[UPDATE] Noncanonical Affects (ALA 2011, Boston, 5/26-5/29; proposals by 12/15/2010)

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American Literature Association
22nd Annual Conference
May 26-29, 2001
Boston, MA

Noncanonical Affects

The affective turn in literary and cultural studies, according to Sianne Ngai, has worked to historicize and critique certain affective states--sympathy, melancholia, shame--even as it has left unexamined the cultural roots of other, less "canonical" forms of feeling. This panel seeks papers that historicize critically neglected forms of affectivity by exploring their representation/production in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century texts.

All papers relevant to this topic are welcome, especially those which
•foreground links between literary canonicity and the affective;
•situate texts within transnational affective structures and/or discourses; and/or
•consider relationships and tensions between affect studies and the "aesthetic turn."

Please send abstract (250-500 words) and brief c.v. by Dec. 15 to Brian Sweeney, Assistant Professor of English, University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, bsweeney@umassd.edu.