Hello all, This is a just a reminder that the deadline for paper proposals for this year's graduate student conference is Sunday, March 10. The conference is a chance to share some of your best work with others in the program. Your paper need not address the conference theme directly: the conference is open to a range of topics. If you have any questions about the conference, feel free to get in touch with me. Best, Bill Orchard 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@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@gmail.com.