MLA Commons | TM Literary and Cultural Theory | Activity https://mla.hcommons.org/groups/literary-and-cultural-theory/ Activity feed for the group, TM Literary and Cultural Theory. Sat, 04 Apr 2026 09:40:55 -0400 https://buddypress.org/?v=10.6.0 en-US 30 hourly 2 66e44e5c2900995ffe9f23d7db788106 Shashi Bhusan Nayak started the topic Call for Chapters – Scripting Selves: New Directions in Life Writing in the forum TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/groups/literary-and-cultural-theory/forum/topic/call-for-chapters-scripting-selves-new-directions-in-life-writing-5/ Tue, 04 Mar 2025 19:32:13 -0500 Scripting Selves: New Directions in Life Writing
Editors: P. Muralidhar Sharma & Shashibhusan Nayak

Until recently, Life Writing has emerged as a loose critical label encompassing a variety of genres, including biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, letters, and dairies. The later decades of the 20th century, in particular, have witnessed a surge…[Read more]

]]> 0 c1a72ef9b1b380d234d1b17765120f4d Thomas Oliver Beebee started the topic CFP for "Reading Cultures," a special issue of the journal Culture as Text in the forum TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/groups/literary-and-cultural-theory/forum/topic/cfp-for-reading-cultures-a-special-issue-of-the-journal-culture-as-text-2/ Fri, 18 Oct 2024 11:34:40 -0400 Reading Cultures

A special issue of the journal Culture as Text (degruyter.com).

Guest Editor: Thomas O. Beebee, Penn State University (Emeritus)

It is common practice among literary scholars to divide their field into a variety of authorial strategies and attachments, e.g. by form, genre, style or literary movement. Romanticism generally makes…[Read more]

]]> 0 51dbb91a449b9d3478027c53ec16c2bb Ji Eun Lee deposited Wooshing London: Unsettling Acceleration in H. G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1889190/ Fri, 14 Jun 2024 03:31:49 -0400 This essay reads H. G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay (1909) in the context of “wooshing” London—I take the word from the story—to see how the unsettling effect of this rapid urban mobility translates into the generic form of the novel. At the turn of the twentieth century, London was wooshing—that is to say, people and things in the city were moving by b…[Read more]

]]> 0 5990b522e766e71f5f9f167d98bda74c Regenia Gagnier deposited Language and literature in the information economy: the state of English, English and the state in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1887294/ Mon, 27 May 2024 04:09:13 -0400 The impact of colonialism and empire and then of transport, logistics, advertising, media, cinema, radio, tourism, and the internet extended the global reach of English. With 1.13 billion speakers, one in seven in the world now has some English competence. Within this global circulation of English, we have the global teaching of English language…[Read more]

]]> 0 40a1c6164b167daf4c4542319d7b1127 Dustin Friedman deposited Toward a Decolonial Queer Humanism: Thomas Hardy's The Well-Beloved and André Aciman's Call Me by Your Name in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1878058/ Thu, 29 Feb 2024 04:05:36 -0500 This essay situates queer negativity within the modernist tradition. In The Well-Beloved (1897), Thomas Hardy satirizes the then-popular notion of racial memory for its racist, colonialist implications, inaugurating the modernist critique of romantic love as complicit with the self-delusions of the liberal-humanist subject. Despite the view shared…[Read more]

]]> 0 ddcb01f8bb9fd11993471e51583fa96f Regenia Gagnier deposited The Geopolitics of Beauty in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1870902/ Sat, 13 Jan 2024 04:04:41 -0500 Building on eighteenth-century philosophical traditions, Victorian aesthetics were often posed as an antidote to the vicissitudes of the Industrial Revolution and the political and economic demands of the marketplace, and in most cultures undergoing modernization the Beautiful has often functioned in opposition to the forces of power and…[Read more]

]]> 0 a4e96485ab9e0971cdccbd1aaa86787e Regenia Gagnier deposited The Futures of English: Introduction from the UK in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1870893/ Sat, 13 Jan 2024 03:10:19 -0500 Will students raised on social media still read English literature?
• What is the role of English/American literature in the PRC, India,
Australasia, the USA?
• What is the role of English language in relation to other global
and local languages?
• What is the role of decolonising efforts?
• How do our respective state apparatuses affect…[Read more]

]]> 0 fb89e0ea4a3876e5b139f426fe1afe4a Shashi Bhusan Nayak started the topic Call For Book Chapters: Beyond Networks of Domination: Rethinking Machinic Media in the discussion TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/groups/literary-and-cultural-theory/forum/topic/call-for-book-chapters-beyond-networks-of-domination-rethinking-machinic-media/ Sat, 30 Dec 2023 10:47:52 -0500 Call For Book Chapters: Beyond Networks of Domination: Rethinking Machinic Media, Digitality & Cinema of our Times

Editors: Ananya Roy Pratihar(IMIS,Bhubaneswar), Saswat Samay Das (IIT, Kharagpur) & Shashibhushan Nayak(GP Nayagarh)

The biopolitical schemas for restructuring machinic networks of Media, Digital, and cinema do not stand as…[Read more]

]]> 0 a74fe0ec01fd3798cad56068d62b232b Fatma Fulya Tepe started the topic New creative feminist work: A Misogynist Triptych from 1945 in the discussion TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/groups/literary-and-cultural-theory/forum/topic/new-creative-feminist-work-a-misogynist-triptych-from-1945/ Tue, 05 Dec 2023 14:28:19 -0500 Dear Colleagues,

I , Assoc. Prof. Dr. Fatma Fulya Tepe, from Istanbul Aydin University, Faculty of Education and Emeritus Prof. Dr. Per Bauhn from Sweden’s Linnaeus University prepared “A Misogynist Triptych from 1945” based on cartoon material coming from the Turkish Boşboğaz (Bigmouth) Humor Gazette from 1945. This project was supported by the…[Read more]

]]> 0 921dcead34c17839001a52fd69341bbc Lisa Zunshine deposited How Memories Become Literature in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1858169/ Tue, 12 Sep 2023 01:18:14 -0400 Cognitive science can help literary scholars formulate specific questions to be answered by archival research. This essay takes as its starting point embedded mental states (that is, mental states about mental states) and their role in generating literary subjectivity. It then follows the transformation of embedded mental states throughout several…[Read more]

]]> 0 7f69fd7d92cfe8b1a0a99237d6e17384 Lisa Zunshine deposited “Why Reasonable Children Don’t Think that Nutcracker is Alive or that the Mouse King is Real" in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1856309/ Thu, 24 Aug 2023 01:27:12 -0400 Zunshine’s essay draws on recent research in developmental psychology and cognitive evolutionary anthropology to examine emotional responses to supernatural events by the child and adult characters of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (1816), as well as to revisit the traditional literary critical view of those responses, acc…[Read more]

]]> 0 fc7be8e63e42ed7f8f503b5f62d74fe2 Alberto Ribas-Casasayas started the topic CfP ACLA seminar "Promises and Perils of the Psychedelic Renaissance" in the discussion TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/groups/literary-and-cultural-theory/forum/topic/cfp-acla-seminar-promises-and-perils-of-the-psychedelic-renaissance/ Fri, 11 Aug 2023 17:35:50 -0400 For distribution among scholars in: Comparative Literature, English, Cultural Studies, Communications, Spanish/Portuguese, Latin American Studies, Medical Humanities.

Ana Luengo (San Francisco State U) and Alberto Ribas (Santa Clara University) are organizing a seminar for the American Comparative Literature Association conference in Montréal,…[Read more]

]]> 0 bbf220313a5e0e59e17a45d3677abfd3 Amel Abbady deposited Investigating the Postcolonial Grotesque in Martin McDonaghʼs A Very Very Very Dark Matter in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1841282/ Thu, 13 Apr 2023 04:28:33 -0400 McDonagh is arguably one of the most celebrated yet most controversial of contemporary Anglo-Irish playwrights. His plays have received mixed reviews from critics and audiences alike, mostly for featuring graphic violence and obscene dialogues. Even though comedy is mostly seen as an inferior genre compared to tragedy, McDonagh, among many…[Read more]

]]> 0 7bdf73fe6be52a9aaf64e4df595b45c1 Dustin Friedman deposited Do Queer Theory and Victorian Studies Still Have Anything to Learn from Each Other? in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1838063/ Tue, 21 Mar 2023 03:54:38 -0400 This essay argues that an antiracist, anticolonialist Victorian studies must remain open to universalizing claims of the kind found in early works of queer theory, particularly Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1990). Although recent work in queer studies (as well as literary studies generally) finds inspiration in Sedgwick’s…[Read more]

]]> 0 d8600d32ecbf19d5c51e9b8c239d5595 Amel Abbady deposited "'You cannot assimilate Indian ghosts' : a magical realist reading of Louise Erdrich's The Night Watchman" in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1788679/ Tue, 26 Jul 2022 03:54:33 -0400 In The Night Watchman (2020), Louise Erdrich continues to blur the lines between history and fiction as she has done in several of her novels. Erdrich introduces the reader to several magical elements that appear to be entirely real: two ghosts, a dog that talks, and an unearthly powwow with Jesus as one of the dancers. The main objective of this…[Read more]

]]> 0 7ea6af151be2db2410b711297fef4e93 Maria Truglio uploaded the file: Call for Poposals: Comparative Literature Studies to TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1773640/ Wed, 02 Mar 2022 13:37:47 -0500 Call for 500-word article proposals for a special issue of the ‘Comparative Literature Studies’ entitled “Redesigning Modernities.’ The issue seeks studies that identify and explore new paradigms for understanding “modernity”—in all its unevenness and inequities— across the globe, and constructing new cartographies of cultural creation and circulation.

]]> 0 086af17b36abdcad9cd02442709c58aa Maria Truglio uploaded the file: Call for Poposals: Comparative Literature Studies to TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1773639/ Wed, 02 Mar 2022 13:36:24 -0500 Call for 500-word article proposals for a special issue of the ‘Comparative Literature Studies’ entitled “Redesigning Modernities.’ The issue seeks studies that identify and explore new paradigms for understanding “modernity”—in all its unevenness and inequities— across the globe, and constructing new cartographies of cultural creation and circulation.

]]> 0 34af2e608b7e5553c2f9af30637468b3 Dustin Friedman deposited “Sinister Exile”: Dionysus and the Aesthetics of Race in Walter Pater and Vernon Lee in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1769039/ Tue, 25 Jan 2022 04:16:29 -0500 The aestheticism of Walter Pater and Vernon Lee participated in a late-nineteenth-century discourse devoted to exploring the aesthetic’s role in producing and sustaining, as well as undermining, notions of racial difference. Pater’s “A Study of Dionysus: The Spiritual Form of Fire and Dew” (1876) and Lee’s “Dionea” (1890) partake of Immanue…[Read more]

]]> 0 1b65b5b658f382a511e91047a7a85f4a Dustin Friedman deposited “The rarest, most complex & most lately developed form of aestheticism”: Olive Schreiner, decadence, and the aesthetic education of the senses in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1769029/ Tue, 25 Jan 2022 03:52:44 -0500 This essay focuses on Olive Schreiner’s personal correspondence and the allegories collected in Dreams (1890) to explore her complicated relationship to late-Victorian Decadence. I argue that Schreiner modified Decadent writers’ use of intersensoriality and synaesthesia to educate her readers into a new kind of common sense, one aligned with her…[Read more]

]]> 0 1f8b3012f6749f6c82834ce298be0a14 Ted Laros deposited Literature and the Law in South Africa, 1910–2010: The Long Walk to Artistic Freedom in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1752239/ Sat, 18 Sep 2021 02:25:11 -0400 In 1994, artistic freedom pertaining inter alia to literature was enshrined in the South African Constitution. Clearly, the establishment of this right was long overdue compared to other nations within the Commonwealth. Indeed, the legal framework and practices regarding the regulation of literature that were introduced following the nation’s t…[Read more]

]]> 0 896ba8a52c1c1a8bcdbad06aa65529ff Regenia Gagnier deposited From barbarism to decadence without the intervening civilization: or, living in the aftermath of anticipated futures in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1749993/ Wed, 25 Aug 2021 03:54:30 -0400 ABSTRACT
The styles, moods, performances, and practices of decadence have been simultaneous with modernization, not least in the process of nation-building. This article considers the dialectics of decadence and modernization with particular attention to the roles and responses of women in the twentieth to twenty-first centuries.…[Read more]

]]> 0 abc1f7f4d70f4aa632e667514ea95727 Dustin Friedman deposited E.M. Forster, the Clapham Sect, and the Secular Public Sphere in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1746902/ Wed, 21 Jul 2021 04:11:34 -0400 Critics have characterized E.M. Forster as an advocate of what Jürgen Habermas calls the “secular public sphere.” Yet Forster was critical of liberalism’s insistence that religious experiences should be translated into the language of secular rationality. The discussion of the Clapham Sect in “Henry Thornton” (1939) suggests that eighteenth…[Read more]

]]> 0 e69616cbd233b3d315dc7e008760ca8f Gloria Lee McMillan replied to the topic CFP Routledge Literary Handbook (Lit. and Class) in the discussion TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/groups/literary-and-cultural-theory/forum/topic/cfp-routledge-literary-handbook-lit-and-class-31/#post-1026444 Sun, 21 Feb 2021 13:33:27 -0500 Our text

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Class

. . . is now on its way to print. Due out in Jul-Aug.  It is dedicated to Aaron Barlow (essay contributor) and my mother, who both died in January 2021.

The editor used my illustration of 1890s London’s East End (although our text is global, we did have some essays of this place s and period.

]]> 0 e495a1248a3978baccc0f4d9cd212395 Whit Frazier Peterson deposited A Magnificent Blond Beast: Exploring the Implications of Harlem Renaissance Writer Wallace Thurman as Ghostwriter of a Forgotten Celebrity Gossip Memoir in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1723210/ Fri, 15 Jan 2021 02:32:08 -0500 In an early version of his article “Harlem Literati in the Twenties,” first published in the Saturday Evening Review in 1940, Langston Hughes offers the curious suggestion that Wallace Thurman was the ghostwriter of Men, Marriage and Me (erroneously written as Men, Women and Checks in Hughes’ article), the tell-all memoir ostensibly by the origi…[Read more]

]]> 0 cdd58e9192afaeb48ba331d7ea7505e1 Kate Pond deposited “Sapience” The (Attempted) Making of a Modern Myth: Storybuilding as a Component of Social Justice in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1719678/ Sat, 12 Dec 2020 02:32:42 -0500 This autoethnographic exploration, describes and reflects upon my attempt to crowdsource a modern myth on the origins of racism in America. It draws on my work in narrative studies with a special focus on stories and their role in human development. Part one is analysis of the ‘functions’ of story as both plot variables and sociological act…[Read more]

]]> 0 a733b493f79a224b3493863e4fb34ca8 Dorothy Tsuruta deposited Diversity--To Be Or Not to Be--That is the Reality in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1707748/ Wed, 09 Sep 2020 02:23:38 -0400 Article My reply to Jacob Sanders’ (Communication Associate of WalletHub 818 18th Street NW Suite 1020 Washington ,DC 20005) “Media Inquiry on “Most & Least Diverse States in America”

]]> 0 94397ab3566a24ad0cc15365bcf3e441 Steven Swarbrick deposited Dancing with Perdita: The Choreography of Lost Time in The Winter's Tale in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1707310/ Fri, 04 Sep 2020 02:28:07 -0400 Shakespeare scholarship has long been interested in the temporal dynamics of The Winter’s Tale, and has often turned to melancholic or traumatic time frames to explain the thematic persistence of lost time in Shakespeare’s romance. In this chapter, I argue that dance provides a key interpretive framework for understanding the play’s interest in bo…[Read more]

]]> 0 b253ccbee6a1999979ac3b0065e4be48 Mark Bracher deposited Compassion-Cultivating Pedagogy: Advancing Social Justice by Improving Social Cognition through Literary Study in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1705597/ Tue, 18 Aug 2020 03:55:57 -0400 Previous studies suggest that narrative fiction promotes social justice by increasing empathy, but critics have argued that the partiality of empathy severely limits its effectiveness as an engine of social justice, and that what needs to be developed is universal compassion rather than empathy. We created Compassion-Cultivating Pedagogy (CCP) to…[Read more]

]]> 0 f306d07420dbf04f75cc7fd94f1e213c Lisa Zunshine deposited Who Is He to Speak of My Sorrow? in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1702146/ Thu, 23 Jul 2020 03:52:46 -0400 This article suggests that comparative literature scholars may benefit from the awareness that different communities around the world subscribe to different models of mind and that works of fiction can thus be fruitfully analyzed in relation to those local ideologies of mind. Taking as her starting point the “opacity of mind” doctrine, the aut…[Read more]

]]> 0 ddd10f9f98a3c2ce90ab9c0b053211d3 Daniel Williams deposited Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel, by David Kurnick in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1693076/ Wed, 24 Jun 2020 03:55:20 -0400 Review of Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel, by David Kurnick

]]> 0 378c90d507875c10786d637551795734 Lisa Zunshine deposited May 2020 Bibliography for Cognitive Literary Studies in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1688878/ Thu, 28 May 2020 04:00:55 -0400 a bibliography-in-progress for cognitive literary, film, theater, and media studies

]]> 0 041fe0de4e34308302a19d11978d3403 Lisa Zunshine deposited Mindreading and Social Status in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1686506/ Thu, 07 May 2020 03:54:56 -0400 Would you like to get better at mindreading (i.e., at inferring people’s beliefs, desires, and intentions, based on their behavior)? As it turns out, all you would have to do is lower your relative social status. Studies have shown that people in weaker social positions engage in more active and perceptive mindreading than do people in stronger s…[Read more]

]]> 0 f14ecb0d3d6c2f11737735a2d3ede301 Steven Swarbrick deposited The Life Aquatic: Liquid Poetics and the Discourse of Friendship inThe Faerie Queene in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1685721/ Wed, 29 Apr 2020 16:32:30 -0400 From Michel de Montaigne’s essay “Of Friendship” to Jacques Derrida’s rearticulation of the former in The Politics of Friendship, scholars both early modern and modern have sought ways to address the fluid co-mixture of bodies from which the discourse of friendship can and does emerge. More recently still, new materialist thinkers of ontolog…[Read more]

]]> 0 538770b5b322f9101591269cf09ed0d2 Steven Swarbrick deposited In Anthropocene Air: Deleuze's Encounter with Shakespeare in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1685578/ Tue, 28 Apr 2020 16:32:21 -0400 A reading of Shakespeare and Deleuze on the subject of Anthropocene air. Keywords: endurance, climate change, fossil capitalism, carbon ghosts, Hamlet.

]]> 0 29026251c5c53743ff11e8f498f8143a Martin Paul Eve deposited Close Reading with Computers: Textual Scholarship, Computational Formalism, and David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1685170/ Fri, 24 Apr 2020 16:34:54 -0400 This book is the first full-length monograph to bring a range of computational methods to bear in a sustained fashion, on a single novel, at the micro-level. While most contemporary digital studies are interested in distant-reading paradigms for large-scale literary history – using their digital methods as a telescope – following calls by Alan Liu…[Read more]

]]> 0 f985aaa5b7744c552a4888f91716fcfa Steven Swarbrick deposited Tempestuous Life: Ralegh's Ocean in Ruins in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1682433/ Mon, 30 Mar 2020 16:28:55 -0400 Turning to Walter Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana (1596) and The History of the World (1614), I reframe such biopolitical factors as Ralegh’s “dissability” around a concept that has less to do with human world-making and more to do with the “states of exception” (Giorgio Agamben) under which inhuman agencies come to matter for world history (of…[Read more]

]]> 0 b7425db8f3f645c4cd00d4cef9dd882b Steven Swarbrick deposited Object-Oriented Disability: The Prosthetic Image in Paradise Lost in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1682118/ Thu, 26 Mar 2020 16:36:13 -0400 Though the verbal icon has a long and robust multisensory history extending beyond Milton, my goal here is to challenge ableist readings of Milton’s poetry by linking his poetic ekphrasis to the politics and aesthetics of disability.

]]> 0 2334d368415e1916497b2d00e9877af7 Steven Swarbrick deposited Nature's Queer Negativity: Between Barad and Deleuze in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1682113/ Thu, 26 Mar 2020 16:26:33 -0400 This essay offers a critique of the vitalist turn in queer and ecological theory, here represented by the work of Karen Barad. Whereas Barad advances an image of life geared towards meaningful connection with others, human and nonhuman, Deleuze advances an a-signifying ontology of self-dismissal. The point of this essay isn’t to separate their t…[Read more]

]]> 0 76cf814b8595c5a16cc1028c5ea17d08 Jay Rajiva deposited “Secrecy, Sacrifice, and God on the Island: Christianity and Colonialism in Coetzee’s Foe and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.” in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1676551/ Tue, 28 Jan 2020 16:25:33 -0500 This essay argues that the tension in Coetzee’s reading of Robinson Crusoe springs from the exposure of the Christian secret in both the colonial enterprises of the characters and the authorial presences of Defoe and Coetzee. My argument draws on Jacques Derrida’s The Gift of Death, which outlines how Christianity tacitly incorporates (but doe…[Read more]

]]> 0 8aff5d4765ec3b2c53dfae76a93d0855 cynthia tompkins deposited call for papers in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1675037/ Sun, 12 Jan 2020 16:25:57 -0500 Call for Proposals

Media, Lingualisms, Translations: Technologies of Language and Power

Conference to be held November 13-14, 2020; hosted by the School of International Letters and Cultures, Arizona State University, Tempe.

Keynote speakers: Jean-Noël Robert (Collège de France, Paris)
Lourdes Ortega (Georgetown University, W…[Read more]

]]> 0 ce3a2c6734be51d960eece2536fb09cd Scott Challener deposited Latinx Literatures and Cultures in the U.S. and Beyond in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1674804/ Fri, 10 Jan 2020 03:58:36 -0500 This course is a study of Latinx literatures and cultures produced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We will concentrate our attention on works by Chicanos, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans, and Dominican Americans. We will consider how these works represent and participate in the upheavals that characterize the…[Read more]

]]> 0 e90ca724125f9bf83c6e0908ad795311 Joydeep Chakraborty deposited "Violence Has Changed Me" Private Trauma and Identity Crisis in Post-9/11 American Poetry in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1664635/ Fri, 27 Sep 2019 04:00:07 -0400 This article seeks to explore into the impact of 9/11 tragedy on the private lives of ordinary people and individuals and into the associated theme of identity crisis, as reflected in four important post-9/11 poems – “Someone Says They Looked Like Cartwheeling Birds” by Lyn Lifshin, “Making Love After September 11, 2001” by Aliki Barnstone…[Read more]

]]> 0 712f9a7bd97a46832c60c4e91c0aa605 Jefferson Gatrall started the topic Crisis and Chronicity: International Conference in the Medical Humanities in the discussion TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/groups/literary-and-cultural-theory/forum/topic/crisis-and-chronicity-international-conference-in-the-medical-humanities-2/ Fri, 02 Aug 2019 17:04:25 -0400 The Montclair State University Medical Humanities Program and the Waiting Times Research Group are pleased to sponsor “Chronicity and Crisis: Time in the Medical Humanities.” Conference to be held at Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey, October 25–26, 2019.

To register: please click [Read more]

]]> 0 497a5912d307e9fdd3b06465d0e55d22 Marisa Parham deposited Hughes, Cullen, and the In-sites of Loss in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1641716/ Wed, 05 Jun 2019 16:27:53 -0400 This essay explores how Pierre Nora’s sites of memory work a specific cultural function through what Melvin Dixon refers to as “a memory that ultimately rewrites history.” I look at two of the most well-known poems of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and Countee Cullen’s “Heritage,” one of which reveals a…[Read more]

]]> 0 99c3881809d9484c232266e24640ea0c Gloria Lee McMillan replied to the topic CFP Routledge Literary Handbook (Lit. and Class) in the discussion TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/groups/literary-and-cultural-theory/forum/topic/cfp-routledge-literary-handbook-lit-and-class-31/#post-1021170 Wed, 29 May 2019 04:50:27 -0400 We have passed peer review. Theory will be important in this text. We are looking for essays involving literature viewed through class theory.  Let us see what you have!

]]> 0 f042c338c9dff38741cc19e89a106faf Tom White deposited The Future Demands Work: William Morris’s utopian medievalism in an age of precarity, flexibility, and automation in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1641103/ Wed, 29 May 2019 03:50:42 -0400 IMC paper for panel 374 Medieval Futura 1: Now, sponsored by the Medieval Studies Institute, Indiana Univ.–Bloomington and organised by Dr Andrea Whitacre.

]]> 0 a6917ef73d0276795c07e0684f16b131 Marisa Parham deposited Saying “Yes”: Textual Traumas in Octavia Butler’s Kindred in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1640727/ Wed, 22 May 2019 16:28:16 -0400 The problem of the “yes,” of affirming an historical identity that is potentially harmful to oneself, troubles some of the imaginative leaps necessary to how readers desire to identify with texts. With that in mind, this article reads Octavia Butler’s 1979 novel Kindred as a story about memory, history, and embodiment as written both on and thr…[Read more]

]]> 0 c145c0e2f327eb71f1b8f73c2bf503ec Louise Bethlehem deposited Stenographic fictions: Mary Benson’s At the Still Point and the South African political trial in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1640469/ Sat, 18 May 2019 03:59:30 -0400 From the mid-1960s onward, compilations of the speeches and trial addresses of South African opponents of apartheid focused attention on the apartheid regime despite intensified repression in the wake of the Rivonia Trial. Mary Benson’s novel, At the Still Point, transposes the political trial into fiction. Its “stenographic” codes of repre…[Read more]

]]> 0 02f682044ac19f68e76b295332af244d Edwige Tamalet Talbayev deposited CFP: Re-membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean International Conference (Toulouse, March 26-27, 2020) in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1639493/ Fri, 03 May 2019 03:58:30 -0400 We are inviting proposals for the forthcoming “Re-membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean” International Conference that will be held on March 26-27, 2020 in Toulouse, France (Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès).
Abstracts (300 words) are due by September 15, 2019 to yasser elhariry (yasser.elhariry@dartmouth.edu), Isabelle Keller-Privat (isa.…[Read more]

]]> 0 6ace2a004be6755ebd1eb0895d88c09e Martin Paul Eve deposited Reading Redaction: Symptomatic Metadata, Erasure Poetry, and Mark Blacklock’s I’m Jack in the group TM Literary and Cultural Theory https://mla.hcommons.org/activity/p/1633859/ Sat, 02 Mar 2019 16:31:10 -0500 In this article, through a reading of Mark Blacklock’s 2015 novel, I’m Jack, alongside the history of erasure poetry, I suggest that an apt literary-critical metaphor for reading redaction in contemporary literature comes from the term “metadata.” This article schematizes the ways in which redaction can work in literary contexts and points to the…[Read more]

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