UPDATE: "Things" in American Realism and Naturalism (4/18/03; SAMLA, 11/14/03-11/16/03)

[The initial version of this CFP was garbled, and the email contact
address also failed to come across.]

South Atlantic Modern Language Association - Atlanta, Nov. 14-16, 2003
Special Session: "American Realism and Naturalism: 'Things' Ain't What
They Used to Be"

In his recent special issue of _Critical Inquiry_ on "Things," Bill Brown
briefly outlines the potential for a "methodological fetishism" of the
material thing that could germinate "new thoughts about how inanimate
objects constitute human subjects, how they move them, how they threaten
them, how they facilitate or threaten their relation to other subjects."
The questions such a mode of investigation might raise would not point to
the particularity of things themselves so much as to the particular work
they do and to the "subject-object relation in particular temporal and
spatial contexts." Out of these and related queries might grow a "new
materialism."

I seek papers for a special session that investigates the roles that
"things" play in American literary realism and naturalism-under the
proposition that a new attention to the material thing as Brown describes
it might produce unexpected and productive new engagements with literary
realism and naturalism's penchant for material reference. Papers may
engage any text(s) typically classified within the genres of realism and
naturalism with the idea of elucidating the roles of things within the
text, history, and/or the genres concerned. Interdisciplinary approaches
are especially welcome.

Email a 250 word abstract by Friday, April 18 to engjmd_at_langate.gsu.edu .

J. Michael Duvall
Visiting Instructor
Georgia State University

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Received on Thu Mar 27 2003 - 13:00:51 EST