Call for Papers: The Consequence(s) of Transience: Mobility in
Twentieth-Century American Literature
NORTHEAST MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION
HARTFORD CT, MARCH 30-31, 2001
This panel will be devoted to conceptualizing movement or unsettling through
spatial, historical and imaginative sites of mobility in twentieth-century
American literature and culture. American culture and national identity is
rooted in mobility, and American literatures reflect this unrelenting and
incessant sense of transience. Henry David Thoreau, in a 1837 journal entry,
writes that "Thank fortune, we are not rooted in the soil, and here is not
all the world." In the twentieth century, Gertrude Stein observes that if
you think of anybody "who goes anywhere or stays at home and is American and
you will realize that it is something strictly American to conceive a space
that is filled with moving." More recently, Mary Oliver expresses this sense
of migratory subjectivity in her poem "Whelks": "All my life / I have been
restless- / I have felt there is something / more wonderful than gloss- /
than wholeness- / than staying at home."
The rationale for the proposed panel is to examine and unsettle the
prevalent conceptualizations of a place-based environmental ethics. Papers
should address the question, in what ways is unsettling or restlessness used
to make a home or construct a sense of place? The panel will seek to
theorize unsettling and restlessness, and to learning more than one place,
to perambulatory or migratory knowledge or ways of knowing, and their
distinctive types of intimacy, memory, viability. In conceptualizing
mobility, movement or unsettling as a means of constructing a sense of
place, the chosen papers will highlight theoretical, philosophical,
imaginative and metaphysical alternatives (and challenges) to the idea that
"staying put" is a "better" or "more viable" form / method of knowing /
knowledge.
Too often parochial in its acceptance of the value of rootedness, the
growing field of ecocriticism, in particular, has cultivated a language for
talking about place that privileges metaphors of stasis, and relies on ideas
such as "digging in" and "slow revelation" and "a lifetime of work." The
panel, then, will extend and challenge this existing body of literature and
criticism by situating it in a more interdisciplinary and theoretically
cosmopolitan framework. Possible frameworks include Masao Miyoshi's analysis
of the dwindling locus of power in the nation state and Lawrence Grossberg's
disrupting spatial economies of nation at the center of debates of national
literatures and postcolonial critique; the cultural poetics of such writers
as Adrienne Rich, Ed Dorn and C. D. Wright; and the critical frameworks
provided by the feminist geographer Gillian Rose, the cultural
anthropologist James Clifford, and the cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan.
Please send a 1-page abstract, and a brief cv, by September 15th. E-mail
submissions are acceptable. Send to:
Mark C. Long
Department of English
Keene State College
229 Main Street
Keene, NH 03431-1402
Phone: 603 358-2695
Fax: 603 358-2773
Email: mlong@keene.edu
Participants must be members of NEMLA by 1 November, 2000. For more
information about the conference, please go to the NEMLA website at
www.anna-maria.edu/nemla/
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or write Erika Lin: elin@english.upenn.edu
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