MMLA 2025 Literary Criticism Permanent Section CFP / In person.

Chair:  Timothy Erwin

Conference: Nov 14-16, 2025
Marquette University
Milwaukee, WI

When Emily Dickinson writes that “Hope is the thing with feathers – / That perches in the Soul –” she links the emotion to lyric indomitability. For Czeslaw Milosz hope is “with you when you believe / The earth is not a dream but living flesh,” that is, when dreams surprisingly come true.  

Yet for Dickinson hope is always tested and for Milosz it dies when you turn your back on it.  Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, and Huckleberry Finn all give us a central character whose hopes are by and large fulfilled.  Again, none of their endings are unproblematic. Jane has enjoyed a decade of what the novel calls “perfect concord” with Rochester, but St. John Rivers has left on a postcolonial mission to India.  Pip and Estella are reunited but will apparently never marry. And Huck uses his freedom to light out for the territories, suggesting that his escape is ongoing.

With Huckleberry Finn, Twain tells us that even satire can be hopeful.  Other genres like the religious hymn, the great ode, or the bildungsroman seem especially predisposed to hopefulness.  Is optimism best activated by generic features like suspense?  Or is anticipation less intense in comedy than tragedy?  Is the trope of allegory more hopeful than the conceit?  How are narrative hopes realized differently in lyric, drama, and fiction?

As a discipline, literary criticism answers to theory as well as to close reading, and to phenomenology as well as historicism.  In practice, its approaches are often mixed or interdisciplinary, embracing the other humanities.  They may well have other disciplinary origins, much as post-structural analysis can be traced back to anthropology and linguistics.  The “Literary Criticism” panel at MMLA 2025 invites trans-humanities approaches to hopefulness in the study of writers from Milton to Murakami.

Please send along your proposed paper title, a 200-300 word abstract, and a brief two- or three- sentence biographical introduction to Timothy Erwin (timothy.erwin@unlv.edu) by midnight April 25, 2025.