ACCUTE Conference 2012

Call for Papers: General, Member-Organized, and Joint Sessions

Please note that the deadline for all CFPs has changed from November 15th to November 1st. (Approved at the 2011 AGM.)

Before submitting to any call listed below, please consult the Policies Governing the Submissions of Proposals to the ACCUTE Conference.

General Call
Member-Organized Sessions
Joint Sessions
Christianity and Literature Study Group

General Call for Papers

ACCUTE invites submissions on a wide variety of themes, topics, and theoretical inclinations for its "general" sessions at the 2012 conference. The only restrictions are that submissions should fall within the mandate of the organization and be of potential interest to our conference audience. In addition to consulting the ACCUTE website for specific information on how to submit a paper to the general CFP, you might also find it helpful to consult the 2011 conference program for examples of past papers.

While all manner of topics pertaining to the study of English literatures are welcome, we especially solicit papers and proposals that deal with under-represented areas and earlier time periods.

Following the instructions on this website for the general CFP, send your 700 word proposal (or 8-10 page double-spaced paper), a 100 word abstract, a 50 word bio-graphical statement, and the submitter information form to info.accute@gmail.com by November 1st, 2011.

Member-Organized Sessions

If you are submitting a paper or proposal for a member-organized session, remember to check the the guidelines to ensure that your proposal/paper satisfies the criteria for inclusion, and that you have provided the necessary information.

The deadline for submission to all member-organized sessions is NOVEMBER 1, 2011.

All submitters must be members in good standing of ACCUTE.

Celebrity Discourses and Canadian Contexts

Organizers: Katja Lee and Lorraine York, McMaster University

Critical conversations about celebrity continue to flourish across disciplines (film, literature, cultural studies, media and communications) but the field continues to be dominated by American, British and Australian analyses and case studies. A consideration of celebrity phenomena in Canada, we propose, has much to contribute to this discussion. This panel seeks to open the floor to an examination of the Canadian contexts of celebrity: How is celebrity in Canada being produced, disseminated and consumed? How do non-Canadians circulate in Canadian media, culture, and economy and is this different from how Canadians circulate? How might existing critical theory benefit from the consideration of these Canadian case studies? We welcome thoughtful studies on:

- particular celebrities (Canadian or not)

- media events

- fan activities

- scandals

- theoretical models and cruxes

- specific examples: eg Will and Kate in Canada, the CBC, Canadian “branch-plant” celebrity production entertainments such as “So You Think You Can Dance”; “Canada’s Got Talent”

- transnational / neoliberal cultural economies and the challenges they pose to celebrity as a national phenomenon

- celebrity and prize culture in Canada

- mass market vs local celebrity

- citizenship and celebrity

- celebrity at various cultural sites: eg politics, sports, literature, social media, entertainment

Following the instructions on this website for member-organized sessions, 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 katjalee@gmail.com and yorkl@cogeco.ca by November 1st.

Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member to submit to this session.

The Nature of Consciousness in Canada

Organizer: Marc André Fortin (Queen’s University)

The history of consciousness is the history of the evolution of culture across millennia, between biological forms, and amongst societies. The theoretical ideas and representations of consciousness are expressed through such disciplines and phenomena as literature, art, religion, science, death, mysticism, and technology - to name only a few – and are often divisive in regards to age, gender, (dis)ability, animality, and materiality. And yet, what existence means, and what it means to exist, shifts within cultures and time periods from the numerous internal and external forces, both natural and technological, that shape and create the individual, society, the past and the future, as well as the artistic and creative products, and cultural events that take place within the boundaries placed around living and non-living matter. The focus of this panel will thus be broad in scope in that it acknowledges the radical conceptual extenuation of consciousness to non-traditionally associated subjects and seeks to critique the genres, narratives, and literary practices that express the meaning of existence. Papers will engage with the question of how the literatures of Canada have represented consciousness in any and all of its forms across all literary periods in Canada.

Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member to submit to this session.

Reading Modernism in Canada

Joel Baetz (Trent University)

In “Wanted: Canadian Criticism” (1928), A.J.M. Smith wrote that literature was fighting a “losing battle.” “But the campaign has begun,” he continued; “[r]einforcements are on their way [to help reform] an audience that only wishes to be flattered.” Of course, Smith wasn’t the only Canadian writer who was worried about the development and maintenance of a readership eager for modernism’s innovations and difficulties. Countless manifestos, letters, and renditions of the period (from Scott’s essays to Livesay’s memoirs) are openly concerned with modernism’s relationship with its readers. The traditional (and misleading) image of the modernist writer is one characterized only by alienation; but it might be better to think of that relationship between modernist author and audience as inherently vexed: necessary, productive, frustrating, and antagonistic. Our modernists needed readers, but they weren’t always happy about that fact.

I invite papers that investigate the ways that Canadian modernists connected with, managed, cultivated, and provoked their readers; and how readers responded to, rejected, and encouraged our modernist writers and their work. How did modernist writers imagine, initiate, and maintain their literature’s relationship with the audience? How did the popular press respond to modernism’s difficulties, challenges, and differences? To what extent did an author’s gender, politics, or region produce or deny a readership’s expectations? How was modernism marketed in Canada?

by November 1st.

Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member to submit to this session.

Music, Sexualities and Literature

Organizer: Jeremy Greenway (U of Western Ontario)

Philip Brett remarks that “among the many code words and phrases for a homosexual man before Stonewall (and even since), ‘musical’ (as in, ‘is he musical, do you think?’) ranked with others such as ‘friend of Dorothy’ as safe insider euphemisms.” But beyond mere equivocation, music has arguably been linked with non-normative sexualities in literature since the myth of Orpheus. If music, as Wayne Koestenbaum argues, allows the queer subject to “come out without coming out,” what happens to said subject when, figuratively or otherwise, the music’s over? How do texts that deal with queer identities invoke musical themes, characters or pieces—and to what effect for sexuality? This session welcomes papers that investigate the relationship between music and sexualities in literature from any era or region.

Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member to submit to this session.

Tex(x)ture in Literature

Organizer: Rasmus R. Simonsen (University of Western Ontario)

In an essay titled “Outing Texture” Renu Bora distinguishes between texture as “the surface resonance or quality of an object or material” (98) and texxture (two x’s) as “the stuffness of material structure” (99). Put differently, we can say that texxture denotes the historicity of texture. In Eve Sedgwick’s rendering of Bora’s concept, texxture is thought to be “the kind of texture that is dense with offered information about how, substantially, historically, materially, it came into being” (14). We might then ask: how does the dialectic of texture/texxture influence literary productions and their reception?

This panel welcomes papers dealing with the relation between textual objects, desire, and affect. For example, in Moby-Dick, Ishmael “quake[s] to think of” the inner savageness that Quequeg’s tattooed body must signify (40). Amardeep Singh refers to many different “texture-words” that are grouped according to semantic kinship, as well as their particular textual effects and affects. In what way, then, do texture-words come to shape the reading experience? As concerns the reader’s perception and reception of the work, how does one respond to the texture or surface of the text? How do material conditions enter into the creative process? Finally, what defines the “haptic” author?

Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member to submit to this session.

Submissions:

Mothers’ Stories of War

Organizer: Linda Warley (University of Waterloo)

This panel invites papers that critically engage with mothers’ stories of war or other sorts of violent political conflicts, such as revolution or coup d’état. In the celebrated life writing text Maus I: My Father Bleeds History, Art Spiegelman’s persona urges his father to find his mother Anja’s notebooks and diaries so that he can read them and gain some understanding of her unique story of surviving the Holocaust. His mother is dead, so there is a special urgency around finding the textual record of her experiences. But his father eventually admits that he has destroyed Anja’s writings, burned them in fact, so her story literally goes up in smoke (a macabre image of the Holocaust itself). How have other mothers’ stories of war and conflict survived? Do mothers’ war stories differ from men’s? Do they have common themes or forms? How do mothers’ stories of war or other kinds of violent conflict function as inter-generational life narratives? I invite submissions from scholars working with mothers’ stories (in any medium). Of particular interest will be papers that theorize mothers’ stories in order to reveal the relationships among gender, genre, and generation.

Please send proposals and completed papers to Linda Warley by email attachment: lwarley@uwaterloo.ca. Deadline for submission is November 1, 2011

Please note that submitters must be members of ACCUTE and in good standing.

New Directions in Adaptation Studies

Organizer: Craig Patterson (Humber College)

The past few years have seen a profusion of adaptation studies that have considerably enlarged the scope and terms of reference of this area of study. No longer is the field dominated by studies of novels-into-films, nor does it rely on fidelity as its principal critical touchstone. Proposals are invited for papers that will continue to enlarge the theory of, and practice in, the field and that engage with such questions as the relations between adaptations and other intertextual modes, the place of intention in adaptations, the question of what is and is not an adaptation, and specific problems in how adaptations are received and/ or produced.

Abstracts (of no more than 700 words) or completed papers (of 8-10 double spaced pages) should be submitted to Craig.Patterson@humber.ca by November 1, 2011 and should include a separate file with a 100-word abstract and a 50-word biographical statement as well as a copy of the Proposal Submitter’s Information Sheet.

Deprofessionalizing English

Organizer: Mervyn Nicholson (Thompson Rivers University)

Papers, abstracts, inquiries are invited relating to the theme of the “professional imaginary”—to questions such as the following: how does literature and/or popular culture such as film depict “professionals”? (as opposed to “non-professionals”)? What is a “profession”? Is English “a profession”? How does literature depict professors—especially English professors? Have there been changes in these depictions? How does market culture shape image and practice in this area? Is “professionalization” about the “profession”—or is it about the market? Is it about “making a sale” or about the “profession,” as in “trade” or “craft” (or “business”?)? What is the emphasis on “professionalization” doing to graduate students/studies? Is “professionalization” like “teaching to the test”? What are the consequences of publishing for career points rather than for knowledge? How do we interpret the “ivory tower” image in fiction and in popular culture? How are “teachers” visualized differently from “professors” in fiction and popular culture? What theorists illuminate the issues here? (Henry A. Giroux?) How uniform is the conception of being “professional” in university English departments?

Abstracts (of no more than 700 words) or completed papers (of 8-10 double spaced pages) should be submitted to mnicholson@tru.ca by November 1, 2011 and should include a separate file with a 100-word abstract and a 50-word biographical statement as well as a copy of the Proposal Submitter’s Information Sheet.

New Intellectual Traditions and Literary Trends in Asian Canadian/American Literature?

Profs. WEI Li and J.Z.M. CHEN (Canadian Studies Center, Inner Mongolia University, Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, China)

In a special issue of Canadian Literature (No. 199, Winter 2008) titled “Asian Canadian Studies,” critics Christopher Lee, Iyko Day, Marie Lo, and Lily Cho have raised questions about establishing an “intellectual tradition” (208-211). Several years have passed, but the questions remain largely unanswered. This panel seeks to widen the scope of inquiry to Asian Canadian/American studies, and addresses the following (and other) questions:

Has the advent of the 21^st century ushered in an era of Asian Canadian/American writing with new literary trends and/or intellectual traditions, or merely revived old trends and intellectual traditions?

Are there distinctively Asian elements that have contributed to such literary trends and intellectual traditions?

What has globalization or western critical theory done to Asian Canadian/American creative writing?

How does western critical theory/intellectual tradition help or hinder the reading/teaching of authentic Asian diasporic writing?

All critical approaches and cultural perspectives are welcome. Please send, by November 1, 2011, an ACCUTE submitter’s information sheet, a 750-word proposal, a 100-word abstract, and a 50-word biographical statement, to: imuweili@126.com or imuniv_johnchen@126.com.

Queer Food

Organizer:Nat Hurley (U of Alberta)

Everybody eats. Or at least that’s the assumption. But how and what we eat are increasingly under scrutiny as we are called upon to defend, or reconsider our ideas and practices around food. This member-organized session invites proposals that consider what queer theory might have to say about food, its representations and its cultures. How can we read food queerly? Does food organize queer life in peculiar ways? What does a queer food ethics or politics look like? Additional topics might include:

Queerness as/and consumption
Eating in queer texts
The lesbian potluck
Food paraphilia (crush fetishes, emetophilia, feederism, vorarephelia)
Normative food rhetorics (e.g.“healthy food”)
Taste
The queer epicure
The case of the vegan queer
Food “lifestyles”
Ingestion
The 100-Mile Queer
Emotional eating
Food fantasies
Food and Fat theory

Following the instructions on the ACCUTE website for member-organized sessions (see www.accute.ca/conference.html ), please 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 to Nat Hurley (University of Alberta) nhurley@ualberta.ca by November 1, 2012.

Theorizing Robots

Jason Haslam (Dalhousie University)

While the figure of the cyborg has been a staple in cultural theory since Donna Haraway’s analysis in 1985, and while artificial intelligence is gaining increased attention, the related figure of the robot has not been subjected to the same level of scrutiny. However, since the term was coined to describe Karel Čapek’s (decidedly organic) figures in the 1920 play, R.U.R., and dating back to earlier formations in the automaton and other devices, the robot has been a central figure in discussions of labour, gender, technology, and many other pressing topics. This panel seeks papers that discuss the cultural representation of the robot, from fictional depictions (from any period) to the representation of actual robots (in factories, health care, computer sciences, etc). Topics could include but are not limited to:

- The robot and labour;

- Robot psychology;

- Robot ethics (including or going beyond Asimov’s laws);

- The robot as gothic monster;

- The robot and identity (including gender, race, and sexuality, among other categories);

- and others.

Please send your 500-700 word proposal, a 100 word abstract, a 50 word biographical statement, and the submitter information form to Jason.Haslam@dal.ca by November 1^st, 2011.

The Working-Class Hero in Contemporary Canadian Literature

Organizer: Rob Winger (McMaster University)

When Antonio Gramsci sat down on the dirty floors of Turi prison to reconceptualize the concept of the worker, he was not calling for a traditional revolutionary. Instead, he envisioned a representative species of “organic” intellectual – a working-class hero – who arises as a grassroots leader from the most disadvantaged classes. While socio-economic, political, and cultural-linguistic oceans separate Gramsci from contemporary Canada, this kind of organic intellectual has been staged and examined in prose and poetry throughout the history of Canadian literature. Its widespread presence in contemporary Canadian writing deserves discussion.

Papers are invited that consider working-class heroes in contemporary (post 1970) Canadian literature. Topics may include (but are not limited to):

- aesthetically erudite celebrations of the working classes;

- the use of and idealization of vernacular in CanLit;

- the adoption, by writers, of gender-specific working-class public personae;

- transnational reconfigurations of the working-class in Canada;

- AND, the staging of gendered heroism in Canadian prose and poetry.

Following the instructions on this website for member-organized sessions, please 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 wingerr@mcmaster.ca by November 1, 2012.

Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member to submit to this session.

Joint Sessions

If you are submitting a paper or proposal for a joint-organized session, remember to check the the guidelines to ensure that your proposal/paper satisfies the criteria for inclusion, and that you have provided the necessary information.

The deadline for submission to all joint-organized sessions is NOVEMBER 1.

All submitters must be members in good standing either of the co-sponsoring organization, or of ACCUTE.

Joint Session: ACCUTE and the Canadian Philosophical Association: Ethical attention and the elemental ode

Organizer: Warren Heiti (Dalhousie University and University of King’s College)

The French philosopher Simone Weil writes, “The poet produces the beautiful by focussing attention on something real. Same with the act of love. Knowing that this human being, who is hungry and thirsty, really exists as much as I do — that’s enough, the rest follows of itself.” This call for papers is an invitation to test the vexed analogy, between aesthetics and ethics, by investigating an exemplary distillate of listening: the thing poem, or elemental ode.

What happens when an ethics of attention is practised in the context of an animistic ecology — the kind of ecology witnessed by the Austrian poet Rilke and the Chilean poet Neruda, and since reflected in the living culture of Canadian elemental odes (by McKay, Sinclair, Thammavongsa, and Zwicky, among many others)? Such an ecology has been forgotten by the post-Cartesian mainstream in moral philosophy, with its comforting demarcation between persons and things. By contrast, the ode remembers that criteria cannot decide our myriad responsibilities. What are the ethical implications of the elemental ode’s attention to this heart-sized red pepper or this pair of hand-knit socks? Importantly, it is hoped that responses to this call will themselves enact the kind of attention under investigation.

Please send abstracts (as per ACCUTE guidelines) to Following the instructions on this website for the general CFP, 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 warren.heiti@dal.ca by November 1st, 2011.

Joint Session: ACCUTE and Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada (VSAWO): Victorian Experiments

The Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada invites proposals
or papers on the subject of Victorian experiments. We encourage broad
engagement with the theme. Possible topics may include, but are not
limited to:

-Victorian social experiments
-writing about science, science fiction
-neo-Victorian engagements
-experimental forms (poetry, drama, novel)
-unlikely combinations

Following the instructions on this website for joint association
sessions, 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 Kristen Guest at kguest@unbc.ca by
November 1st.

Joint Session ACCUTE/ Bibliographical Society of Canada (BSC): Publishing Histories

Organizer: Eli MacLaren (McGill University)

What processes, agents, or structures lie behind the publication of books? How do texts move from the private sphere of creation into commercial circulation and public display? What traces do books show of the techniques and relations that produced them? How is publishing itself a cultural phenomenon defined and limited by historical circumstances? Publishers are as integral to the making of literature as authors and critics, and looking into their activity inevitably reveals a significant backstory to the text. Moreover, the term publishing commonly designates many different actions – from the quick copying of a text at one’s own expense, to a complicated business involving expertise, investment, marketing, and the remuneration of the author. To discover the history of publishing at the micro- or macro-level is to ascertain why literature has the form and meaning that it does. How are texts published?

For the fourth annual joint session between ACCUTE and the BSC, papers are invited on the rich topic of publishing history in any place or period. Panel participants will be encouraged to submit full-length versions of their paper to the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada for possible publication.

Please send proposals by 1 November to eli.maclaren@mcgill.ca, including the following (as specified on the ACCUTE web site, www.accute.ca):

• An electronic file for the paper/proposal,

• A file containing a 100 word abstract and a 50 word biographical statement

• The proposal Submitter Information Form

Joint ACCUTE/ Society for Digital Humanities Session: Literature and the Copyfight

Organizer: Mark A. McCutcheon (Athabasca University)

As ever-stricter copyright tightens control over the modes of literary production (and, in the process, criminalizes growing numbers of citizens and consumers), critical scholarship is urgently needed to intervene critically on the question of copyright: once a staple stimulus for literary and cultural production that now tends more to stifle it. As William St Clair shows in The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, copyright, or intellectual property (IP), represents a foundational but under-examined condition of literary production; today, the regulation of IP is changing fast, in international copyright law (ACTA), Canadian copyright law (Bill C-32), and debates over copyright in Canadian education (e.g. Access Copyright, fair dealing, and Open Access). Many of these changes in IP regulation are prompted by digital media, and both IP regulation and new media networks now powerfully influence literary production and reception (e.g. Google Books, Scribd). The changing IP policy environment has polarized interests into a “copyfight” between copyright “maximalists” (e.g. corporate intermediaries that lobby for term extensions and litigate against consumers) and a “copyleft” of critical creators, scholars, and organizations (e.g. alternative licensing initiatives like Creative Commons). This session invites papers on the relationship between literature, copyright, and the copyfight.

Papers on any subject relevant to literature and the copyfight are welcome, for example:

literary representations of intellectual property
copyright in literary history
IP policy changes in post-secondary education (e.g Access Copyright)
digital remediations and redefinitions of literature
case studies in copyright enforcement or litigation by authors or estates
creative license, appropriation, fair dealing
theory and methodology of critical cultural and legal studies

Please send abstracts (as per ACCUTE guidelines) to mccutcheon@athabascau.ca by 1 November 2011.

Joint ACCUTE/NASSR Session One

Organizer: Dr. Nathaniel Leach, Cape Breton University

Panel Title: Romantic Bodies in Performance

Romantic scholarship has moved beyond the idea that Romantic drama was written for an exclusively “mental theatre,” and this has helped to open many questions about the body and the physical performance of identities. Many Romantic writers (in the theatre as well as other venues) are obsessed with delimiting, prescribing and defining the ways in which bodies can perform, while others foreground the body’s resistance to such discourses. This panel invites submissions on any aspect of the performance of the Romantic body. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: Romantic theories of physiology and physiognomy; embodied identities; Romantic theories of acting; the body in theatrical performance; performativity and performance; disciplined bodies and/or grotesque/aberrant bodies; the representation of bodies in various media; gender and the body; the body as the site of national/imperial discourse; Romantic vs. Enlightenment or Victorian conceptions of the body.

Proposals should be approximately 500 words in length, should be accompanied by a 100-word abstract, and a 50-word bio, and should be e-mailed to by November 1, 2011.

Following the instructions on this website for joint association sessions, 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 nat_leach@cbu.ca by November 1^st, 2011.

Note: You must a member in good standing either of the co-sponsoring organization, or of ACCUTE.

Joint ACCUTE/NASSR Session Two

Organizer: Dr. Nathaniel Leach, Cape Breton University

Panel Title: Romanticism and (Ir)responsibility

Jacques Derrida writes of the “duty not to respect ethical duty.” How does this aporia of responsibility manifest itself in the work of Romantic writers? How are ethical values both asserted and transgressed in Romantic works? In what ways do Romantic writers acknowledge this aporia and in what ways do discourses of ethics and responsibility seek to disavow the irresponsibility that inheres within these concepts? This panel invites submissions on any aspect of the problem of responsibility in Romanticism. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: the ethics of representation (how to speak of the unspeakable); Romanticism and its “others”; Law and justice; the ethics of transgression; conscience and remorse (Byronic heroes and Gothic villains); Romantic theories of morality and ethics; readings of Romantic works through contemporary ethical theories (Derrida, Levinas, et cet.)

Proposals should be approximately 500 words in length, should be accompanied by a 100-word abstract, and a 50-word bio, and should be e-mailed to by November 1, 2011

to nat_leach@cbu.ca by November 1^st, 2011.

Note: You must a member in good standing either of the co-sponsoring organization, or of ACCUTE.

ACCUTE/International Gothic Association (IGA) Call for papers

Contemporary Gothic

This year’s IGA panel invites papers that explore any aspect of the Gothic in contemporary popular culture.

Proposals must conform to ACCUTE’s submission guidelines (including the submission deadline) and should be sent to Karen Macfarlane: Karen.macfarlane@msvu.ca.

ACCUTE/Margaret Atwood Society (MAS) : Comparative Atwood

The Margaret Atwood Society invites papers that focus on comparisons between Atwood’s work and the work of other authors, poets, artists or cultural commentators.

Proposals must conform to ACCUTE’s submission guidelines (including the submission deadline) and should be sent to Karen Macfarlane: Karen.macfarlane@msvu.ca.

Joint Session Proposal ACCUTE-CAAS

Joint Session ACCUTE/ Canadian Association for American Studies (CAAS): American Literature’s New Frontiers

Organizer: Jennifer Harris (Mount Allison University)

As Frederick Jackson Turner noted in 1893, the concept of frontiers has been central to American historic, geographic, and literary expressions. Turner’s "Frontier Thesis" has long been central to American Studies. Those frontiers might be literal or metaphoric, but their imaginative resonance has come to be constitutive of set definitions of American values, with far-reaching consequences for nationalist agendas and mythologies, decisions about security and policing, issues of citizenship, and territorial belonging. Increasingly United States politics and policies lay bare the ways in which particular notions of nationhood and citizenship have been shaped in response to rhetorics of the frontier, as we simultaneously witness resistance to any such reconfigurations of—or challenges to—its supremacy.

This panel aims to revisit and revise the Frontier Thesis, recognizing the ongoing imaginative and lived consequences of the frontier in American life and culture, and encourages submissions which consider how it continues to resonate in contemporary times, or which revise our understanding of earlier representations of the frontier. This might include the frontier as invoked in: transnational configurations, scientific explorations, dystopias, political or economic frameworks, linguistic practices, new geographies, land usages, institutional cultures (such as supermax prisons), new media, body modification, etc.

Please send abstracts (as per ACCUTE guidelines) to jharris@mta.ca by 1 November 2011.

Joint Session ACCUTE/ Victorian Studies Association of Ontario/ Assoc. of Canadian College and University Teachers of English: Victorian Hesitations: Indeterminacy in Language, Art, and Politics

Organizers: Fiona Coll and Constance Crompton

For knowing his way he is answerable, and therefore [the young artist] must not walk doubtingly… he may pause, but he must not hesitate.

Ruskin, Modern Painters

Lord Hartington's conduct seems to give signs of hesitation.

The Nation, April 1886

The Victorian ethos is often understood to have been based upon action, expansion, and initiative. However, behind all the evidence of Victorian vim and vigour lie traces of equivocation, vacillation, and indecision. From the Crown's factual reluctance to make Cameroon a British protectorate to Lady Bracknell's fictional admonition against irresolution in The Importance of Being Earnest, a concern with hesitation marks the prose and policy of the era. This panel invites papers that explore suspended moments in Victorian culture – moments when a delay, however long, was of real consequence. How did the Victorians understand hesitation? How did they weigh the ethics of equivocation against the virtues of candor? How did their moments of uncertainty manifest themselves in movement? How was the difference between deliberation and doubt calibrated in this age of enterprise?

Papers may focus on, but need not be limited to:

- Anxiety

- Contemplation

- Deliberation

- Doubt

- Dubiety

- Irresolution

- Meditation

- Pause

- Prevarication

- Reconsideration

- Reflection

- Reluctance

- Restriction

- Stillness

- Suspense

Following the instructions on the ACCUTE website (under Conference) for joint association sessions, 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 (http://www.accute.ca/generalcall.html#submit), to Constance Crompton at VSAOatACCUTE@gmail.com by November 1^st.

Joint Session of Association for Research in Cultures of Young People (ARCYP) and ACCUTE: Troubling Normativity: Race/Whiteness in the Popular Cultures Of Young People  

Organizer: Peter E. Cumming (York University)

This panel invites papers that use race/whiteness as a framing or entry point for critical inquiries into popular culture produced for, about, or by young people. How are systems of racialization, whiteness, and normativity produced and consumed, secured and maintained, or contested and countered? Do contemporary cultural industries affiliated with young people’s texts and cultures (television, music, film, video games, publishing, theatre, etc.) challenge what Stuart Hall has famously characterized as “racialised regimes of representation” (1997) and the naturalization of racial hegemony? How does race become meaningful in relation to multicultural clichés of diversity and harmony? How does race function as co-constituent with class, sexuality, and gender?

Possible topics with a focus on race/whiteness in popular culture produced for, about, or by young people might include (but are not limited to) the following: popular music (K’naan, Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, etc.); popular film (Shrek, The Princess and the Frog, etc.); video games (Grand Theft Auto, Final Fantasy, etc.); “tween” culture (the Obama girls, Hello Kitty, etc.); television (Dora the Explorer, Sesame Street, etc.); literature (The Hunger Games, Twilight, etc.).

Following the instructions on this website for submitting to joint sessions, send your 700-word proposal (or 8-10 page double-spaced paper), a 100-word abstract and a 50-word biographical statement, and the submitter information form, in three separate files directly to admin@arcyp.ca by November 1, 2011.

Note: You must a member in good standing either of ARCYP or ACCUTE.

Joint Session of Association for Research in Cultures of Young People (ARCYP) and ACCUTE  Youth Creators, Thinkers, and Expressions of “Child Consciousness” 

Organizer: Peter E. Cumming (York University)

For Merleau-Ponty, the danger of “dogmatic rationalism” in psychological models of development is the creation of a false dichotomy between two “impermeable” mentalities – that of the child and that of the adult – a hierarchy that fixes “adult experience within concepts such as the ‘representation of the world’” and “renders communication between the adult and the child theoretically impossible.” These quagmires are vindicated for Merleau-Ponty by the “extraordinary ‘anticipations’ of the child’s thought.” We invite papers that analyze various examples of child and youth creative and philosophical consciousness and cultural production. How do young creators and thinkers disrupt the notion that the products of their thought are defined as extraordinary for what they ‘anticipate’ rather than for what they ‘are’? How do they make permeable the division between adult and child/ youth experiences, ‘representations of the world,’ and effective knowledge?

Possible topics may include, but are not limited to: young people as creators of culture and cultural expression; young people as co-creators or collaborators; young people as scholars, philosophers, theorists; young people’s writing, visual art, film; youth and digital media, such as YouTube, blogs, fan fiction, etc.; the material conditions, dissemination, and transmission of youth cultural and philosophical thought and expression.

Note: You must a member in good standing either of ARCYP or ACCUTE.

Joint Session of Association for Research in Cultures of Young People (ARCYP) and ACCUTE : Youth, (Imaginary) Borders, and the Nation State

Organizer: Peter E. Cumming (York University)

The nation is a fractured space today, constituted with various institutional and imaginary boundaries that shape experiences of belonging, identity, and childhood. Some boundaries are geographic, such as the borders between the Canadian provinces or between neighbouring countries. Some are related to language – for instance, the boundary between the “two solitudes” in Canada – or relate to the passage of time – for instance, the boundaries between childhood, adolescence and adulthood. These boundaries may be defined as limits never or hardly ever crossed, or as opportunities for youth to grow and mature. Given this, we invite papers that explore and complicate the relationship of youth to imaginary boundaries.

Possible topics may include, but are not limited to: young adult and children’s literature in translation and the process of translating; young adult bilingual/ multilingual literature; (imaginary) borders and young people’s electronic and digitally mediated texts; young people’s experiences in other countries or provinces, and volunteering abroad; bilingual and multilingual youth experience.

Note: You must a member in good standing either of ARCYP or ACCUTE.

ACCUTE/NAVSA Joint Session :Victorian Technologies and the Technologies of Victorian Studies

From railways to telegraphy, typewriters to telephones, Victorians were engaged with new, and developing, technologies of connection and communication. Innovations in technology over the course of the Victorian period influenced wider cultural ideas of connection, of scale and of human capacity. Like the Victorians, researchers in Victorian Studies are using new technologies of reading, writing, research and social connection that are changing the nature of our work and its dissemination.

Possible topics may include:

- technologies of reading, writing, printing and publishing

- photography, phonography, telephony and other media and information technologies

- from horses to railways: technological innovation vs. the natural world

- industrial innovations and working with/as machines

- technologies of the body: medical instruments, prostheses

- the railway, the telegraph and other social networks

- theories, histories and discourses of the technological

- Archives then and now

- the history and future of the [Victorian/Victorian Studies] Book

- Victorian Studies e-journals and archive digitization projects

- Victorian Studies social media: blogs, facebook groups and twitter

- Victorian Studies and the digital humanities

This call is for papers that critically address Victorian Technologies and/or the technologies of Victorian Studies. Whether you are interested in the Blackberry or the trans-Atlantic cable, you are invited to submit a proposal for a 20 minute paper to be presented at the ACCUTE/NAVSA joint panel at the 2012 Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities in Waterloo, Ontario. Please submit your proposal by November 1 to Jennifer Esmail at jesmail@wlu.ca.

Joint ACCUTE/CLSG Session (Christianity and Literature Study Group): Flannery O'Connor in an Uncertain World

Organizer: George Piggford (Stonehill College, Massachusetts)

The CLSG and ACCUTE invite paper proposals on the writing of Flannery O'Connor, with a particular focus on the 2012 Congress theme of "Scholarship for an Uncertain World." In what ways do O'Connor's professed theological verities intersect with ambiguity and contradiction? How do her texts invite readers to modes of unknowing? How did contemporaneous debates over philosophy, religion, race, region, gender, and sexuality inform O'Connor's writing? How do her texts complicate the uncertainties of our own cultural moment? Papers included in this session might engage with these or similar lines of inquiry.

Email address for submissions: gpiggford@stonehill.edu

Christianity and Literature Study Group

Topics: Various (See above for proposed joint session)

Organizers: David Kent (Centennial) and Margo Swiss (York)

The Christianity and Literature Study Group (an Allied Association now in its 25th year) invites proposals or papers on any aspect of religion and literature, including pedagogy and critical theory, for its annual Conference at the 2012 Congress. We also welcome suggestions for member-organized sessions.

Note: While the Christianity and Literature Group has an annual CFP, please be aware that (because this is a “study group,” and because the submissions are not sent for external assessment) presenters at these sessions are not eligible for the ACCUTE conference travel funds provided by SSHRC.

Note: You must a member in good standing either of the co-sponsoring organization, or of ACCUTE.

ACCUTE Conference 2012

Call for Papers: General, Member-Organized, and Joint Sessions

General Call Member-Organized Sessions Joint Sessions Christianity and Literature Study Group

General Call for Papers

Member-Organized Sessions

Joint Sessions

General Call
Member-Organized Sessions
Joint Sessions
Christianity and Literature Study Group