** Apologies for multiple cross-postings **
CALL FOR PAPERS for a session to be convened at the Northeast Modern
Language Association (NEMLA) conference, 7-8 April 2000 in Buffalo, New York.
** Theatrical Extremities: Alice Munro and the Splendors of Vision **
Taking its title and specific focus from one of Alice Munro's own telling
phrases from the 1978 story cycle *Who Do You Think You Are?*, this session
extends an open invitation to critics from a broad range of theoretical
backgrounds to explore a persistent and complex issue that has informed
Munro's fictions from the earliest stories to the recent *The Love of a
Good Woman* (1998): the ideological, philosophical, and sociocultural
implications of sight and seeing. Appealing, arousing, and often
threatening to disrupt the tenuous threads of human connection that sustain
the lives of individuals and communities in her stories, the related
practices of seeing and being seen are primary activities in the public and
private worlds of Munro's fictions. Rarely benign, such practices often
illuminate the darkest shadows of the human condition as well as the
illusory certainties through which individuals or communities "look at" and
"see" themselves and the worlds around them.
Aspects or angles of enquiry that might be explored include, but are by no
means limited to:
* considerations of the positive/negative powers of performance and the
paradoxical appeal/fear of overt theatricality
* considerations of the ideological (and often logistical) intricacies of
voyeurism and/or the related appeal/fear of "exposure"
* theorizing spectacle in Munro's fiction
* the physical and psychological distance separating observed and observer
* the complex and often tension-filled relationship within Munro's fiction
between sight/lines and space (the urban versus the rural; the panoptic;
gendered space)
Offers of twenty-minute papers on these or other aspects of the splendors
of vision in Munro's fictions are invited by 15 September 1999. Please
submit either a full paper or 300-500 word proposal, along with an abstract
(250 word maximum) to:
Dr. Klay Dyer
Department of English Language and Literature
Brock University
St. Catharines, Ontario
Canada L2S 3A1
Electronic mail: kdyer@spartan.ac.brocku.ca
Facsimile: (905) 934-3301
* Hard copy, electronic (within body of e-mail), or facsimile submissions
are welcome. Any requests for audiovisual equipment should be noted in the
proposal package.
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