Northeast
Modern Language Association 49th Convention
“Global Spaces, Local
Landscapes and Imagined Worlds”
When: April 12th-15th,
2018
Where:
Pittsburgh, PA
Deadline for
Abstracts: Saturday, September 30th, 2017
How to Apply: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/CFP
Keynote Speaker:
Rob Nixon, the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Family Professor in the
Humanities and the Environment at Princeton University. He is the author of
four books, most recently Dreambirds: the Natural History of a Fantasy and Slow
Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, which won numerous awards,
including the 2012 Sprout prize from the International Studies Association for
the best book in environmental studies.
Topics with
areas concerning ChildLit/YA Literature and Popular Culture:
Editor's Note: We have selected only a few areas of interest, to see the entire list of topics, please visit their website.
Superwoman: Comic
Myth or Idealized Icon? (Panel)
Chair: Nicol Epple (Indiana University of Pennsylvania)
We know the four tenets of True Womanhood and understand the
Feminine Mystique. But, today, what gender role prescriptions still proliferate
concerning domesticity and work, family affairs and public
relationships? This panel seeks to create discussion which explores
feminist theories and material applications in current American cultural
landscapes. What changes have transpired from past feminist viewpoints and what
speculations can made of feminist scholarship and cultural production for the
future?
Reboots and Revivals: The Return of
Television (Roundtable)
Chair: Lisa Perdigao (Florida Institute of Technology)
While film has an extensive history of remaking classics and
blockbusters for new audiences, television’s recent reboots and revivals
suggest new ideas about the limitations and possibilities of continuing
narratives in a medium defined by seriality. Recent reboots and revivals
include Arrested Development (2013- ), Heroes Reborn (2015-2016), Gilmore
Girls: A Year in the Life (2016- ), Girl Meets World (2014-2017), Fuller
House (2016- ), 24: Legacy (2016- ), Prison Break:
Resurrection (2017- ), and Twin Peaks (2017- ) while
series such as Will & Grace, Dynasty, Roseanne, Charmed,
and American Idol are slated for returns in the near future.
Teaching and Learning Spaces: Real,
Fantastic, and Imagined (Panel)
Chair: Carine Mardorossian (SUNY University at Buffalo)
This session is devoted to the exploration of teaching and
learning as real, fantastic, and imagined spaces. It welcomes contributions
that address pedagogical representations and practices, theories, issues, experiments,
and debates in education.
Political Implications of the Portal Fantasy
(Panel)
Chair: Emily Lauer (SUNY Suffolk County Community
College)
Portal Fantasies offer a unique way to comment on the
current political situation, in their capacity as invented worlds with a
permeable link to our own. The portal can act as a funhouse mirror, reflecting
our own world back to us in grotesque and illuminating ways, or it can offer
stark contrasts to our own world which often take the form of escapist, superior
alternatives. This session invites papers that explore how authors have used
the portal fantasy to comment on the politics of our world in various ways.
'The World is
Changed': Fantasy Literature in the Anthropocene (Seminar)
Chair: Stephanie Weaver (St. John’s University), Lisa
Robinson (St. John’s University)
The Anthropocene, or "The Age of Man," focuses on
the exploitation of resources and the possibilities of resiliency and
sustainability in the wake of anthropocentric-induced crisis. This seminar
seeks to unpack the various understandings and responses to the human-dominated
geological age, specifically through the lens of the fantasy genre. Papers are
sought that discuss the role of environmental crisis in various areas of
fantasy literature and the multifaceted responses and solutions to preventing
the destruction of worlds because of the Anthropocene.
Free Range: An Open
Inquiry into the Nonhuman in Latinx Studies (Panel)
Chair: Lacie Rae Buckwalter (Cornell University)
In this panel, we propose to explore the roles of
human-nonhuman encounters in the field of Latinx Studies and Literature at
large. How do animal, human, botanical, and epistemological bodies alter the
way we approach ontological interpretations in Latinx texts, visual art, and/or
performances? In addition to these concerns, this call for papers seeks work
that traverses a varied range of bodies and utilizes interdisciplinary
frameworks in innovative ways. Topics might include, but are not limited to:
race and animal studies, transgender bodies and queering the nonhuman,
corporeal ecologies, critical approaches to landscapes, bodies of land, and
water.
Arthurian Legend in
the 20th and 21st Centuries (Panel)
Chair: Susan Austin (Landmark College)
The past hundred years have brought the legend of King
Arthur to Broadway, television, comedy, and Disney; countless authors have
appropriated or reimagined the legend and elements from it. How have films,
television shows, games, comics, and books for all audiences and ages employed Arthurian
characters, themes, motifs, and plots? How have these changes reflected
shifting cultural attitudes and values? What do recent retellings and
appropriations of Arthurian legend tell us about ourselves and the generations
immediately preceding us? What do we want and need from King Arthur and his
court?
Space and Psyche in
Contemporary Latinx/Latin American Culture (Panel)
Chair: Thomas Conners (University of Pennsylvania)
Psychoanalysis ponders the ways in which subjects form while
navigating the dynamic environments they inhabit. With movement across the
Americas in constant flux, contemporary Latin American and Latinx literatures
offer insights into this border-crossing psyche. Examining the implications of
crossing, moving around, and standing in the spaces, we ask: how is a subject
formed when straddling borders, languages, racial identities, and national
affiliations? What are the formal, affective, and aesthetic manifestations of
this in literature?
Human, Animal,
Post-Human: Ecocriticism and Materialism in a Global Context (Panel)
Chair: Mark Epstein (Princeton University), Daniele
Fioretti (Miami University)
This panel welcomes contributions that focus on the areas of
tension regarding ecocriticism and the “post-human”: natural – 'human' sciences,
materialism – postmodernism, global – national/regional, historical –
contemporary. It also welcomes reflections on the possibilities for
communication between species, and what “autonomy” and “(self)-emancipation”
might possibly mean for non-human species, given the very limited forms of
inter-species communication we have established so far.
Sequence and/or Simultaneity: Time and
Narrative in Comics and Graphic Narratives (Panel)
Chair: Heike Polster (The University of Memphis)
This panel seeks new scholarly work on the representation of
temporality in comics and graphic narratives, with a particular attention to
the formal qualities of comics. Papers may address sequentiality, simultaneity,
seriality, human vs. cosmic time, eruptions of the past into the present, or
other experimental permutations of time in comics. Graphic narratives from
other countries and traditions outside of the Anglophone world are welcome.
The Urgency of Now
(and Then): Contemporary Representations of African American History (Panel)
Chair: Maria Rice Bellamy (City University of New York)
This panel seeks papers analyzing the contemporary
significance of recent representations of African American history in
literature, television and film as well as in the National Museum of African
American History and Culture (NMAAHC). Papers are invited on such works as
Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, Nate
Parker’s The Birth of a Nation, WGN America’s Underground, Ava
DuVernay’s 13th, and the NMAAHC. Papers should discuss the
relationship between the presented history and the contemporary moment and may
address such questions as: What does the current prominence of such works say
about this moment in United States history and society? How do the struggles of
the past resonate with the protests of the present?
New Approaches in
Zombie Studies (Panel)
Chair: Derek McGrath (SUNY University at Buffalo)
This session looks at zombies, including as they were
defined by Night of the Living Dead, filmed in NeMLA’s host
city Pittsburgh by local director George Romero. How have zombies changed in
recent years, in their composition, narrative format, and metaphorical status?
What new insights can be garnered looking to earlier conceptions of the zombie,
and conceptions from Haiti and around the world? How have zombies served as
commentary on medicine, social media, anti-intellectualism, economics, and
society?
Spaces of Hope and Desperation in Science
Fiction (Panel)
Chair: Elif Sendur (SUNY Binghamton)
This panel aims to consider speculative/science fiction’s
spatial imagination vis-à-vis hope and despair. Topics may include the kinds of
dystopian spaces SF proposes, space and its spatial representation, gendered
spaces within the SF genre, environment and its future imagined by SF, and the
representation of the instability or hope. All forms of SF literature,
including short stories, novels, films, anime, manga, and TV shows are
welcome.
Monsters and Monstrosity: A Tribute to Mary
Shelley (Creative)
Chair: Richard Johnston (United States Air Force Academy)
1818 marks the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein;
or, The Modern Prometheus. To honor Shelley’s enduring novel, and to
compliment the critical panel on the literature and culture of 1818, this
roundtable welcomes creative work, in any genre, on monsters or the idea of
monstrosity. In the interest of including as many voices and as possible,
participants will be asked to limit presentations of original creative work to
10 minutes.
Postcolonial Queers:
Representations, Remediations, Revolutions (Panel)
Chair: Christian Ylagan (Western University)
While Western theories such as Judith Butler’s performative
thesis have been productive in opening up the discursive grounds on gender and
sexuality, these frameworks often limn bodies in abstract ways that downplay
their materialities and contexts. This panel thus hopes to build on the notion
of a queer intersectionality whereby gender and sexual identity are
inextricable from race, geography, linguistic modes, embattled histories, and
cultural contexts.
Seelenlandschaften
(Soul Landscapes) in German Children and Youth Novels (Panel)
Chair: Mona Eikel-Pohen (Syracuse University)
The panel invites proposals on German children and youth
novels from the late 20th / early 21st century with a focus on innovative
interpretation approaches (e.g. re-telling, drawing, or building in Minecraft),
on respective movie adaptations, and on the impact of symbolic and real spaced
for the mental and intellectual development of younger readers and its
relevance for identity formation e.g. as reading text in middle and high school
or higher education.
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