SLSA 2016 – Creating Accounts of Creative Bodies: the Narrative Work of Fertility

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Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA)
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Babies perform a lot of narrative work. George Eliot's Middlemarch narrator playfully quips that "where there was a baby, things were right enough," and that "error, in general, was a mere lack of that central poising force," and this is often as true for narratives themselves as for the characters therein. Babies often serve as forces of disruption or normatization in literary texts, and this panel seeks to explore the narrative work that the (pro)creative and (pro)created bodies of mothers and babies perform. This panel seeks to situate the creative work of female reproduction in the context of its narrative creation, taking seriously the textual creation and performance of fertility in literary texts. How, we wonder, does the insertion of withholding of maternity work to influence narrative? How does the pro-"creativity" of the narrator or author intersect with that of her characters? How might textual events like abortions, miscarriages, and births serve to radically disrupt or re-entrench social norms of fertility?

We seek abstracts that address, expand, or complicate these questions. All periodization and theoretical approaches are welcome. Please send a 25-word abstract and a 1-page CV with the subject line "SLSA Panel Submission" to Alyssa Duck at alyssa.duck@emory.edu by Tuesday, May 10. The theme of the 2016 meeting for the Society for Science, Literature and the Arts (SLSA) is "Creativity." The conference will be held 3-6 November in Atlanta, Georgia. Please see http://litsciarts.org/slsa16/ for more information.