MLA 2019 LLC East Asian Forum Session Call for Papers
MLA 2019 Convention in Chicago, January 3-6, 2019
Modern and contemporary East Asian women writers, poets and filmmakers contribute in unique and significant ways to cultural change, while both embodying and transcending feminist concerns. Many women intellectuals, writers and visual artists across East Asia throughout the modern period until the present articulate new forms of consciousness and address pivotal concerns of their time in provocative, oftentimes experimental ways. This guaranteed session, organized by the MLA LLC East Asian Forum, will explore modes of narrative invention, aesthetic innovation and cultural critique in modern and contemporary East Asian women’s literature and film. Areas of inquiry include but are not limited to: 1. modes of articulating and expressing subjectivity in fiction, poetry, drama and film; 2. unconventional subject matter and voices in feminine/feminist texts such as, for instance, homosexual and transsexual themes; 3. creative de/constructions of the relationship between gender, language and the body; 4. ecocritical consciousness and creative engagement of environmental degradation; 5. re-conceptualizations of the intersection between urban space and human subjectivity; 6. the creative utilization and re-imagination of classical culture as well as the corpus of modern literature and film; 7. male authors’ critical engagement with and portrayal of women’s themes.
Submissions examining these and related issues in literary/fictional or visual/cinematic texts are welcome, as are essays that incorporate interdisciplinary, transnational and comparative perspectives. A broad range of theoretical approaches may be used in the examination of Chinese, Japanese and Korean texts. At the same time, we are interested in tracing the interconnections between East Asian women writers and artists, their intellectual-artistic predecessors, classical aesthetics, and literary-cinematic influences from within and beyond East Asia.
Please submit a 250-word abstract via email attachment by March 23 to the session organizer Géraldine Fiss (gfiss@usc.edu). Abstracts will be selected by March 28. If chosen to participate in the session, presenters must obtain MLA membership and attend the session at the convention in Chicago.
