PAMLA 2010 - Honolulu

Relentless connectivity and extensive mobility are sociological key features of the mobile network society of the 21st century. How are these new forms of sociality and questions of movement (people, things, information, ideas) articulated in contemporary German literature and film? How are they theorized by German-speaking writers and intellectuals? How do they shape our view of texts from the Gutenberg era? How mobile is contemporary German literature?

With a few stunning exceptions, the national integrity of the United States has endured unbreached since the War of 1812. Yet two centuries later, America’s invasion and destruction remains a popular fictional trope. This panel will examine the persistence of this nightmare in popular culture.

This session investigates the production of, marketing of, and aesthetic issues surrounding musical performance. Music is an easily-accessible forum for artists who can publish their work using technological tools like garage band and online publications such as myspace, facebook, and iTunes. "Music As Voice" is looking for proposals dealing with any aspect of musical production.  Papers focusing on ways the disenfranchised musicians secure an outlaw position within a dominant cultural medium are particularly welcome.

This session will examine various types of programs that appear on French radio and television in order to determine their effect on popular culture, as well as the transmission of high culture to a popular audience. Topics to be discussed include political analysis and news programs, comedy and satirical programs, culturally oriented talk shows, films on TV, sports, fictional series (“sagas,” soap operas, police series), télé-réalité.

Papers on a west poetics (1900-present). Possible topics: West as site of self-invention; Asian (and Asian-American) influences; San Francisco Renaissance and its legacy; Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the Orient in the West (U.S. West as edge of the East); Northwest poetry/painting; West coast “nature” poetry (Stafford, Snyder, Jeffers, Everson, Hass, Roethke, Hugo, Levertov, etc.). Particular interest in the conflicted idea of the West as promise and apocalypse, fullness and absence.

This session aims to showcase original, innovative approaches to second-language acquisition pedagogy.

This panel focuses on the interaction between humans and mountainous environments, whether in the form of exploration, aesthetic experience, or mountaineering. Examples from literature, film, painting, or other media are welcome.

Proposals may address the special theme for the conference, “Picturing Oceania and the Pacific,” in relation to Children’s Literature. General Children’s Literature proposals will be accepted as well.

 Armor/Exoskeleton: Historical Mediations of Touch

This panel investigates how materialities of armor or exoskeleton mediate the chiasm of body and world in premodernity and postmodernity. What are the epistemologies, ontologies, or ethics of contact, defense, or commingling implied by the hardened, full body sheath?

After 1989, Italian films begin to exceed the previously privileged space of the nation, in order to explore the transnational sites where cultures intertwine and crisscross. This session is dedicated to considering the authorial talents and the generic developments that have emerged in Italian cinema in the last two decades.

This session, sponsored by the Association for the Study of Literature & Environment (ASLE), will investigate any aspect of ecocriticism, including ecocritical theory, environmental ethics, environmental justice, colonial and postcolonial ecologies, gender and ecology, literary representations of non-human being, and interdisciplinary investigations of literature and environmental science.

Soliciting papers on exploration in Young Adult literatures. “Exploration” can be broadly interpreted and include both explorations/assessments of the YA genre as well as analyses of exploration within YA narratives. From developmental explorations of identity, sexuality, relationships, drugs, or community to explorations of other worlds (fantasy), new cultures (migration literature), or travel narratives, this panel will look broadly at current discourses in YA literatures.

I am looking for papers in a selective but open-ended fashion, where proposals can choose from several topics, time periods, directors, actors and languages, so long as they have an explicit argument to make. Proposals on Global Cinema (French, Vietnamese, German, African, Latin American) are more than welcome, as well as papers dealing with form and content, and the use of music and editing in the Hollywood narrative. Your paper may concern film movements such as Neorealism, New Queer Cinema, European or Asian New Wave cinema, Dogma 95, German Expressionism, Mumble Core, Blaxploitation, Italian Futurism, American Indiewood and Garbage Mouth Cinema. Also welcome: arguments dealing with genre films such as noir, samurai, horror, romantic comedy, BroMance cinema, science fiction, the war film, fantasy, as well as documentaries, cult movies, children's films, silent films, caped crusaders, anime, pornos and Japanese pinku movies. Directors of interest and concern could just as well deal with films by Agnès Varda, Shohei Imamura, QT (is back!), Terry Gilliam, PIXAR, Kathryn Bigelow, James Cameron, Martin Scorsese, Hal Ashby, Wong Kar Wai, Sophia Coppola, Catherine Breillat, Paul Thomas Anderson, Alfred Hitchcock, Miranda July, Ousmane Sembène, Fellini and more.

The new discipline of food & culture promotes and practices the analysis of cultural, social and political issues concerning the production, distribution, representation, and consumption of food from a variety of disciplines and critical perspectives. This special session explores food traditions and customs from a local and transnational perspective.

In this special session, we will explore food representation and the art of conviviality in French literature, film, and the arts, as well as the relationship of food to French cultural identity.

This panel will investigate the soft boundary between Literature and Philosophy by probing how the narrative conventions of the two forms use language to construct significance(s). In what ways do the vocabulary, contexts, connotations, and purposes of these forms converge and/or diverge? How can we stimulate a productive conversation between them?

This panel invites submissions that deal with the contemporary discussion, in both academic and popular representations, of the marginality, or lack thereof, of Jewish Americans.

This special session will focus on the various formal and cultural relationships that can be established between 20th century Latin American fiction and film, including adaptation of novels, novellas, and short stories to film; cinematographic/literary scripts; visual and verbal intersections in both written and cinematic texts; and comparative narratological strategies.

This special session seeks proposals that engage childhood representations of the Pacific through mass media. This concept stems from US children in the “lower 48” learning about Pacific, especially Hawaiian, children through such venues as Lilo and Stitch. “Lilo’s 'Ohana” will explore cultural oversights generated by mass media outlets that seek to present a particular image of Hawaiian and Pacific culture through children’s mass media.

This special session explores any intersection of literary studies and the discipline of psychology (not psychoanalysis), such as literary applications of memory theory, trauma theory, child psychology, psychopathology, affect, emotion, the psychology of reading, theories of perception, theories of imagination, or cognitive approaches to narrative theory.

Topics may include, but are not limited to, the role of the novel in exploration, trade, colonization, empire; masculinities at sea; cartography; contact zones; the relation between fact and fiction in maritime travel narratives; formal dimensions of maritime narrative. Papers that concern the Pacific are especially welcome.

The session will address interdisciplinary approaches to literature and science from the end of the 18th century to the 21st century.

The shape of nationalist fervor is drawn against a background of coherent visuals. But what if the mother tongue speaks in pluralities at the very origin of the nation? This panel seeks to examine the role of accents, dialects, creoles, and multilingualism upon the national project, especially in the context of francophone and sinophone texts.

This session will examine notions of “home” and “homeland” as entities grounded less in the material realm than in those of performance, practice, and imagination. Proposals from all global sites, periods, and genres (literature, theatre, film, culture) welcome.

Barrack Obama’s presidency, with its invocation of John F. Kennedy’s legend, invites a wider discussion of how 1960s socio-political movements, philosophies, and art may be transformed, reinterpreted, and redeployed in the 21st century. We welcome papers engaging the legacy of 1960s American countercultural or revolutionary literature, visual arts, and/or music, and exploring how they resonate in the collective consciousness, not simply as repositories for nostalgia but as viable, if problematic, strategies for inspiring “hope” and effecting “change.”

Papers rethinking post-war American poets and poetics of the late 1940s and 1950s, especially those that break down or rethink general categories or assumptions—between the Beats and the “domestic” or “confessional” poets, for example—are welcome.

The proposed panel will analyze Spanish literary inquests of the sea, as portrayed across different time periods. We are particularly interested in  explorations of the "sea" as a: a) bridge between cultures and identities, b) metaphor of a search for personal freedom, and/or c) symbol of creative borders that celebrate "uncomfortable" identities and expressive modes. While literary works are the main focus, we welcome papers that relate the literary to the visual arts, as well.

For additional information, please contact Professor Adrian Perez-Boluda (adrian.perez-boluda@csun.edu) when submitting papers concerning 1400-1800 Spain, and Professor Jasmina Arsova (jasmina.arsova@pomona.edu) concerning 1800-2010.

This panel will focus on narratives describing transformations across the permeable boundary dividing humans from animals, reality from dream, or the mundane from the divine to explore questions of identity and memory within Chinese literature.

This session is open to any topic related to pedagogy and technology. Case studies of implementations of particular technologies are welcome, as is research discussing the impact of technology in the classroom/curriculum.

This panel would welcome papers on representations of travel and tourism in German Culture. Presenters might wish to examine travel accounts, explorer narratives, ethnographic texts, (post)colonial literature, touristic accounts, or any work of literature, art, or film that addresses questions of travel, tourism, and/or (trans)nationalism.

Women’s Writing Today: Distinct or Equivalent?
 
In her essay “I Am Not a Woman Writer,” Toril Moi argues that the subject of the woman writer has disappeared from feminist theory. Moi recalls how, in A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf famously asks women to write androgynously and how Simone de Beauvoir reminds us that in “a sexist society, man is the One, she is the Other” (Moi 264). In the 1970s and 1980s, écriture féminine and the subject of women’s writing were very popular, but Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Roland Barthes contributed to the rejection of the importance of an author’s gender. The question of the gendered author becomes even more complicated with Judith Butler’s concept of gender being a performative act. Recently, novelist Rachel Cusk argues (The Guardian 12 Dec. 2009) that women’s writing should not “seek equivalence in the male world” but rather “express a distinction, not deny it.” According to Cusk, a woman author on Woolf’s terms is “a victim, a prisoner…. actively disbarred” whereas on Beauvoir’s she is “fawning for scraps from the male table.” Cusk goes on to suggest that women who fail to recognize their writing as feminine are not freer due to the postfeminist notion of feminist goals achieved but rather because “[s]ometimes society is receptive to the language of oppression; at other times it is not, and oppression becomes a cause of shame.” What exactly, asks Cusk, are “female values”? Have women stopped promoting female literary texts as “women’s writing” because of this shame?
   
Should contemporary approaches to texts written by women—be they historical texts or more recent—ignore the gender of the author? Is emphasizing the author's gender a privileging strategy? Or does it condemn discourses on women’s writing outside of mainstream literarature? Can we find evidence for Cusk’s proposal that shame is a symptom of oppression in the writings of women in the Western tradition? Can we find similar evidence in the writing of women in the postcolonial tradition?

From its origins in popular literature, the graphic novel has emerged as a genre of literary expression that merits serious critical treatment. This panel encourages presentations by scholars who are eager to take on the genre’s textual and graphic elements as sophisticated modes of expression that reward exploration along traditional critical lines of inquiry.

The West has progressively "de-territorialized" islands' cultures along the "molar lines" opened up by colonialism and then widened via the global, frenetic drive of the 19th century and postmodern capitalism—-some islands are literally losing ground to rising sea-levels.  Literary and philosophic texts and travel accounts meditate on this encounter and “reduction.”