Call For Papers: MLA 2023
Modern Language Association Annual Convention
San Francisco, CA
January 5-8, 2023
One guaranteed panel and one non-guaranteed panel; see submission details below
Melville and His Critics
Guaranteed Panel
Melville understood the power that critics have in making or destroying a literary reputation. As biographers have noted, he would collect and study reviews of his work and was often devasted by them, leading him to declare after the publication of Moby-Dick that “there are hardly five critics in America; and several of them are asleep.” But since the Melville revival in the 1920s, some of the most important literary critics, poets, and writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have written on Melville. Anglophone critics include Charles Olson, Elizabeth Hardwick, Newton Arvin, Edward Said, C. L. R. James, Toni Morrison, and Barbara Johnson, while beyond the Anglophone world, there are Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes, Hannah Arendt, and Jean Giono, to name but a few.
Literary criticism has produced many Melvilles and this panel invites papers that reflect on how Melville has signified in critical works and to explore the stakes of these critical reflections. How have critics related themselves to Melville’s writing and what has Melville come to represent for them? What aesthetic, ethical, epistemological, and political questions are figured in and through Melville’s oeuvre? What are the themes and issues that seem to preoccupy literary schools of thought only to be challenged and replaced by other sets of questions and preoccupations? What defined the Melvilles of previous generations and how do they differ from ‘our’ Melville?
This panel solicits papers that approach Melville as a site of conversations that have grown ever more complex over time and to unpack and explore this critical archive that created and continues to create Melville.
Send abstracts of 250 words and a vita to Carrie Tirado Bramen at bramen@buffalo.edu by March 22, 2022 with the subject line: “Melville Society MLA.”
Melville Style: The Matter of Mind, Life, Art, Politics
Non-Guaranteed Panel
The tone of capital, the color of chaos, the figure of pain, the texture of philosophy: among the characteristic stylistic features of Melville’s prose and poetry is the precision with which he gives aesthetic form to the concepts and problems that drive his work. As scholars like Christopher Freeburg, Sianne Ngai, Samuel Otter, Michael Snediker, and many many others have shown in recent years, Melville’s work combines aesthetic experimentation with some of his strangest and most radical thinking about philosophy, art, desire, life, power, and politics. This panel seeks papers that engage such new approaches to the broad question of style in Melville’s work as the means by which he materializes his far-reaching explorations of matter and mind, art and politics, affect and embodiment, life and ecologies.
Send abstracts of 250 words and a vita to Jennifer Greiman at greimaj@wfu.edu by March 25, 2022.
For more information on the Modern Language Association 2023 convention, see https://www.mla.org/Convention/MLA-2023
