Deadline for submissions: April 3, 2017
Full name / name of organization: UC Berkeley Department of English & Stanford University Department of English
Contact email: berkeleystanford2017@gmail.com
The Berkeley-Stanford Graduate Conference in English Literature welcomes papers on this year’s theme:

TRUTHINESS

April 29, 2017 @ Stanford University

“Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction…” -Virginia Woolf

Nietzsche defines truth as “a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations…which, after lengthy use, seem firm, canonical and binding to a people.” For whom is it binding, and in what sense are they bound?

Truth is often thought to be the province of the sciences. In contrast, lies are the province of fiction. What is the difference between lying and telling a story, and what are its moral consequences? What makes something true? Is truth entirely rational? What makes something feel true, and can belief be manufactured? That is, are we able to believe in something that we know to be untrue?

This conference will explore ideas of truth and its many alternatives as they are deployed and discussed in literature, politics, and history. Prospective applicants may wish to consider this theme in relation to the following (non-exhaustive) list of topics:

• fictionality

• sincerity

• deception

• epistemologies

• “alternative facts” and “fake news”

• being wrong

• veracity and conformity

• rhetoric and ethics

• allegory

• memoir

• decoration

• empiricism in literary study

• reception studies

• the speculative and the historical

• literary hoaxes

• found texts

Please send abstracts of ~250 words to berkeleystanford2017@gmail.com by April 3 for consideration.

Deadline for submissions: April 30, 2017
Full name / name of organization: Midwest Popular Culture/American Culture Association
Contact email: patrick.cox@rutgers.edu
Youth Literature and Media

The Youth Literature and Media Area of the Midwest Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association invites papers for the 2017 MPCA/ACA conference in St. Louis, MO, October 18-22.

There is much to query about the kids these days. This past year we saw the rise of Teen Vogue as a political voice, but a simultaneous decline in the percentage of youth who voted. Millennials now outnumber baby boomers, but are perhaps becoming old news themselves as Forbes Millennials are now outnumbered by Generation Z. Transgender youth have been at the center of debates over school bathroom policies, civil rights, privacy, safety, and identity. Meanwhile, Dorothy Wang became “funemployed” once again.

We are looking for proposals for papers on any aspect of Youth Literature and Media, from the latest YA best seller to my nine year old son’s YouTube channel. This area takes an expansive approach to youth, literature, and media. We are interested in youth as both producers and consumers of literature and media, representations of children and youth in literature and media, and the study of lit and media aimed at children and youth.

What more to chew on? How about:

• Shifting definitions of youth
  Revisiting youth through nostalgia, revivals, and reboots of old TV shows
  Youth culture becoming adult culture
  Millennials, elections, politics, and policies
  Adult audiences of YA Lit and other youth culture
  Images and discussion of youth in the news
  Youth and Social Media: where the kids go when their parents join Facebook
  Youth access to media
  Youth and traditional, digital, and media literacy…and illiteracy
  Moral panics around youth
  Youth and technology
  Youth subversion of mainstream discourses
  “Youth” and intersectionality
  Rural youth
  Youth in the Trump Era
  What’s absent from representations of youth in media?

Please submit proposals of single papers or full panels at http://submissions.mpcaaca.org by April 30, 2017.

More info about the conference is available here: http://mpcaaca.org/.

For questions and queries about the Youth Literature and Media Area, please contact Patrick Cox, patrick.cox@rutgers.edu.

Deadline for submissions: March 21, 2017
Full name / name of organization: Melanie A. Marotta, PhD
Contact email: femalesfwestern@gmail.com
I am seeking original, previously unpublished essays for a collection tentatively titled The Science Fiction Western: Representation of Female Characters in the Late Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Media. An academic publisher has expressed interest.

Unfortunately, one of my contributors has pulled out of the project. As a result, I am seeking an additional essay. While I am looking for an essay, I am happy to accept more if they contain examinations of previously unaddressed areas of study.

In reference to historians’ accounts of the frontier, Susan Armitage writes that “Women are either absent or incidental to the story”.While women may have been attracted to the Frontier Myth concept, they are infrequently the main focus of American Western stories. Adult males, however, appeared prominently within literature in connection to this myth. Even after its closure in 1890, the frontier continued to live on in literary, cinematic, and gaming forms.

With the advent of the late twentieth and twenty-first century, the science fiction western has increased in popularity and, with that interest, an increase in focus has been placed on female characters.

Study direction: This study will investigate the changing role of female characters in the late twentieth and twenty-first-century science fiction Western. Are the roles for female changing or are they recreations of traditional / typical Western roles for women?

For this study, I have chosen to examine the period that began just before the release of Kevin Costner’s monumental film, Dances with Wolves, as this is when popularity for the Western was once again revived. I have also chosen to include the Science Fiction Western (the frontier is explored on the ground in the future) and the Space Western (the frontier is explored in space). I am also interested in the portrayal of African American and Native American female characters.

Works that could be considered:

Television: The Expanse, Killjoys, Defiance, Westworld, Star Trek (particularly Deep Space Nine, Voyager)

Films: Cowboys vs. Aliens, Terminator, Avatar, Star Wars, Gaming: Fallout 4, Red Dead Revolver,

Literature: Jonatham Letham’ Girl in the Landscape, Octavia E. Butler’s Parables, Steven King’s Dark Tower series, Mari Collier’s Earthbound, Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

Please do not submit abstracts about anime, comic books, graphic novels, tabletop gaming, and Firefly.

The essays will be grouped into the following sections: literature, film, television, and gaming.

The deadline for a 350-500 word abstract is March 21, 2017.

Abstracts of proposed essays (as a Word or pdf attachment) and a brief CV should be sent to femalesfwestern@gmail.com.

Acceptances will be sent immediately. Length of completed essays is 5,000-7,000 words.

Deadline for submissions: September 1, 2017
Full name / name of organization: The Art of Artertainment: Nobrow, American Style
Contact email: ividmar@ffri.hr
The Art of Artertainment: Nobrow, American Style

Many of our current cultural practices are marked by a union of art and entertainment. Underlined by all-pervasive processes of globalization and digitalization, this union comes in all shapes and sizes, transforming culture so that it can no longer be comfortably classified as high or low, art or genre. Surprisingly, this ‘art of artertainment’ has not, as yet, attracted much scholarly interest. It is with the aim of overcoming this omission that we launch this call for papers.

As editors of a collection titled The Art of Artertainment: Nobrow, American Style, we warmly invite articles that focus on all aspects of American culture, such as literature, television, cinema, music, painting, material culture, photography, theater, and all other that are influenced by the crossovers of highbrow with lowbrow. Of special interest are historical and/or analytical approaches illuminated by colorful studies of cases where art and entertainment come together, written from the perspective of aesthetics, history, sociology, anthropology, art history, communications, digital culture, and the like.

Please send an abstract of minimum 400 words along with a biographical note to both editors, Peter Swirski, Distinguished Professor of American Studies and American Literature (peter.swirski@ualberta.ca) and Iris Vidmar, Senior Researcher in the Analytic Philosophy of Art and Literature (ividmar@ffri.hr). To coin a slogan, we are looking for highbrow content and reader-friendly, lowbrow style. The deadline for the abstract submission is 1st September, 2017, but feel free to approach us any time.

Deadline for submissions: March 25, 2017
Full name / name of organization: Jewon Woo
Contact email: jwoo@lorainccc.edu
The new president did not show any interest in higher education until the late stage of the campaign. His pick to lead the Education Department, Betsy DeVos also does not have any background in higher education. In addition to his impulsive and popularist policies that horrify experts, his connivance of white supremacy and anti-intellectualism especially put academe in jeopardy. We have already witnessed unpromising changes on campuses in the U.S. since his appearance for the election. Racial and religious minority groups became targets of hate-motivated incidents. White-supremacist posters and fliers, swastikas, and racial epithets, which were once believed as taboo, cause constant controversies on campus. In accordance with his win, racist and xenophobic rhetoric seem out of the ancient shadows that his supporters pejoratively call “political correctness.” And, we have seen these happenings in our writing classrooms.

Some people have blamed this election for academe—failure of “liberal” education. For example, Heidi Beirich, an expert on extremism at the Southern Poverty Law Center, argues, the “alt-right” movement is built on ideas “liberated” by academics. Must academe be blamed for producing these populist groups as byproducts of an intellectual trickle-down process? As Mark Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia University, insists, academe and its fixation on identity politics result in “moral panic about racial, gender, and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force.” Critics of academic liberalism like Lilla even scoff at the idea of “sanctuary campus.”

Nevertheless, these “byproducts” cannot defame the values that academe stands for—the value of expertise, the authority of scholarship, and the pursuit of truth and academic freedom. These values cannot be aligned with the Trumpian inconsistency, lack of logic and empathy, divisive rhetoric, and contempt for scholarly authority. In fact, what Trump represents simplifies and devalues critical thinking and writing that academe emphasize as one of the core skills students must learn in lower-level college composition courses. As college educators, our worst fear may be anti-intellectualism. Whether or not we admit, this election revealed deep-rooted distrust and hostility toward expertise, and the institutions like colleges, that produce it.

This session is looking for a paper on teaching reading and writing in a lower-level composition course, especially at public colleges in the Mid-West where Trump was predominantly supported. Not a small number of students at those institutions favor Trump and his anti-intellectualism, and consider his way of arguing acceptable. Then, how does he affect our classroom? How can we educate students to be better media consumers? What can help them able to adequately police the line between fact and fiction? Ultimately, how can we lead them to learn citizenship through writing pedagogy? What effort do we need to revise writing curriculum and pedagogy?

Here are possible topics, but not limited to them:

Changes in students’ writing styles since the election
Critical thinking against “alternative facts”
Writing through social media and Big Brother in 2017
Writing pedagogy through the election
Plagiarism, appropriation, and hypertext in the Trump era
Academic freedom and “freedom of speech”
Discussing sensitive issues in the classroom
Creating an inclusive classroom
Citizenship and writing pedagogy

Please send your 250-word proposal by March 25, 2017, Friday, to Jewon Woo (jwoo@lorainccc.edu). If you have any questions and suggestions, you can also contact her.

Minsk State Linguistics University

Belarusian Association for American Studies

Belarusian association of Teachers of English, IATEFL

Call For Papers

May 13 – 15, 2017

(Minsk, MSLU)

It is assumed that the conference will address the following problems:

• Intertextuality in the literature of the 20th–21st centuries. Literary and cultural interaction.
• Intermediality in literature at the end of the 20th – the beginning of the 21st century.
• Theater Experiments at the end of the 20th – the beginning of the 21st century.
• Multiculturalism vs. interculturalism: theoretical problems.
• Experiment in culture and literature in the 20th–21st centuries.

Conference languages: English, Belarusian, Russian.

It is expected that a volume of conference papers will be published. Only the papers presented at the conference will be considered for publication.

Applications for participation and a short summary of the paper (100 words) should be sent by April 10, 2017 to the following address:

MSLU World Literature Dept (conference 05.2017),

Zakharova St., 21, Minsk, Belarus, 220034.

Tel.: (+375-17) 288-25-63 Fax: (+375-17) 294-75-04

E-mail: worldlit1@mail.ru

All the expenses connected with participation in the conference are to be covered by the participant or his/her institution.

Deadline for application: April 10, 2017 (worldlit1@mail.ru)

Organizing Committee

Requirements for Publication

The size of articles is up to 20,000 printed characters. Texts for publication should be printed in Font 14 Times New Roman with 1 space between the lines. Contributions can be sent by e-mail to: worldlit1@mail.ru

Articles submitted for publication should include the aim(s) and methodology of the research, give an overview of the work previously done on the investigated problem, substantiate the achieved results of the research and have a list of references. The manuscript should also contain a summary of 150—200 printed characters in English, key words in English and Russian/Belarusian.

The author’s full name, academic affiliation, office (or home) address, telephone, e-mail address and research interests should be given at the end of the submission.

References should be presented according to the order in which they appear in the text.

Example :

THE DESTRUCTION OF AMERICAN EXPERIENCE.

FROM EMERSON TO CORMAC MCCARTHY’S

THE ROAD AND BLOOD MERIDIAN

Marek Wilczyсski

University of Gdansk, Poland

At the moment, Ernest Hemingway once more seems to have been right when in the Green Hills of Africa he claimed that “all modern American literature comes from Huck Finn.” [1, p. 22]

Literature

1. Jarrell, R. Graves and the White Goddess / R. Jarrell // The third book of criticism. – L., 1975. – Р. 77–112.
2. Kadish, D. Y. From the Narration of Crime to the Crime of Narration: Claude Simon’s Le Palace / D. Y. Kadish // The International Fiction Review. – 1977. – № 4. – P. 128–136.
3. Rubinstein, W. D. Detective Novels: A Very British Crime Wave / W. D. Rubinstein // History Today. – 2010. – Vol. 60. № 12. [Electronic ressource]. – Mode of access : http://www.historytoday.com/william-d-rubinstein/detective-novels-very-british-crime-wave. – Date of access : 10.07.2012.
4. Jouve, V. Les métamorphoses de la lecture narrative / V. Jouve // Protée. – 2006. 34. – № 2–3. – P. 153–161.

Details of presenter

Last name _______________ First name________________ (Mr./ Ms./Prof./Dr.)

Address (in Russian): _______________________________________________

Contact phone #: home _________________ office _______________________

E-mail: __________________________

Affiliation, position: ________________________________________________