2011 CFP: Theory and Literary Criticism
See also under:
American: “A (Post)Secular Age: Protestant Epistemologies and the American Novel”; “Affect and Periodization: Rethinking the Long 19th Century”; “American Fiction Reflecting Global Ecological Concerns”; “Discourse on Democratic Identity & Freedom: Douglass, Wright, Ellison, Baldwin”; “In Memory of Radio: Modernity, (Post) Metropolis, and American Writing”; “Levinas in Antebellum America”; “Redeeming Modernity: Economy, Religion, and Literature in Modern America”; “Toni Morrison and Marilynne Robinson: Revisioning the American West”; “Utopian Impulses: Hope, Futurity, and Change in American Literature”
British and Anglophone: “Marvell and the Theorization of History”; “Renaissance Trauma”; “Samuel Beckett and the Encounter of Philosophy and Literature”; “Theorizing the Victorian Novel”
Comparative Languages: “Duly Noted: Approaches to Paratext”; “Literary Dress: Fashioning the Fictional Self”; “Revolutionary Terror”; “The Space of Memory”
Creative Writing: “Experiments in Hybrid Essay”
Cultural Studies and Film: “Cinema and Demos”; “Surplus Formulations in Detection Fiction”; “Understanding Avatar: A Movie Made for the Masses”
French and Francophone: “The Complexity and Originality of Camus’s Writings”; “Manipulative Forewords: Authors’ Attempts to Impose Their Own Agenda in Preface”; “Postmodern French Literature”
Italian: “Calvino and the city: new critical perspectives”; “Corporeality: Italian Literary Bodies of the XX and XXI Centuries:”; “Diseased Imaginations: Illness in Modern Italian Fantastic Fiction”; “Immagine e Forma nell’ Estetica Barocca”; “L’Altro Tasso: A Discussion of Tasso’s ‘Not-So-Minor’ Works”
Russian/Eastern European: “East European Literatures: Thinking Change, Conceiving Futures”; “Russian 20th-Century Poetry in New Contexts”
Spanish/Portuguese: “Cyberspace and Literature in Latin America: What Does The Future Entail?”; “Ficcion, Intriga y Fantasma. Novela historica vs narrativa testimonial”; “Manifestations of Madness and Love in 19th and 20th Century Spanish Literature”
Transnational Literatures: “‘Only the Difficult Stimulates’: The Interplay of Opacities in Caribbean Lit”; “Zero World Literature: The Writing of the Outside”
Women’s and Gender Studies: “Simon de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex: Newly Translated and Rediscovered”
- Articulating the Human and its Others
- Sponsored by the Society for Critical Exchange. How do literary and other texts articulate, reify, or produce the human--as category, claim, effect, etc.--as well as its oppositional others, such as the inhuman, subhuman, or posthuman? Is it possible to think or express what is counter to the human without reinscribing the human? How are multiplicities or hybridities of human natures or essences articulated? Abstracts for 20-minute papers to Scott DeShong, spdes@conncoll.edu.
- Authority and Uncertainty in Poetic Language and Practice
- How do poets construct authority for their art? What are the sources of lyric authority and how do poets exploit and challenge that authority productively? How do the resources of uncertainty enrich and complicate reception? We invite theoretical approaches based on readings of particular poets or poems and we welcome proposals that examine encounters between institutional authority and the authority of poetry and the poetic. Please send 300-word abstracts to Andrea Scott amstwo@princeton.edu and Stephen Donatelli sdonatel@princeton.edu.
- Cyber Aesthetics: Communication, Literature and Digital Reproducibility
- This panel seeks to explore the aesthetic consequences of digital reproducibility in hyperfiction and virtual realities. It thus focuses on three dimensions of the new media: (1) The notion of the Sign; (2) Communication; (3) Aesthetics and Literature. Therefore the relations between author, recipient and text will be in the center of discussion. Please send 500 word abstracts and brief biographical statements to Julia Genz (julia.genz@uni-tuebingen.de) or Ulrike Küchler (ulrike.kuechler@uni-tuebingen.de).EXTENDED TO 10/10
- Ecocritical Activisms and Activist Ecologies
- Ecocriticism informs ecological activisms, and vice versa. If ecocriticisms are important for educating desires and inspiring practices, then ecocritics take on activist roles that access spaces outside academia. What kind of change can the intersections and tensions between ecocriticism and activism bring about? This panel seeks to explore the ecologically-aware and imaginative possibilities of ecocritical activism. Please send abstracts of 500 words or less to Georg Drennig and MaryAnne Laurico at ecocrit.nemla2011@gmail.com.
- I See What You Say: Exploring Intersections of the Visual and the Literary
- This panel invites papers that consider the relationship between literary texts and visual images—paintings, illustrations, photographs, works of graphic design—that are put in a particular dialogic relationship. We welcome papers that aim to theorize this relationship on a general level or specific interpretations of a particularly compelling visual-verbal pair. Please send 250 word abstracts to Geoff Bender at gbender@mail.rochester.edu.
- Intention and Intentionality
- Sixty years after the publication of ‘The Intentional Fallacy,’ the problem of intentionality continues to haunt literary criticism. This panel seeks papers that historicize authorial intention (early modern period to present) and bring this into conversation with contemporary critical practice. Papers that do this and also examine the philosophical and interdisciplinary dimensions of authorial intention are especially encouraged. Submit 250 word abstracts to jsgang@rutgers.edu.
- Legal Fictions
- The characterization of extant laws as mere fictions of the state has often been a strategy for legal reform. This panel invites historical and theoretical examinations of the epistemological affinities and/or disparities between law and literature. Topics might include: legal fictions such as corporate personhood, the categorization of enslaved persons as “chattel,” literary allusions in law, natural rights discourse, law as rhetoric and coercion, reformist literature. Email 250-500 word abstracts to Carrie Hyde, chyde@eden.rutgers.edu
- Literary Darwinism and Social Justice
- Are literary Darwinism’s attempts at “essentialism” merely based on cultural constructs that can have negative social consequences? Or, could a focus on tensions between the cultural and the universal lead to a deeper understanding of our selves that could be used for the promotion of social justice? This panel seeks papers on how an evolutionary approach to literature might prove either beneficial or detrimental for the goals of promoting social justice. Email 250-300 word abstracts to Todd O. Williams. williams@kutztown.edu
- Literary Landscapes: Representation and Imagination
- This panel explores representations of landscape in works of fiction and literary non-fiction. It investigates the relationship between literary and literal landscapes, and the ways in which they are connected. It asks how the literary construction of a landscape becomes an iconic or mythic landscape that reappears in other literary works, art, or the popular imagination, and influences the perception of an actual landscape. Papers may examine works from any literature or time period. Send 250 word proposals to <mrye@fdu.edu>.
- Literature and the Experience of Ecstasy
- This panel will address the particular kind of knowledge generated by literary reconstructions of experiences of ecstasy. We wish to interpret and discuss how these literary transpositions – necessarily displaced from the actual experience – participate in transforming the experience of ecstasy, which usually seems to imply some suspension of the self into concentration or awareness that may produce a particular, more intuitive, knowledge. Please send 250-500 words proposals to Sara Danièle Bélanger Michaud, sdbm22@gmail.com .
- Medical Visions of Modernism
- This panel seeks to explore the relationship between emerging medical disciplines at the end of the nineteenth century (psychology, neurology, phrenology, and finally psychoanalysis) and Modernism. We are interested in papers which explore the role of language and its limits in articulating illness in literary fiction, medical treatises, and film studies.Maureen Chun mctwo@princeton.edu and Masha Mimran mmimran@princeton.edu
- Methodologies of Science and Literature (Roundtable)
- This panel will explore the state of the discipline in the field of science and literature, with particular emphasis on work that surveys, historicizes and/or theorizes contemporary methodologies. This will be a roundtable discussion. Abstracts of no more than 300 words to Rebekah Sheldon at rebekah.c.sheldon@gmail.com.
- Persons and Things: a Roundtable in Memorial to Barbara Johnson (Roundtable)
- In celebration of the life and work of Barbara Johnson, we will focus on one of her last books and its significance for fields ranging from law to film to the history of art. The essays in Persons and Things bring together concerns from throughout Johnson’s career, and we will ponder her lifetime impact on criticism. She provokes us to reconsider the self-evident yet slippery difference between persons and mere objects, how ‘non-life seems to lie behind what is considered most deeply human.’ Email Charles Henebry, Boston U, henebry@bu.edu
- Posthumanism, Biopower, and Modern and Contemporary War (Roundtable)
- How have representations of war since the beginning the twentieth century engaged with ideas of biopower and posthumanism? Proposals might investigate representations of technology and embodiment in war, the tropes of modern war involving machines or animals (e.g. helicopters in Vietnam, dogs in torture scenarios), or how such cases affect theories of life and machinery. Proposals (300 words or fewer) addressing these issues in literature, film, and other relevant texts should be sent to Ryan Hediger, La Salle University, hedigerr@lasalle.edu.
- Questioning Hybridity-Discourse: Colonial Métissage, Postcolonialism, and Globa
- This panel seeks papers that address hybridity from colonial, postcolonial and global perspectives. Proposals should critically examine postcolonial discourse on hybridity and offer new theoretical and empirical perspectives on the problematic relation of postcolonial studies to globalization. Papers that question the role of hybridity-discourse as a counter hegemonic agency are particularly welcome. Please submit 250-500 word abstracts to Amar Acheraiou at acherayou@sympatico.ca
- Rethinking the Postmodern Monster
- This panel seeks papers on theories of monstrosity. How does monstrosity occlude or benefit theories of genre/ gender/ nation? How do theories of monstrosity deal with the post-human/ post-national? How can monster theory be circumscribed as a unique ontology? This panel also seeks papers that apply monster theories in unique ways. Please submit 250-500 word abstracts on any aspect of the postmodern monster to Heather Cyr at h.cyr@queensu.ca.
- Routes of Memory: Remapping Trauma Studies
- This panel invites papers that explore traumas in a variety of genres (film, literature, photography, graphic novels) and that examine the relationships between identity and memory; the tensions between mourning, bearing witness and assuming ownership over histories; and, particularly for post-memory subjects, the anxieties that accrue to aestheticizing traumas one experiences at a generational remove. Please send 400 to 500-word abstracts of your papers to Rachel Ann Walsh at rachel.ann.walsh1@gmail.com.
- Separation as Condition and as Solution (Seminar)
- An interdisciplinary seminar on aspects of separation: race, religion, gender, politics, family and more. Examples include: gender separation in prayer houses and schools; the Berlin Wall; the separation barrier in Israel / Palestine; Jim Crow and Apartheid laws; religious taboos of separation; separation of the sick or disabled. Please send abstracts of 500 words on literary or visual representations and readings of separation to Aryeh Amihay (aamihay@princeton.edu). For further information, visit http://www.princeton.edu/~aamihay/sep.pdf
- Serial Narratives and Temporality
- This panel addresses the various relationships between seriality and temporality. We invite theoretical reflections as well as analyses of individual serial narratives (in literature, television, comics, video games, blogs, etc.) that explore the notion of narrative time: Is time in serials slow or fast, continuous or cyclical? Or is it – as recent publications suggest – essentially queer? Please send 250-500 word abstracts and brief biographical statements to Toni Pape, Université de Montréal, toni.pape@umontreal.ca.
- The Spatial Turn in Literary Theory (Seminar)
- This seminar addresses the significance of the so-called ‘spatial turn’ for literary theory. We welcome proposals for papers that examine theoretical attempts to conceptualize spatiality, but are also interested in papers that focus on specific spatial constructions in exemplary literary texts. Please send 300-400 word abstract to Nicola Behrmann (behrmann@rci.rutgers.edu) or Julia Weber (j.weber@yale.edu)
- Uncovering the Tradition of Vitalism in 20th Century Literature
- This panel seeks submissions that address literatures of vitalism--the belief that the material world and humans are best understood as being shaped by a dynamic field of energy and flow--and the aesthetic, ethical and political implications of vitalism. We are primarily interested in twentieth century literature, but also welcome submissions about vitalism in other periods (e.g. Romanticism and the Renaissance). Please submit 250-500 word abstracts to Philip Longo, Rutgers University, plongo@gmail.com.
- Word, Image, and Contemporary Lyric Voice(s)
- This panel will explore the constructions and/or disruptions of lyric voice(s) in contemporary ekphrasis. Topics might include: ekphrastic persona poems, the slippage or distance between speaker and poet identity, multivocal ekphrastic pieces, poet/artist collaborations or dialogue, serial lyric ekphrasis, spoken word or performance art that engages both verbal and visual, and hybrid texts or digital media that “speak” in lyric ways. Email a 1-2 page abstract and brief bio to Anne Keefe, Rutgers University (akeefe@eden.rutgers.edu).
