The past two decades have witnessed a resurgence in transnational modernist studies and the emergence of a new generation of scholars working on Canadian modernist literature and drama. This period has seen the publication of critical monographs, biographies, essay collections, anthologies, and critical editions, the organization of several international conferences, and the launch of major collaborative research projects. The Editing Modernism in Canada (EMiC) project plays a leading role in this emergent generation of modernist studies. For its first major public event, EMiC is hosting the Conference on Editorial Problems at the University of Toronto, 23–24 October 2010. Sean Latham, Past President of the Modernist Studies Association, will deliver the keynote address.

We invite proposals not only from EMiC-affiliated researchers (co-applicants, collaborators, postdocs, and graduate fellows) but also from unaffiliated scholars whose work in the fields of modernist literature and theatre, scholarly editing, book history, and the digital humanities intersects with our project. Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following: case studies of digital or print editions in progress; rationales for prospective or hypothetical editions in print or digital media; exhibitions of collaborative digital editing tools and publication engines; reports on experiential-learning pedagogies used to train students and new scholars in editorial theory and practice; strategies for the development of relationships among universities, publishers, the media, public libraries and non-profit cultural organizations (book clubs, reading groups, reading series, literary festivals) to promote Canada’s modernists; re-assessments of canons and curricula posed by the introduction and/or reinterpretation of Canadian modernist texts in new critical editions; analyses of series of editions (New Canadian Library, Laurentian Library, Collected Works of A.M. Klein, Collected Works of E.J. Pratt, etc.) and how these series have shaped editorial and critical practice; findings based on research into the archives of modernist authors, their editors and anthologists, and their publishers.

We welcome proposals for 20-minute papers for panels or 5-minute position papers for roundtables. Panel sessions will feature the standard sequence of 3 or 4 speakers delivering 15-20 minute talks followed by a question period and discussion. Roundtables will consist of 5 or 6 speakers gathered around issues or topics of common concern in order to generate discussion among the participants and with the audience. Roundtable participants will be asked to deliver short (5 minute) position statements in response to questions distributed in advance by the session organizer, and they will take turns responding to the moderator’s and audience’s questions and comments.

Selected papers by conference participants will be collected in a planned volume of conference proceedings, which will be published as part of the University of Toronto Press’s Conference on Editorial Problems series and co-edited by the conference convenors. In addition to this collection, we will publish a special issue of Essays on Canadian Writing with contributions from a select group of the conference’s panel and roundtable participants.

A limited number of subventions for EMiC participants (co-applicants, collaborators, postdocs, and graduate fellows) and affiliated students will be available to defray travel and accommodation expenses. For eligibility guidelines see the Travel Subventions page of the project website.

Please submit 500-word proposal, 100-word abstract, and 50-word biographical statement via email to the conference organizers, Dean Irvine (dean.irvine@dal.ca) and Colin Hill (colin.hill@utoronto.ca), by 15 March 2010.

These are some of the issues that will be addressed in this international conference to be held in Toronto and Guelph 10-12 June 2010. It is being jointly organized by the Celtic Studies Program, St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto; the Scottish Studies Program, Guelph University; and the University of Aberdeen’s AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies.

Proposals of no more than 300 words should be sent to David A. Wilson [david.wilson@utoronto.ca] by 28 February 2010.

Please note: the deadline for proposals has been extended to 29 March 2010

The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC, pronounced “quirk”) will provide a digital platform for new collaborations in humanities research. Supporting team-based scholarship, digitization and editing, and embedding its material in political, commercial and cultural contexts, CWRC brings digital arts into dialogue with other artistic practices that are part of a contemporary landscape of imaginative and creative work and critical research. CWRC has been successful in securing, under the leadership of Dr. Susan Brown (University of Alberta / University of Guelph), substantial funding from both the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and provincial funding bodies.

CWRC’s centerpiece is a Canadian Women Writers project, a radically interdisciplinary, collaborative and bilingual research initiative that will be developed across three primary modules: 1) a virtual archive of textual, visual, and audiovisual materials relevant to research in women’s writing in Canada; 2) a searchable, expandable, user-producer textbase of historical, bio-critical data on women’s writing in Canada; 3) an interactive forum/salon for the circulation of discussion, new textual, audio and visual material, and readers’ and writers’ communities.

This gathering will be the first of up to three conferences planned around this flagship project of CWRC.

This venture with multilingual, multi-genre, and multi-media content is anchored in the premise that digital and electronic instruments are key to enabling and producing new meanings in embodied, experiential, participatory ways. In coordinated collaboration with related major projects partnered with CWRC (TransCanada Institute; Editing Modernism in Canada; canadiana.org, among others), this Canadian Women Writers initiative aims to bring into alignment established and emergent histories, to integrate divergent perspectives on history, and to engage users as producers in a variety of textual, visual, and audio formats.

The conference will bring together scholars, writers, booksellers, librarians, publishers, and software designers, along with invited keynote speakers, to catalyze discussion — particularly on women’s writing in Canada, literary history, historiography, collaborative methods, and digital and feminist scholarship — through papers, panels, readings, and online hook-ups and demonstrations.

Plenary Speakers:

• Nicole Brossard (Author, Montréal)
• Louise Dennys (Executive Publisher and Vice-President, Knopf Canada, Random House Canada, Vintage Canada)
• Lucie Hotte, (Research Chair on the Literatures and Cultures of Francophone Canada, University of Ottawa)
• Smaro Kamboureli (Canada Research Chair, TransCanada Institute, University of Guelph)
• Rosemary Sullivan (Author and Canada Research Chair, Department of English, University of Toronto)

We invite papers that illuminate the vast diversity of Canadian women’s writing, past and present, in all genres and formats (printed text, manuscripts, journalism, screenwriting,  graphic novels, songs, music, performance art, artists’ books), of all cultures, regions, and linguistic groups. Papers should be relevant to CWRC’s emphasis on collaboration and digital scholarship. They may:

• comment on the critical reception of Aboriginal, minority and/or multilingual writing;
• explore the potential for comparative study and analysis through an integrated online history and/or its implications for Canadian Comparative Literature;
• pursue both historical specificity and trans-historical connections;
• consider the plurality of Canadian women’s literary histories;
• examine these histories in relation to various versions of the nation or a transnational perspective;
• address the practicalities of the marketplace;
• interrogate distinctions between popular and elite, subversive and insider writing;
• investigate platforms necessary to make Wikipedia-like resources literary, creative, scholarly and extensible;
• address the limitations of current available sites (e.g.,. lone databases) and the potentials of interlinked or integrated knowledge systems;
• explore modes of circulating, disseminating and expanding an integrated history;
• offer frames for reading digital works as media systems, social practices, or cultural networks;
• offer examples of using digital tools to produce new kinds of cultural or historical analysis;
• illustrate the emergence of new forms of technological infrastructure and media.

Forward abstract (500 words), along with a one-page CV, in English or in French, to: clccollo@ualberta.ca

Deadline for submission: 15 March 2010 29 March 2010

Members of the conference committee:

Dr. Susan Brown, University of Alberta/Guelph University
Dr. Marie Carrière, University of Alberta
Dr. Patricia Demers, University of Alberta
Dr. Cecily Devereux, University of Alberta
Dr. Carole Gerson, Simon Fraser University
Dr. Christl Verduyn, Mount Allison University

Address all mail inquiries to:
Canadian Women Writers Conference/Colloque écritures des femmes du Canada
Canadian Literature Centre/ Centre de littérature canadienne
Humanities Building 4-115
University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta
T6G 2E5

In her Foreword to Recalling Early Canada (2004), Carole Gerson laments that “we do not have many wide-ranging volumes of critical studies dedicated to early Canadian literary culture” (ix). Indeed, much of the important scholarly work on early Canadian literature that began in the 1970s and 1980s has been supplanted by succeeding waves of post-modern, post-colonial, and now contemporary Canadian literary scholarship. But research in the areas of Colonial and Confederation literature has recently expanded in a number of exciting ways. The History of the Book in Canada project, for instance, firmly established book history as a vibrant new area of research, while studies by D.M.R. Bentley (2004), Nick Mount (2005), and Gerson (forthcoming 2009) have stressed the need for early Canadian literary history to be set in an international context. Similarly, Kym Bird (2004) has shown that theatre research plays a central role in our understanding of early Canadian literary culture.

We invite articles on authors, texts, genres, and contextual issues that will not only help bring attention to the study of early Canadian literature, but will also help address the gap in scholarship. Essays may focus on new readings of established early Canadian texts or consider little known texts by well-known authors. We are also interested in articles that address neglected and emerging areas of critical investigation, such as early First Nations writers, digital archives, and early Canadian cultural production.

Essays should follow the submission guidelines of the journal: canlit.ca/submit. Cover letters should indicate that the article is to be considered for this special issue.

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.

La version française suivra.

Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne, published at the University of New Brunswick since 1975, invites submissions to a special issue focusing on depictions of adolescence in Canadian literature, to be edited by Jennifer Andrews, John Clement Ball, Heidi Butler, and Benjamin Lefebvre.

As a transitional stage between childhood and adulthood, adolescence has been deployed as a complex metaphor in the literature of numerous countries, including Canada, which has often been depicted as an adolescent (or emerging) nation. The editors welcome original submissions on Canadian texts from pre-Confederation to the contemporary moment for and/or about adolescents, including literatures from all regions, time periods, and types, including depictions of adolescence that extend the range of thirteen to nineteen in either direction. Interdisciplinary approaches are also welcomed.

Possible topics include:

• Generic and ideological distinctions between literature for adolescents (the “YA novel”) and literature about adolescents

• Adolescent perspectives and family dynamics, including narration/focalization

• Adolescent voices and the shaping of cultural memory

• Adolescent rebellion and cultural citizenship

• Adolescence and war, crisis, risk, politics/activism, nationhood/nation-building

• Peer groups’ effects on adolescent maturity

• Colonial and postcolonial discourses of adolescence

• The contemporary bildüngsroman and künstlerroman

• Global vs. local, rural vs. urban adolescences

• Adolescence and/as performance

• First Nations, racialized, gendered, queer, and trans adolescences

• Adolescence in English and French Canadas

Submissions should not be longer than 7,000 words and should conform to the MLA Handbook, 6th edition. Please submit electronically via Word attachment to scl@unb.ca. Deadline for submissions is 30 April 2010, with publication scheduled for late 2010 or early 2011. We welcome submissions in English and in French. For more information, visit the journal’s website at http://journals.hil.unb.ca/index.php/SCL/ or contact Heidi Butler at Heidi.Butler@unb.ca.

Publiée à l’université du Nouveau-Brunswick depuis 1975, la revue Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne vous invite à soumettre un article pour un numéro spécial portant sur les diverses représentations de l’adolescence dans la littérature canadienne. Ce dossier sera dirigé par Jennifer Andrews, John Clement Ball, Heidi Butler et Benjamin Lefebvre.

À titre d’étape transitionnelle entre l’univers des enfants et celui des adultes, l’adolescence fait figure d’une riche et complexe métaphore dans de nombreuses littératures nationales, incluant la littérature canadienne. Notons que cette dernière est souvent dépeinte comme une nation adolescente (émergente). Les éditeurs souhaitent recevoir des textes originaux portant sur des œuvres canadiennes allant de la période pré-Confédération jusqu’à l’époque contemporaine. Les œuvres à l’étude doivent être destinées aux adolescent.e.s ou encore doivent porter sur ceux-ci ou celles-ci. Par ailleurs, les œuvres privilégiées doivent animer des personnages âgés de treize ans à dix-neuf ans et peuvent provenir de toutes les littératures régionales, toucher à toutes les époques ainsi qu’à tous les genres. Les approches interdisciplinaires sont aussi acceptées.

Parmi les pistes de réflexion possibles, on notera, à titre indicatif, les suivantes :

• Distinctions génériques ou idéologiques entre la littérature pour les adolescent.e.s et jeunes adultes et la littérature portant sur les adolescent.e.s.

• Perspectives des adolescent.e.s et dynamique familiale, incluant narration/focalisation.

• Voix adolescente et élaboration de la mémoire culturelle.

• Révolte des adolescent.e.s et citoyenneté culturelle.

• Adolescence et guerre, crise, risque, politique/militantisme, identité nationale, construction de la nation.

• Influence du groupe de pairs sur la maturité des adolescent.e.s.

• Discours coloniaux et post-coloniaux sur l’adolescence.

• Bildünsgsroman et künstlerroman contemporains.

• Adolescence globale vs locale, rurale vs urbaine.

• Adolescence et performance ou adolescence comme performance.

• Adolescences et Premières Nations.

• Adolescences et identité (race, gender, sexualité).

• Adolescence au Canada anglais et au Canada français.

Les soumissions doivent se conformer au MLA Handbook, 6e édition et ne pas dépasser les 7 000 mots. Veuillez soumettre votre texte par courriel en format Word à l’adresse électronique suivante : scl@unb.ca. Date limite d’envoi des articles : le 30 avril 2010. La date de publication est prévue pour la fin 2010 ou le début 2011. Votre soumission peut être rédigée en anglais ou en français. Pour de plus amples détails, veuillez consulter le site de la revue à http://journals.hil.unb.ca/index.php/SCL/ ou entrer en communication avec Heidi Butler à Heidi.Butler@unb.ca.

At the ninth biennial conference hosted by the L.M. Montgomery Institute (University of Prince Edward Island), we invite you to consider L.M. Montgomery and the matter of nature. In recent years, the matter of nature has been the subject of much contested debate and theoretical innovation across disciplines. While multiple romanticisms have informed L.M. Montgomery’s passionate views of the natural world, her complex descriptions show her writing both of and for nature. This complexity extends as well to the depiction of cultural and gendered mores (domesticity, friendship, faith, community, biological determinism) as both natural and cultural. In all its forms, nature situates binary relationships that are often represented as hierarchical and oppositional: nature and culture; child and adult; animal and human; female and male; emotion and reason; body and mind; traditional and modern; raw and cooked; wild and domestic; rural and urban.

We invite the submission of abstracts that consider these issues in relation to Montgomery’s fiction, poetry, life writing, photographs, and scrapbooks, as well as the range of adapted texts in the areas of film, television, theatre, tourism, and online communities. Possible questions include:

• What are the effects of the representations and images of nature that are crafted and circulated in Montgomery’s work?
• How do Montgomery’s narrations of nature shape children and adults within and across cultures?
• How do particular constructions of nature work in fiction, across such differences as gender, race, culture, and class?
• What are the cultural and historical contingencies surrounding nature in Montgomery’s work?
• What does it mean to consider Montgomery as a “green” writer (Doody) or as a proto-ecofeminist (Holmes)?
• What do Montgomery’s provocative readings of nature offer us at a time of environmental crises and ecological preoccupations?
• How does the notion of “nature” impact some of the most central preoccupations in Montgomery’s fiction, poetry, and life writing (the nature of war, of mental illness, of cultural inheritance, of conflict, of same-sex friendships and of heterosexual marriage, of cultural memory, of national ideologies)?

Abstracts should clearly articulate the paper’s argument and demonstrate familiarity with current scholarship in the field (please see http://lmmresearch.org/bibliography for an updated bibliography). For more information, please contact the conference co-chairs directly: Dr. Benjamin Lefebvre (ben@roomofbensown.net) and Dr. Jean Mitchell (mjmitchell@upei.ca). All proposals will be vetted blind and should therefore contain no identifying information.

Please submit one-page abstracts and short biographical sketches by 15 September 2009 to the L.M. Montgomery Institute’s OCS page (http://ocs.vre.upei.ca/index.php/lmmi/2010).

If you’ve already submitted an abstract for the 2010 Conference, please verify that it has been received by e-mailing the director at lmmi@upei.ca. All those who were registered through the 2008 OCS page have been made authors and should go to http://ocs.vre.upei.ca/index.php/lmmi/2010/presenter/submit/1 to submit their abstract. If you were registered but have forgotten your password, please use the Reset Password link located here: http://ocs.vre.upei.ca/index.php/lmmi/2010/login/lostPassword. If this is your first time using OCS for the L.M. Montgomery Conference, then please register yourself as an author here: http://ocs.vre.upei.ca/index.php/lmmi/2010/user/account?source=&requiresPresenter (make sure to select the “Create account as Author: Able to submit items to the conference” option at the bottom of the registration form).

The 2010 Conference planning is well underway so please be on the lookout for future emails with details concerning accommodations and other events. And as always, if you have any problems, do not hesitate to contact us at lmmi@upei.ca.

Keynote speakers: D.M.R. Bentley, Professor of English, University of Western Ontario; Carole Gerson, Professor of English, Simon Fraser University

http://www.canlit-symposium.ca/

Students and teachers of Canadian literature in English are invited to a symposium at the University of Ottawa to share their scholarship on early Canadian writers, especially to explore new approaches, uncover neglected texts and genres, and assess writers’ and critics’ diverse achievements.

2010 marks the twentieth anniversary of Lorraine McMullen’s Re(dis)covering Our Foremothers, a volume of essays that emerged from an earlier University of Ottawa symposium. McMullen’s anthology implicitly assumed that male authors of fiction and poetry were already receiving the attention they deserved, and that female writers would soon join them in the spotlight—two assumptions that, despite some remarkable scholarly achievements, remain open to question. This symposium seeks to address why and how we study early Canadian literature, and to energize scholars of this rich and challenging area of research.

Proposals are welcomed on any aspect of early Canadian literature to 1918, including but not limited to the following:

• How adequate has been our research into the authors, texts, literary and publishing practices, cultural trends, and social texts of early Canada?
• What work remains to be done?
• Which texts and authors have been effectively recovered over the past few decades, and which have fallen into obscurity—and what criteria have governed recovery efforts?
• Have male writers lagged behind female authors in recent criticism?
• What new and traditional approaches, critical and editorial, best help us to read early Canadian texts in their historical and cultural contexts?
• How is early Canadian literature discussed internationally, if it is discussed at all?

Please send, by e-mail attachment, your 300-400 word proposal, with a 100-word abstract and a 50-word bio-blurb, to Janice Fiamengo, Symposium Chair, Department of English, at fiamengo@uottawa.ca. The deadline for proposals is September 25, 2009.

Confirmed Keynotes: Ann Cvetkovich (An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures), Angela Grauerholz (At Work and Play: A Web Experimentation), Ben Highmore (The Everyday Life Reader; Everyday Life and Cultural Theory), Michael O’Driscoll (The Event of the Archive)

This conference will bring together academics, advocates, artists, and other cultural workers to examine the intersecting fields of archive and everyday life theory. From Simmel through Mass Observation to contemporary Cultural Studies theorists, the objective of everyday life theory has been, as Ben Highmore writes, to “rescue the everyday from conventional habits of the mind…to attempt to register the everyday in all its complexities and contradictions.” Archive theory provides a means to explore these structures by “making the unfamiliar familiar,” hence opening the possibility of generating “new forms of critical practice.” The question of a politics of the archive is critical to the burgeoning field of archive theory. How do we begin to theorize the archive as a political apparatus? Can its effective democratization be measured by the participation of those who engage with both its constitution and its interpretation?

“Archive” is understood to cover a range of objects, from a museum’s collection to a personal photograph album, from a repository of a writer’s papers in a library to an artist’s installation of found objects. Regardless of its content, the archive works to contain, organize, represent, render intelligible, and produce narratives. The archive has often worked to legitimate the rule of those in power and to produce a historical narrative that presents class structure and power relations as both common-sense and inevitable. This function of the archive as a machine that produces History–telling us what is significant, valued, and worth preserving, and what isn’t–is enabled through an understanding of the archive as neutral and objective (and too banal and boring to be political!). The archive has long occupied a privileged space in affirmative culture, and as a result, the archive has been revered from afar and aestheticized, but not understood as a potential object of critical practice.

Can a dialogue between archive theory and everyday life theory work to “take revenge” on the archive (Cvetkovich)? If the archive works to produce historical narratives, can we seize the archive and its attendant collective consciousness as a tool for resistance in countering dominant History with resistant narratives? While the archive has worked to preserve a transcendental, “affirmative” form of culture, bringing everyday life theory into conversation with archive theory opens up the possibility of directing critical attention to both the wonders and drudgeries of the everyday. Archiving the everyday–revealing class structures and oppression on the basis of race and gender, rendering working and living conditions under global capitalism visible, audible, and intelligible–redirects us from our busyness and distractedness, and focuses our attention on that which has not been understood to be deserving of archiving. The archive provides the time and space to think through a collection of objects organized around particular set of interests. If the archive could grant us a space in which to examine everyday life, rather than sweeping it under the carpet as a trivial banality, we could begin to understand our conditions and develop the desire to change them.

How can we envision the archive as a site of ethics and/or politics? Does the archive simply represent a place to amass memory, or can it, following Benjamin, represent a site to make visible a history of the present, thus amassing fragments of the everyday, which can in turn be used to uproot the authority of the past to question the present? In short, what happens when we move beyond the archive as merely a collection and begin to theorize it as a site of constant renewal and struggle within which the past and present can come together? Furthermore, how then does the archive as an everyday practice allow us to understand or change our perception of temporality, memory, and this historical moment?

Areas of inquiry for submissions may include, but are not limited to, the following topics and questions:

• The archive both includes and excludes; it works to preserve while simultaneously doing violence. Are the acts of selection, collection, ordering, systematizing, and cataloguing inherently violent?
• The question of digitization: the internet as digital archive and the digitization of the physical archive. Digitizing the archive renders collections invisible and distant, yet increasingly searchable and quantifiable. Does the digitization of the archive reveal new ways of seeing persistent power structures? Or does it hide them?
• National and colonial archiving: questions of power and national identity.
• The utopian, radical potential of the archive as well as its dystopian possibilities.
• Indigenous modes of archiving.
• Visibility and pedagogy: while the archive often works to hide, conceal, and store away, it can also reveal and display that which otherwise remains invisible. Do barriers to access restrict this emancipatory function of the archive?
• Questions of collective memory and nostalgia (for Benjamin, a retreat to a place of comfort through nostalgia is not a political act).
• The archive as revisionist history.
• The archive as a form of surveillance.
• The role of reflexivity with respect to the manner in which the archive is constructed/produced/curated.
• Function of the narrative form for the archive: how does the way in which the archive reveals its own constructedness unravel the concept of the archive as “historical truth”?
• The future of the archive: preservation and collection look forwards as well as into the past. How should we understand the hermeneutic function of the archive and the struggle over its interpretation?
• The relationship between the archive and the archivist/archon.
• Mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in the archive: who speaks and who is spoken for?
• The affective relationship between the archive and the body.

Following the conference, we intend to publish an edited collection of essays based on the papers presented at the conference to facilitate the circulation of ideas in this exciting field of inquiry.

“The Archive and Everyday Life” Conference will take place 7-8 May, 2010, sponsored by the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario (John Douglas Taylor Fund). The conference format will be diverse, including paper presentations, panels, round-table exchanges, artistic performances, and exhibitions. We encourage individual and collaborative paper and panel proposals from across the disciplines and from artists and community members.

Paper Submissions should include (1) contact information; (2) a 300-500 word abstract; and (3) a one page curriculum vitae or a brief bio.

Panel Proposals should include (1) a cover sheet with contact information for chair and each panelist; (2) a one-page rationale explaining the relevance of the panel to the theme of the conference; (3) a 300 word abstract for each proposed paper; and (4) a one page curriculum vitae for each presenter.

Please submit individual paper proposals or full panel proposals via e-mail attachment by October 15, 2009 to tayconf@mcmaster.ca with the subject line “Archive.” Attachments should be in .doc or .rtf formats. Submissions should be one document (i.e. include all required information in one attached document).

Conference organizing committee:

Mary O’Connor, Jennifer Pybus, and Sarah Blacker

Website: http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~english/Taylor_2010/index.html