth century to the modernist novel of the twentieth (and beyond). 

FEMSPEC invites scholars and creative writers to join our team of book and film/television reviewers.

We focus on fantasy, science fiction, mythic, and speculative genres and use gender-based theories as well as other interpretive models as viewing lenses.

Suggested current titles may be found in the links below.

From LITERARY HUB, https://lithub.com/21-sci-fi-and-fantasy-books-to-look-forward-to-in-2023/

From INVERSE, https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/10-anticipated-sci-fi-movies-2023

2023 Conference

“Anger”

2023 Meeting of the Society for Comparative Literature and the Arts

October 5-7, 2023

Wyndham Philadelphia Historic District (Hotel)

Philadelphia, PA

Keynote Speaker: Robert J. C. Young

CALL FOR PAPERS

Reading Tolkien in the 21st Century
(7–8 September, 2023 – University of Bonn, Germany)