CFP 120th Annual PAMLA Conference (2023): Portland, OR - Special Session CFP (2/1/2023; in-person event October 2023)

120th Annual PAMLA Conference (2023): Portland, OR - Special Session CFP

deadline for submissions:
February 1, 2023

full name / name of organization:
Craig Svonkin, Metropolitan State University of Denver

contact email:
director@pamla.org

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2022/12/20/120th-annual-pamla-conference-2023-portland-or-special-session-cfp

The 120th Annual PAMLA Conference

The PAMLA 2023 Conference will be held at the Hilton Portland Downtown in Portland, Oregon between October 26-29, 2023,


The 2023 PAMLA Conference is being held entirely in-person. We won’t be having any virtual or hybrid sessions or papers.

PAMLA, founded as the Philological Association of the Pacific Coast in 1899, and the western affiliate of the Modern Language Association, is dedicated to the advancement and diffusion of knowledge of ancient and modern languages, literatures, and cultures.

Please email Craig Svonkin if you have any questions about the conference: director@pamla.org.

PAMLA 2023 Conference Theme

PAMLA 2023 looks to a figure born in 1899 as the exemplary writer for our times: Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentine essayist, storyteller, and poet, whose life works might best be considered as an ideology and literary theory unto itself.

Therefore, the 2023 PAMLA Conference theme is “Shifting Perspectives.” How might we apply this dynamic to our respective fields of study and shine a light on new approaches, thereby engaging in the critical and theoretical processes of shifting our own views and exploring the results? How might we shift perspectives in terms of our scholarly and intellectual pursuits, our world views, our creative writing, and our teaching?



Special Session Proposals

As always, we welcome special session proposals (due February 1, 2023 via our online special session proposal system: pamla.ballastacademic.com) on the preceding topics related to the special theme, but also on other topics of broad interest (in other words, special session proposals will be entertained that do not connect to the conference theme, as well as proposals that do). This year, we are particularly interested in special session proposals broad enough to perhaps justify becoming general (standing) sessions after three successful years as special sessions (see below for a list of current general (standing) sessions for the PAMLA conference. For example, PAMLA’s board would welcome special session proposals on topics such as:

• 1923
• African Literature
• Multilingual American Literature (in other languages than English, or in English and other languages, both)
• Arabic Literature and Culture
• ASL
• Audiences or Reader Response Theory
• Audio (or Sound) Studies
• Books: perhaps including Textual Studies, Materiality, History of the Book, etc.
• Canadian Literature and Culture
• Class or Marxist Literature, Film, and Culture
• Creative Writing: Drama or Creative Writing: Creative Nonfiction or other topics of interest
• Digital Humanities
• Environmental Media
• Family (or Metafamily)
• Fan Fiction or Fan Studies
• Futurisms (to include Afrofuturism, Indigenous Futurism, etc.) Or Multi-Ethnic Futurisms
• Hmong
• Immigrant Studies (Or Movement, Migration, and Immigration)
• Infrastructure Studies
• Interdisciplinary or Innovative sessions
• Teaching of Literary Works (focusing on a particular work)
• Modernism
• Multi-ethnic German
• Museum Studies
• Objects, Stuff, and Things; Object Studies
• Pedagogy
• Performance Studies
• Portuguese
• Posthuman or Animal Studies
• Posthumanities
• The Postmodern
• Slang, Languages, and Dialects (or Underground Languages)
• Sociolinguistics
• Spatial Studies
• Transcultural (or Transnational) Literature
• Translation Studies
• Vietnamese

If you have any questions, please contact PAMLA Executive Director Craig Svonkin (director@pamla.org) or PAMLA President Yolanda Doub (ydoub@mail.fresnostate.edu).

Current general (standing) PAMLA sessions are:

21st-Century Literature; Adaptation Studies; African American Literature; American Literature before 1865; American Literature 1865-1945; American Literature after 1945; Ancient-Modern Relations; Anime and Manga; Architecture, Space, and Literature; Asian American Literature; Asian Literature; Austrian Studies; Autobiography; Bible and Literature; British Literature and Culture: To 1700; British Literature and Culture: The Long Eighteenth Century; British Literature and Culture: The Long Nineteenth Century; British Literature and Culture: 20th and 21st Century; Carceral/Prison Studies; Children’s Literature; Classics (Greek); Classics (Latin); Coalitional Feminisms; Comics and Graphic Narratives; Comparative American Ethnic Literature; Comparative Literature; Comparative Media; Composition and Rhetoric; Creative Writing; Critical Theory; Cultural History; Digital Studies; Disability Studies; Disney and Its Worlds; Drama and Society; East-West Literary Relations; Film and Literature; Film Studies; Folklore and Mythology; Food Studies; French; Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Literature; Germanic Studies; Gothic; Hip-Hop Poetics; Indigenous Literatures and Cultures; Italian; Italian Cinema; Italian Ecocriticism; Jewish Literature and Culture; Latina/o Literature and Culture; Linguistics; Literature & the Other Arts; Literature and Religion; Medieval Literature; Middle English Literature, including Chaucer; New Italians; Oceanic Literatures and Cultures; Old English Literature, including Beowulf; Poetry and Poetics; Post-Colonial Literature; Religion in American Literature; Rhetorical Approaches to Literature; Romanticism; Science Fiction; Shakespeare and Related Topics; Spain, Portugal, and Latin America: Jewish Culture & Literature in Trans-Iberia, Spanish and Portuguese (Latin American); Spanish and Portuguese (Peninsular); Teaching with Media and Technology; Teaching Writing Across the Disciplines; Television Studies; Travel and Literature; Veterans Studies; Video Game Studies; Western American Literature; Women in Literature; Young Adult Literature and Culture.



Last updated December 20, 2022

CFP PAMLA 2022 Call for Special Sessions (2/2022-4/30/2022; Los Angeles 11/11-13/2022)

 GEOGRAPHIES OF THE FANTASTIC AND THE QUOTIDIAN:

PAMLA 2022 CALL FOR SPECIAL SESSIONS

Source: https://www.pamla.org/pamla-2022-call-for-special-sessions/

PAMLA welcomes special session proposals for the 2022 PAMLA conference at the UCLA Luskin Conference Center and Hotel in Los Angeles, California (early morning Friday, November 11 through Sunday night, November 13, 2022) on topics of scholarly interest that are not too close to the topics of our general (standing) sessions (go to https://www.pamla.org/about/constitution-bylaws/ and search for “general sessions” to find a list of PAMLA’s standing sessions). Our system for paper proposals will open in February 2022, with April 30th as the submission deadline.

While we welcome special session proposals on a wide variety of topics, we are particularly interested in special session proposals that engage with the 2022 PAMLA Conference Theme: Geographies of the Fantastic and Quotidian.

As we converge on the magnificent, incomprehensible megalopolis of Los Angeles in November of 2022, it would be timely to consider the many “ecologies” of our lived spaces and places. [1] We might think dialectically in terms of clear, dynamic oppositions: exterior and interior spaces, for instance, or those we would categorize as real or surreal—or, perhaps to return to Los Angeles, “hyperreal.”[2] Within those texts we like to dwell—metaphorically at least, for the longue durée or for brief, eccentric interludes—as we discover that time intersects with space in surprising and contradictory ways.

The 2022 Special Theme invites our scholarly community to consider the overdetermined landscapes both of the imagination and of everyday experience. In the process, we hope collectively to interrogate the multiple topographies and topologies of our cherished narratives, for as Michel de Certeau reminds us, “stories … carry out a labor that constantly transforms places into spaces or spaces into places.”[3]

Los Angeles itself would certainly offer fertile ground for scholarly excavation, but we strongly encourage submissions that explore what Gaston Bachelard termed the “poetics of space” within texts of all sorts, as well as all sizes and varieties of context. Particularly fascinating might be explorations of the extraordinary, the exemplary, the “out of this world” sorts of places, real and figurative: the spaces of the fantastic and the bizarre. Conversely, the lived and experienced environments of the banal might spark equally fertile archaeologies of the everyday. For that is the allure of the often inscrutable or illegible cities of the imagination: they open up new territories.

We welcome special session proposals (due January 31, 2022) on any topic for our 2022 annual conference. Those that harmonize with our special theme might include all varieties of heterotopologies; explorations of fictional domains; Borgesian labyrinths; road narratives; enclaves of digital introspection or connection; theme parks; elision, caesura, and other grammatological openings; migration/border crossings; psychedelic “trips” of all sorts; native practices of tending the land; mirrors and projections; choreography and dance; exteriority/interiority; the politics or rhetorics of dispossession; theatrical staging; embodiment and disembodiment; panopticism; the family and/or spaces of domesticity; museums and archives; loitering; Zoom and other hauntings; homelessness and houselessness; settler colonialism; communities and cliques; as well as both paroxysmal places and quiet passages.

—

[1]    To borrow a fitting phrase from the famed British/American architectural critic Reyner Banham, whose Los Angeles: Architecture of the Four Ecologies, when read today, projects an alluring, smog-shrouded palimpsestual map of a city which has been repeatedly rewritten over the half-century since its publication.

[2]    Interestingly, both Umberto Eco’s 1973 “Travels in Hyperreality” and Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 Simulations reveal a fascination with Los Angeles, and particularly Disneyland, as the epicenter of a [seemingly] quintessentially American tendency to sanctify the fantastic.

[3]    It might seem outlandish to evoke Michel De Certeau’s spatial rhetorical practice of “walking in the city” within the paradigmatic autopia of Southern California (The Practice of Everyday Life, 118, 91), at least in the shadow of the New Wave/Punk pop eloquence of Missing Persons’ 1982 slightly vicious ditty. But, as Jane Jacobs teaches us in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the intricate “sidewalk ballet” of neighborhoods, large and small, routinely transcends the pedestrian (66).