The following Calls for Papers, which could all dovetail with the study of Early Canadian Literature, appear in the September 2010 newsletter of ACCUTE. The deadline for all of these is 15 November 2009. You must be a current member of ACCUTE to submit to these sessions.
Beyond Emily Montague: Encountering Canada in the Eighteenth Century
Organizer: Susan Paterson Glover (Laurentian)
Canadian fiction such as Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes, Afua Cooper’s The Hanging of Angélique, and John Steffler’s The Afterlife of George Cartwright, has imagined “Canada’s” eighteenth century. Restoration and eighteenth-century writers also imagined, and experienced, the space we now identify as Canada. The digitization of early texts and historical documents from the period has transformed access to archival material for research and teaching. This panel invites papers that search out and explore a broad range of those texts—imaginative works, non-fiction prose, documentary sources—that offer representations of northern North America prior to the Treaty of Paris in 1763 up to the early nineteenth century.
Possibilities might include, in addition to English literary works of the period: English encounters with New France; captivity narratives; the great Cascadia earthquake of 1700; the experience of war; spiritual life and memoir; logs, letters and diaries; mission reports, including les Relations des Jésuites; First Nations histories, oral and recorded; documents related to slavery and abolition; the Royal Proclamation of 1763; treaty documents; immigration/migration; early reading practices.
Following the instructions on the ACCUTE website (under Conference), send your 700 word proposal (or 8-10 page double-spaced paper), a 100 word abstract, a 50 word biographical statement, and the submitter information form, to sglover@laurentian.ca by November 15th.
The E-Book Wars
Organizer: Brian Greenspan (Carleton)
Owners of Amazon’s Kindle reader were recently shocked to learn that their purchased copies of Orwell’s 1984 had, ironically enough, been remotely erased following a copyright dispute. Meanwhile, Google and the Authors Guild reached a settlement allowing the Internet giant to scan entire university libraries, with more and more publishers choosing to launch new titles in Second Life. Electronic books have aroused critical fascination and anxiety for decades; with the recent explosion of e-book formats and devices, however, scholars find themselves competing with media conglomerates and sophisticated reading publics to define and, in some cases, contain these innovative technologies.
This panel will explore the utopian promises and dystopian fears generated by new literary media. Papers are invited that address the notion and nature of literature in the era of electronic books. How are authors, publishers and critics responding to the challenges of new literary objects and networks? Do e-books enable new reading and writing practices, or merely remediate conventional notions of the book?
Topics might include: e-book controversies; representations of digital books in other media; critical readings of native digital texts; digital rights management and copyright reform; transmedial, procedural or machinistic writing; new analytical tools and methods.
Following the instructions on the ACCUTE website (under Conference), send your 700 word proposal (or 8-10 page double-spaced paper), a 100 word abstract, a 50 word biographical statement, and the submitter information form, to brian_greenspan@carleton.ca by November 15th.
Canadian Ecocriticisms: Diverse Directions and Untold Stories
Organizers: Paul Huebener (McMaster) and Lisa Szabo (Alberta)
While ecocritical analyses of Canadian literature have often focused on canonical writings about nature or broad concepts such as survival and wilderness, many stories remain to be told as the field continues to take shape. We invite submissions that address topics and questions including, but not limited to: ecocritical approaches to experimental or conceptual poets, natural history, borders and bioregions, minor environmental literatures, texts that are not normally considered environmental, visual art and other cultural forms; heoretical approaches involving postmodern ecology, deterritorialization, cosmopolitanism, globalization, and canonicity; which Canadian works lend themselves well to ecocritical readings but have been largely overlooked?; how do bioregional boundaries disrupt national or provincial boundaries, and vice versa?; is contemporary Canadian literature permeated with what Simon C. Estok calls ecophobia?; does it make more sense to speak of Canadian ecocriticism, or Canadian ecocriticisms?
Following the instructions on the ACCUTE website (under Conference), send your 700 word proposal (or 8-10 page double-spaced paper), a 100 word abstract, a 50 word biographical statement, and the submitter information form, to huebenph@mcmaster.ca or lszabo@ualberta.ca by November 15th.
Nature vs. Nurture: Cultural Inheritance in Canadian Literature
Organizer: Benjamin Lefebvre (Worcester/Prince Edward Island)
I invite proposals for papers that focus on questions of cultural inheritance in Canadian texts, particularly as they come up against the binary nature/nurture. To what extent are cultural traditions (including ancestry, ritual, festival, language, religion, food, clothing, etc.) expressed or experienced as either “natural” components of the body or as acts and behaviours nurtured by cultural citizens? In the process of inheriting culture, are nature and nurture complementary or contradictory processes? How dotexts published in or about Canada negotiate this binary, and what visions of the nation do these tensions produce? Proposals about texts from all regions, communities, and periods are welcome, as are all critical/theoretical approaches and methods.
Possible topics include: the performance of cultural inheritance; racialized, gendered, classed, regionalized, and politicized bodies, families, and communities; trans-, hybridized, queer, questioning, two-spirited and/vs. heteronormative identities and inheritances; adulthood and/vs. childhood; the production, reproduction, and counterproduction of cultural memory.
Following the instructions on the ACCUTE website (under Conference), send your 700 word proposal (or 8-10 page double-spaced paper), a 100 word abstract, a 50 word biographical statement, and the submitter information form, to ben@roomofbensown.net by November 15th.
What is a Canadian Literary Urbanism?
Organizer: Brandon McFarlane (Toronto)
Since the mid 1990s writers and scholars have been calling for a Canadian literary urbanism. Authors like Zsuzsi Gartner, Hal Niedzviecki, Andrew Pyper, and Russell Smith contextualized their urban writing as a challenge to ‘obsolete’ notions of Canadian identity: ‘the Great White North’, the small town, and survival. “Justin D. Edwards’s and Douglas Ivison’s Downtown Canada begins with a polemical asserting the centrality of the city and the urban within the Canadian spatial and cultural imaginaries” (4). Having recognized the city’s importance within Canadian culture, it now seems necessary to ask: What is a Canadian literary urbanism? This panel invites papers investigating what an urban consciousness allows one to do with Canadian literature. Potential approaches may investigate how urbanism affects on-going debates (trans-nationalism; native vs. cosmopolitanism; multiculturalism; ethnic studies; thematic criticism; environmental literature; diaspora studies; etc). Others may re-visit previous justifications of an urban approach (the need for national-referential writing; the rise of spatial theory; the arrival of ‘Generation-X’; nationalism; etc). Others may wish to theorize how relevant existing interdisciplinary urban models or theories are to a Canadian context.
Following the instructions on the ACCUTE website (under Conference), send your 700 word proposal (or 8-10 page double-spaced paper), a 100 word abstract, a 50 word biographical statement, and the submitter information form, to brandon.mcfarlane@utoronto.ca by November 15th.
Canadian (dis)Content
Organizer: Karen Macfarlane (Mount Saint Vincent)
Not so long ago I was asked why we can’t seem to discuss a Canadian writer or work without focusing on his/her/its Canadian-ness. I‘m throwing the question out to you by inviting proposals that consider Canadian literature outside of/beyond/and ideally without reference to Canadian content. Contributors are invited to consider ways in which we can discuss works by Canadian writers without explicit reference to Canadian national identity and related topics. Papers that focus on authors or works that are usually left out of discussions of canonical Canadian literature and those that address possible theoretical approaches to this topic are especially welcome.
Following the instructions on the ACCUTE website (under Conference), send your 700 word proposal (or 8-10 page double-spaced paper), a 100 word abstract, a 50 word biographical statement, and the submitter information form, to karen.macfarlane@msvu.ca by November 15th.
The Materiality of Texts
Organizer: Eli MacLaren (Queen’s)
There is more to a text than meets the casual reader’s eye. The specific forms in which it is received govern its significance, which we cannot fully grasp without enumerating and explaining these forms. An eighteenth-century novel reflects the class for whose consumption it was created; a twentieth-century novel foresees its own adaptation to film; a twenty-first century novel enshrines the ideology of the granting council that funded it. The “materiality of texts” is one label for the shaping impact of social and economic factors on language and literature, and it has emerged as a major point of convergence in literary studies, bibliography, and post-Marxist theory.
Papers are invited on any aspect of the materiality of texts, such as; the monied text and the players: incentive, rewards, careers, publication, performance, exchange—what are the human motivations behind textual production?; the mirror and the private reader: far from critical hierarchies, individuals turn to texts of all sorts and discover themselves. What and how can we learn about the value of texts to specific readers other than ourselves?; the fluid text and the scholarly editor: How do variants affect the significance of a work? How should one represent and organize the different incarnations of a text?; intersections in method: bibliography and cultural studies both take the “materiality of texts” as a starting point but trace noticeably different trajectories. How might these different fields of contemporary scholarship fruitfully learn from one another?
Following the instructions on the ACCUTE website (under Conference), send your 700 word proposal (or 8-10 page double-spaced paper), a 100 word abstract, a 50 word biographical statement, and the submitter information form, to eli.maclaren@gmail.com before November 15th.
Radical Modernist Pedagogy in Canada
Organizers: Karin Shearer (McGill) and Dean Irvine (Dalhousie)
Canada boasts a great number of teachers and professors amongst its writers. For many, teaching presents an opportunity to shape the values of both readers and writers of literature. Modernist writers such as A.J.M. Smith worked to legitimize Canadian literature as an academic field within Canadian universities, while Earle Birney helped to institute Canada‘s first creative writing MFA in 1963. But pedagogy is not, of course, limited to the university classroom: Ezra Pound’s famous “Ez-university” was akin to a correspondence course in which writers exchanged letters with the American poet, receiving in return a literary education that included enclosed pamphlets and recommended-reading lists. Contemporary scholars and teachers continue individually and collectively to push the boundaries of pedagogy: the Editing Modernism in Canada (EMiC) project (www.editingmodernism.ca), for example, includes within its mandate experiential-learning pedagogies to train students and new scholars, as well as web-based pedagogies to “appeal to communities of readers beyond postsecondary institutions.” Might experimental modernist pedagogical strategies offer new ways of thinking about our contemporary practice as teachers of modernist literature?
Papers on radical modernist pedagogy in Canada might explore but are not limited to the following questions:
In what locations, venues, or media did radical modernist pedagogy take place? (i.e. living rooms, public parks, CBC radio, etc.)
What form(s) did women’s radical pedagogy take?
What is the relationship between teaching and writing?
Did technological advances offer new pedagogical possibilities?
How has radical modernist pedagogy been documented?
Following the instructions on the ACCUTE website (under Conference), send your 700 word proposal (or 8-10 page double-spaced paper), a 100 word abstract, a 50 word biographical statement, and the submitter information form, to karis.shearer@mcgill.ca or dean.irvine@dal.ca by November 15th.