YALE UNIVERSITY is pleased to announce its call for papers for the American Literature in the World Graduate Conference on Friday, April 5, 2019. The conference hopes to broaden the scope of American literature, opening it to more complex geographies, and to a variety of genres and media. One-page abstracts (250-650 words) are due to americanliteratureintheworld@gmail.comby Saturday, December 15. For more information, see below.
American Literature in the World Graduate Conference
Yale University
April 5, 2019
The conference hopes to broaden the scope of American literature, opening it to more complex geographies, and to a variety of genres and media. The impetus comes partly from a survey of what is currently in the field: it is impossible to read the work of Toni Morrison and Teju Cole, Bei Dao and Rita Dove, Tony Kushner and Lynn Nottage, Joan Didion and Ta-Nehisi Coates without seeing that, for all these authors, the reference frame is no longer simply the United States, but a larger, looser, more contextually varied set of coordinates, populated by laboring bodies, migrating faiths, generational sagas, memories of war, as well as the accents of unforgotten tongues, the taste and smell of beloved foods and spices.
The twenty-first century is a good century to think about American literature in the world. But other centuries are equally fertile ground, as the writings of Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley, Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Sui Sin Far, Gertrude Stein, Zitkála-Šá, William Carlos Williams, Frank O’Hara, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Anzaldúa make abundantly clear. To study these and countless other authors is to see that the United States and the world are neither separate nor antithetical, but part of the same analytic fabric. Our conference explores these extended networks through many channels: from the cultural archives circulating across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans as well as the Caribbean Sea; to the dynamic interactions between indigenous populations and those newly arrived; from the institutions of print, to the tangled ecologies of literature, art, theater, music, and film, to the digital globalism of the present moment.
The conference is supported by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences; the Creative Writing Program; the English Department; the American Studies Department; and the African American Studies Department.
Please send a 1-page abstract (250-650 words) to americanliteratureintheworld@g
Yale University
April 5, 2019
The conference hopes to broaden the scope of American literature, opening it to more complex geographies, and to a variety of genres and media. The impetus comes partly from a survey of what is currently in the field: it is impossible to read the work of Toni Morrison and Teju Cole, Bei Dao and Rita Dove, Tony Kushner and Lynn Nottage, Joan Didion and Ta-Nehisi Coates without seeing that, for all these authors, the reference frame is no longer simply the United States, but a larger, looser, more contextually varied set of coordinates, populated by laboring bodies, migrating faiths, generational sagas, memories of war, as well as the accents of unforgotten tongues, the taste and smell of beloved foods and spices.
The twenty-first century is a good century to think about American literature in the world. But other centuries are equally fertile ground, as the writings of Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley, Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Sui Sin Far, Gertrude Stein, Zitkála-Šá, William Carlos Williams, Frank O’Hara, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Anzaldúa make abundantly clear. To study these and countless other authors is to see that the United States and the world are neither separate nor antithetical, but part of the same analytic fabric. Our conference explores these extended networks through many channels: from the cultural archives circulating across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans as well as the Caribbean Sea; to the dynamic interactions between indigenous populations and those newly arrived; from the institutions of print, to the tangled ecologies of literature, art, theater, music, and film, to the digital globalism of the present moment.
The conference is supported by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences; the Creative Writing Program; the English Department; the American Studies Department; and the African American Studies Department.
Please send a 1-page abstract (250-650 words) to americanliteratureintheworld@g
