Deadline for submissions: April 15, 2018
Full name/name of organization: Society for the Study of American Travel Writing
Contact email: kfslr00@tamuk.edu

The Society for the Study of American Travel Writing invites proposals for the Society for the Study of American Women Writers 2018 Triennial Conference in Denver, Colorado. November 7-11, 2018.

In keeping with the Conference Theme: “Resistance and Recovery across the Americas,” the SSATW seeks proposals that examine the ways American women travelers use their writing to critique society, the nation, and the injustices they experience or observe as travelers.

Whether traveling in America or abroad, women travelers are uniquely positioned

• to observe the lives of people they visit,
• to comment on the restrictions to travel for women,
• to think about the social, economic, and political forces at work in the locations visited and in the nation as a whole,
• to comment on the effects of patriarchal and racist institutions and modes of thinking or behavior on women who travel or reside in the locations visited,
• to observe an environment under the pressure of expansion and development,
• to comment on the tourist industry–its modes of transportation and accommodations as well as the narratives it supports,
• to redefine the traveling self as gendered.

For a fuller description of the SSAWW Triennial Conference, please see the SSAWW website at ssawwnew.wordpress.com.

Please send abstracts of 250-300 words and a brief cv to Susan Roberson (susan.roberson@tamuk.edu) or Andrew Vogel (vogel@kutztown.edu) by April 15, 2018.

Deadline for submissions: August 15, 2018
Full name/name of organization: Kristopher Mecholsky (Louisiana State University)
Contact email: kmecho1@lsu.edu

Given their contribution to the historical development of the coastal south and the Americas in general, pirates are relatively absent in the present southern literary canon and its criticisms. As the Companion to Southern Literature mentions with some surprise, “southern writers…seem not to have cared much about pirates…[particularly] given the fact that some of the most notorious pirates worked the coastal regions of the Southeast.” And yet, nineteenth-century fiction about the American South was flooded with pirates.

This CFP seeks essays for a planned edited collection that will augment papers delivered at a panel on pirates in southern fiction at the 2018 Society for the Study of Southern Literature. Proposed essays should address gaps in criticism about piracy in southern fiction (both broadly understood) from all periods. Proposals about historical approaches to piracy and the American South are also encouraged. From the cultural echoes of Sir Walter Scott’s The Pirate to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold-Bug” and Joseph Holt Ingraham’s Lafitte: The Pirate of the Gulf and more—and encompassing the cultural role of pirate fiction in triangulating gender, colonial, racial, economic, and nationalistic attitudes with respect to Mexico, the Caribbean, and the entire coastal American South—the proposed collection will form the first substantial critical exploration of pirates in southern literature. Possible topics include (but are certainly not limited to) the following:

• Jean Lafitte in literature and film
• Mark Twain and piracy
• the relationship between Bahamanians and Floridians (esp. the Conchs), particularly in fiction
• the relationship between the Scottish & British literary world and the American South
• authors from outside the traditional South who wrote about pirates in it
• pirates in twentieth-century fiction and film about the South
• the role of pirate myth in the coastal Carolinas, Georgia, and the Gulf coast states
• the economics of piracy in the development of colonial America
• how pirate fiction represents, navigates, and negotiates the intersectional complexities of slavery
• the role of piracy in the relationship between the Caribbean and the American South
• 19th-c. dime novels about pirates in and around the South
• piracy during the Civil War (e.g., the Confederate privateer ships Jefferson Davis, Savannah, and Petrel)
• Rev. Joseph Holt Ingraham’s fiction and the South
• buried treasure motifs in ficiton of the American South
• piracy in stage dramas
• gender and piracy
• race and piracy
• sexuality and piracy

Please send abstract proposals (up to 500 words) to Kristopher Mecholsky at kmecho1@lsu.edu by August 15, 2018. Formal proposals to publishers will then go out; accepted proposals will be expected to submit a finished essay (~6,000 to 8,000 words) by April 15, 2019. Feel free to send queries with any questions regarding proposals (including feedback on ideas) at any time.

Deadline for submissions: April 3, 2018
Full name/name of organization: Modernist Studies Association (MSA) 2018
Contact email: charlessumner@hotmail.com

Eliot scholars might look askance at the idea that his poetic vision was at any point influenced by psychoanalysis. Just two months before The Waste Land was published, after all, he ridiculed psychoanalysis as “a dubious and contentious branch of science” and predicted an imminent demise for what he dubbed the “psychoanalytic type” of novel. Still, there is plenty to suggest his appreciation for the literary critical and poetic powers enabled by psychoanalysis. The Waste Land was first published in the Criterion’s inaugural issue, and as editor of the journal Eliot also included a review by Hesse identifying Freud as a major influence on German poetry and declaring his “psychology of the unconscious” a good foundation for artistic development. Further still, Eliot procured for a later number in that first volume Jacques Rivière’s essay advocating the concept of sublimation as a tool for literary criticism. As for his own remarks, he declares in “A Brief Treatise on the Criticism of Poetry” that poetry is indeed a valid object of study for psychoanalysis and, in “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” that “Psychology (such as it is, and whether our reaction to it be comic or serious), ethnology, and The Golden Bough have concurred to make possible what was impossible even a few years ago. Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method.” This remark shows grudging respect for Freud’s project but presents it nevertheless as an exegetical key to myths which are themselves integral to understanding contemporary history and culture.

This panel will seek to establish the ways Freudian psychoanalysis informs Eliot’s literary criticism and poetry. Papers detailing the ways that Eliot’s work foreshadows psychoanalytic developments later in the century – Lacanian theory for example – are also welcome.

Please send a 300 word abstract along with a brief bio to charlessumner@hotmail.com.

Deadline for submissions: April 23, 2018
Full name/name of organization: Université Jean Monnet, Saint-Etienne
Contact email: marie1.moreau@univ-lyon2.fr

Family Portraits: Representing the Contemporary North-American Family

Thursday 27 and Friday 28 September 2018

International conference

Université Jean Monnet, Saint-Etienne (CELEC)

The sixties and the seventies marked a turning-point in the evolution of family. Major sociocultural changes undermined certain patterns of gender roles around which traditional families, and the American society at large, were organized. When the Food and Drug Administration approved the first oral contraceptive back in 1960 and the Supreme Court ruled in favor of legal abortion in 1973 (Roe v. Wade), women were given the right to break free from the normative gendered imperatives of the traditional family. Because the cult of domesticity gradually declined, and the crisis imposed the necessity to move from single-income to dual-income families, an unprecedented number of women – wives and mothers included – joined the workforce in the seventies. This shift in social values combined with new legal developments in family law (California for instance adopted the no-fault divorce in 1970) caused a major upheaval in North-American family structures. New behaviors within the family (how couples relate to marriage; the rise of divorces and remarriages; the decrease in the birthrate; the delaying of marriage and parenthood) have delineated new family forms. Today, married couples with children are no longer the norm; they coexist with other family structures such as single-parent, blended, and homoparental families, unmarried parents or childless couples. To adapt to these new realities, a lexical evolution necessarily ensued. Concepts like “living apart together” or “three-parent families” started to spread in order to define new family forms and reflect the changes that have occurred over the past forty years.

Contemporary family was also labeled as “deinstitutionalized” (Andrew Cherlin) or “declining” (David Popenoe). Its plural modalities are evidence of its constantly changing nature. Though broken and splitting apart, is family at threat? Is it doomed to fail because of the erosion of traditional forms? Many observers sound alarmist as to the future of family. According to sociologist John F. Conway, the Canadian family is “in crisis”; as for the media, some predict “The Slow Death of ‘Traditional’ Families in America” (The Atlantic) or go as far as comparing it to “An Endangered and Disappearing Species” (CNSNews). However, in 2010, 98.2% of American respondents told the researchers of the World Value Survey that family was “important” or “very important” in their lives. On social networks, family hashtags have been flourishing (more than 250 million #family). One of the goals of this conference will be to examine and question this gap between a deep attachment to the family unit – whether real or fantasized – and the proclaimed death of family.

The family ideal thus seems to have survived the major sociodemographic transformations and continues to thrive in the North-American imaginary, as contemporary fiction shows through the extraordinary amount of fictional autobiographies and family narratives. Indeed, family has often inspired North-American writers for, in many respects, it has concentrated all the anxieties of a fairly recent literature which has continuously questioned notions of origins and filiation. As a locus of suffering, misfortune, and neurosis, family is more than ever an obsession for contemporary writers. The Lamberts (Jonathan Franzen), the Lisbons (Jeffrey Eugenides), the Raitliffes (Rick Moody) or the Schells (Jonathan Safran Foer) have superseded the Angstroms (John Updike) or the Wapshots (John Cheever) but they remain families riddled with frustrations, secrets and trauma. So, how can we account for the fact that family narratives still endure and have even expanded in contemporary fiction? The approaching new millennium and the inaugural catastrophe of 9/11 that ushered in a new era led writers to turn to the family and portray it as either an idealized unit, a mere invention, or an alienating space. In this temptation to turn inward, how do writers negotiate family history and collective history? Isn’t this eagerness to fictionalize family – sometimes one’s own family – a sign of withdrawal, a reluctance to engage with the other? Does this phenomenon finally come along with a renewal of literary forms and practices? All those questions can be approached through the fiction of contemporary writers like Rick Moody, Jeffrey Eugenides, Nicole Krauss, Junot Diaz, Dave Eggers, Donald Antrim or Miriam Toews to draw up here a non-exhaustive list.

We welcome contributions addressing for instance the following topics:

– Family in contemporary novels, poetry and drama (fictional autobiographies, family narratives, autofictions)

– Family and its transformations; representation of identity and roles within the family

– Religion, class, ethnicity, territory: representations and stereotypes

– Staging the family on the public and political scenes

– Families on screen: in the movies, in TV shows (“Modern Family”, “Brothers and Sisters” etc.) or in reality shows (“Keeping up with the Kardashians”, “Hogan knows best” etc.)

– Staging family life in the visual arts

– Digital family identity et glamorization of family life on social networks (Instagram, family vlogs, parental blogs etc.)

– Family and words (family rhetoric, terminological evolutions, lexical creations etc.)

Papers may be presented either in English or French. Abstracts (around 300 words) along with a short biographical notice should be sent to Marie Moreau (marie1.moreau@univ-lyon2.fr) and Sophie Chapuis (sophie.chapuis@univ-st-etienne.fr) by April 23rd, 2018.