**please note: fax submissions are welcome; see number below**
CALL FOR PAPERS
**** Writing Loss: Melancholia Modern to Postmodern ****
Northeast Modern Language Association 2000 Convention
April 7-8, Buffalo, NY
For more information on NEMLA 2000, see
http://www.anna-maria.edu/nemla
This panel investigates the treatment of melancholic loss--loss which is
unrecoverable and unmournable--in the twentieth-century British novel.
More than a discrete plot event, a cultural experience that writing
reflects, or a crisis that elegiac narrative "gets over," loss in
literature can be viewed as a generative, shaping force. The panel will
point to ways in which melancholia contributes to the operation of
paradigmatically "modern" narrative habits:
linguistic experimentation, troubled closure and chronology,
self-reflexivity, and critical historiography.
Although papers that treat a single author will be
considered, the most
relevant discussions will likely be those that adopt a comparative
approach in order to sketch narrative "trends:" British authors as
varying as Katherine Mansfield, Joseph Conrad, Jean Rhys, Doris
Lessing, D. M. Thomas, Julian Barnes, and John Fowles have grappled in
original ways with the (narrative) question of unmournable loss.
Reading modern and postmodern British texts with an eye to what they do
with loss (and what loss does), as well as what they say about it, is an
exercise in the mutual implication of the story and its telling, of life
and literature.
You need not be a member of NEMLA to propose a paper, but if
accepted, you must become a member by November 1, 1999.
Please send abstract along with a cover letter stating name,
address, affiliation, telephone, e-mail, and any A/V needs by September
15, 1999 (email submissions pasted into body of message or fax
submissions are preferred)
to
Sarah Henstra
Dept. of English, University of Toronto
7 King's College Circle
Toronto, ON M5S 1A1
Canada
fax (416) 921-0130
shenstra@chass.utoronto.ca
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or write Erika Lin: elin@english.upenn.edu
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