Hello all,
Below is the Call for Papers for this year's English MA Conference, which will take place on Wednesday, May 1, 2019. I've also attached the call to this message as a pdf file. The deadline for proposals is Sunday, March 10, but we welcome and encourage early submissions!
Conference presentations are usually about 15 minutes long, which translates to about 7 pages of text. Please consider submitting papers that you have completed for classes or sections of thesis essays that you are completing this year.
The MA conference is always a nice cap to the academic year, and a chance to see what others are up to in the program and hear work by students in graduate programs from around the New York area.
Feel free to contact me if you any questions about submitting a proposal.
Best,
Bill
CALL FOR PAPERS
The Sixth Annual Queens College English Graduate Conference
The Pursuit of Pleasure:
Literature, Beauty, Repose
Conference Date: Wednesday, May 1, 2019
Submission Deadline: Sunday, March 10, 2019
“A resistance of the pressure of the real and the preservation of a free imaginative space in language is vital to our survival.” - Matthew Zapruder
In his essay “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words”(1941), the poet Wallace Stevens suggests that poetry allows us to resist the “pressures of reality,” and, in this capacity, provides readers and writers with pleasurable escape and relief from the external events of the world around them. Stevens offers that literature acts as a place to preserve the imagination and, with it, very human feelings like hope, possibility, love, and connection. The point here is not to avoid the real but rather, in the face of the violence and turbulence that always threaten to monopolize our attention, to remain connected to those feelings and experiences that sustain us as human beings.
The sixth annual Queens College English Graduate Conference invites a discussion of the ways literature, film, and media function as a means through which we remain connected to our human experience. For this conference, we are interested in looking at not only what causes the creation of such media, but also what service the work provides to both the creator and the consumer: How does literature provide a space to explore vulnerability? What purpose does an action film or comic book serve in a world consumed with political turmoil? What provides an escape or a form of pleasure when the external world demands our attention? We want to engage in a conversation not only about how texts and readers engage with literature as a means of cultivating spaces for resistance and repose, but also with the way in which this function of literature generates fresh insights about predicaments both past and present.
The QC English Graduate Conference is a chance for CUNY master’s students to share their research interests with the larger CUNY community. Submissions must be critical or theoretical works about literature and/or culture and can be portions of larger works or works-in-progress.
We welcome papers on a range of topics. Possible submission topics include but are not limited to:
Guilty Pleasures
§ Apocalyptic Narratives
§ Protest Literature
§ Science Fiction/Fantasy
§ Children’s/YA Literature
§ Comics and Graphic Narratives
§ Adaptation Studies
Pleasurable Defiance
§ The Body in Crisis
§ Politics and the Demos
§ Crisis of Faith and Belief
§ Emotional Challenges
§ Hybrid Texts
§ Digital Humanities
Vulnerable Reading
§ Personal and the Political
§ Risk and Precarity
§ Openness to Pleasure
§ Fan Cultures and Enthusiasms
§ Unconventional Mediums
Crisis Management
§ Utopias and Utopian Writing
§ Aesthetic Remedies
§ New Social Imaginaries
§ Coalitions and Intersections
§ Speaking Truth to Power
To Submit a Proposal
Please send proposals (250 words max.) to QCEnglishMAconference(a)gmail.com by Sunday, March 10, 2019. Proposals should be pasted in the body of the email. Please include your full name and the name of your program and school as well as the title of your paper.
All Queens College MA, MFA, MSED, and MAT students are welcome to submit, as well as master’s students from other schools. If you have any questions, please email QCEnglishMAconference(a)gmail.com.
