Benjamin Lefebvre

Contributors are sought for a critical essay collection on Canadian postwar literatures for submission to an internationally distributed British academic press in 2012. Besides war itself the book will address themes relevant to postwar social and cultural conditions. A key aim for the volume is to extend criticism of Canada’s postwar literature beyond the often discussed First World War (without necessarily ignoring it) to consider how the Second World War, the Vietnam War, recent wars in Africa/ Bosnia/ the Middle East, and other conflicts have influenced postwar themes in Canadian literature. Recoveries of forgotten/ underappreciated works are especially welcome, as are considerations of recent works worthy of greater critical attention. Contributions on more critically established works (The Wars, Obasan, The English Patient, etc.) are welcome, provided they offer new insights. Literature in any genre may be discussed, and interdisciplinary approaches that combine literature with historiography, film, visual art, digital humanities, etc. will also be considered.

Possible approaches include (but are not limited to):

• Historically situated studies of forgotten or recent authors/ texts
• Postwar literature and poetics
• Postwar narratives and the history of the book
• Trauma and recovery
• Diaspora and exile in postwar narratives
• Persecution and crimes against humanity
• Ecocritical or ecofeminist readings of postwar works
• Femininity/ masculity/ gender in postwar texts
• Existential or other philosophical dimensions in postwar literature
• Postwar drama and performance
• Postwar literature and other media or art forms

Please email proposals consisting of a 500-word abstract, a 100-word bio, and a brief cover message to the editor, Dr. Peter Webb, at peter.webb@gmx.com, by December 1, 2011.

Attach Word or Rich Text files and avoid fixed formats like PDF. If the proposal derives from a completed or nearly completed paper, please indicate in the email. Submissions will be assessed according to critical significance and the potential to complement others in forming a coherent volume. Accepted proposals will need to be expanded to manuscripts of 6000 – 8000 words by summer, 2012. All finished papers will be subject to final acceptance and peer review.

On Friday October 21, 2011, from 1:00 to 4:30 p.m., the Association for Research in Cultures of Young People (ARCYP) and the Children’s Studies Program at York University will co-present a symposium on new research in Children’s Material Cultures. The symposium is free and open to all faculty and students in the Children’s Studies Program as well as to other interested people from York and beyond. Presenters will include ARCYP Executive members and York Children’s Studies Program faculty and students.

The symposium will consist of two panels/roundtables and open discussion on new and emerging research on children’s material cultures, and will include time for refreshments and socializing and meeting with the presenters.

CALL FOR BRIEF PAPER PROPOSALS

ARCYP Executive Members, ARCYP Members, and interested York Children’s Studies Faculty or students are invited to send a TITLE and ONE BRIEF PARAGRAPH describing their proposed 15-20-minute presentation to the symposium coordinator in an e-mail message to admin@arcyp.ca no later than Friday September 23 so that the event can be publicized appropriately.

Description

For the purposes of this symposium, children’s material culture is understood to refer to those things that are central to the way meaningfulness and relationality are constituted, negotiated, and made anew within the diverse and globalized contexts of young people’s contemporary lives. This includes the practices through which children’s things – including toys, games, literatures and technologies – are used and consumed, and the way such things (and their associated practices) are situated in relation to particular contexts and to questions of political economy, gender, race and sexuality. While children and youth in the global North and South continue to be the site of an immense set of challenges, pressures, and risks – that have to do with the environment, war, health, politics, the economy, and the role of new technologies – that shape young people’s mobility, opportunity, and sense of the future, this symposium seeks new research that examines how and in what ways children’s things are implicated in and, in some instances, an antidote to the above risks. This includes work that addresses the amplified role of consumerism as a constituent feature of the children’s material cultures and work that examines how this culture operates in the spaces and places children call home.

Topics for the symposium may include but are not limited to the following:

• research from various methodological traditions – including phenomenology, cultural studies, and ethnography – that addresses children’s use of games, toys, and technologies as a feature of play, work, or education
• research that examines the changing nature of consumerism and consumer practices in children’s material culture
• research that examines the role of things (toys, games, and technologies) in relation to children’s socialization

More generally, we are interested in:

• materialist-feminist criticism and analyses of children’s literature and culture
• materialist analyses of post-colonial children’s literature and culture
• the political economy of children’s literature and culture

Contact:
Stuart Poyntz, Symposium Coordinator
admin@arcyp.ca

In October 2012, the Department of English at the University of Ottawa will host a Symposium on “Children’s Literature and Imaginative Geography: Past, Present, and Future.”

For Tolkien, the Realm of Faerie defined an imaginative place. That sense of place not only defined fairy tales for him; it made the magic of fairy tales possible. It was at the beginning, at the root of fairy tales. Story begins in a place. An imaginative place is also the backdrop of a children’s novel, poem, or play; it IS the world of Story. Whether realistic, fantastic, historical, gothic, or nonsensical, a work of fiction has its own geography. The giant sequoia on a prehistoric island opens Kenneth Oppel’s Darkwing, and defines the soon to be destroyed safety of its colony of chiropters, Oppel’s imagined prehistoric bats. The North shapes the adventures and redemption of protagonist Burl Crow in Tim Wynne-Jones’s The Maestro. P.E.I. inspires and nurtures Anne of Green Gables; her own imagination grows out of her love of the Island. Fantastic geographies, whether in the past or present, can be small or epic in scope: Lilliput or Middle-earth, the Hundred Acre Wood or Narnia, the house of the Other Mother in Coraline or the dark multitudinous worlds of the Inkheart trilogy to name a few.

Cyberspace cannot be mapped like a place on Earth, but it plays a role in present day imaginative geography. It is a place of websites, blogs, e-mails, and tweets, and enables the downloading of books, as well as the creation of interactive fictional worlds. Computers, cell phones, e-readers, and tablets connect us to imaginary places. Cyberspace has also helped make our world into a global village, where it is not so strange to read children’s literature from around the world, whether about the Australian Outback, Nazi Germany, India, or the thick woods of early Canada. The imaginative geography of children’s literature is the focus of this conference. Where has it been? Where is it now? Where is it going?

Among the keynote speakers are Kenneth Oppel, Alan Cumyn, and Margot Hillel.

Please send electronic or paper proposals by November 15, 2011 to Aïda Hudson at ahudson@uottawa.ca or Amy Einarsson at aeina018@uottawa.ca

Department of English
University of Ottawa
70 Laurier Avenue East
Ottawa, Ontario K1N 6N5

Literary Slipstreams (14–16 June 2012), Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts

The 39th Annual Children’s Literature Association Conference will consider a multiplicity of interpretations of “Literary Slipstreams,” a theme thriving in the present but involved with waking the past. As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, this theme invites participants to think about literature for children and young adults as a literature both of and in transition. Where has the field been? Where is it going? What are the patterns of critical inquiry in the field? How can Bruce Sterling’s use of the term slipstream to mean a “fiction of strangeness” and “a parody of mainstream” be applied to our understanding of children’s and young adult literature?

We suggest the topics below but, in the true spirit of slipstream, we welcome other paper and panel topics suggested by the conference theme.

• Revisions, re-versions, and retellings
• Adaptations
• Prequels and sequels
• Literary heirs and ancestors
• Fan fiction
• Narrative playfulness
• Changing the historical record
• Literary conventions
• Slipstreams of time and time travel
• Scholarly authorship as slipstream
• Hybridity (in all forms and contexts)
• Genre boundaries, genre bending, and genre crossings
• Parodies
• Irreverence in children’s literature
• Inscriptions and re-inscriptions
• Machinima
• Multimedia projects
• Books as moving objects
• Emerging scholars and scholarship

Send 300-500 word paper proposals to Conference Chairs at childrensliterature@simmons.edu. The submission window for proposals will be open from October 15, 2011 until January 15, 2012.

[The call for papers for this exciting conference was posted recently on the website of Beyond Little House, an amazing resource for Ingalls-Wilder-Lane studies.]

The National Laura Ingalls Wilder Legacy and Research Association Conference

Sponsored by the Laura Ingalls Wilder Legacy and Research Association and the Department of Mass Media at Minnesota State University, Mankato

We invite submissions of paper, panel, and workshop proposals for review and possible acceptance for presentation at the second LauraPalooza conference, to be held on the campus of MSU, Mankato, July 12-14, 2012.

The theme of this year’s conference reflects the continuing interest in the lives and stories of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, particularly as related to American culture, history, values, and ideological practice. Participants may consider asking themselves, “What Would Laura Do?”

Topics may include:

• The broad influence the stories have had on American popular culture in the last 75 years
• The history of the books and their cultural, educational, political, and social influences
• The renewed interest in women’s handwork as cultural artifacts of women’s history
• The preservation of American folk music ways
• The preservation of American food ways
• The strategic and political influence of farming and farming culture in American history
• The long-term ramifications of the 1862 Homestead Act on Western culture
• The ever-widening circle of Lane’s politically Libertarian belief structures
• Historical racism and its lasting effects
• New discoveries in individual research that add to the Lane and Wilder legacies
• Any other way you might interpret the legacies of Wilder and Lane.

Submit your proposal in the form of a 700- to 1,000-word abstract, outlining your idea and research, by midnight on December 15, 2011. All proposals should include a 200-word bio as would be appropriate for the conference program. Panel proposals should include bios for all panelists and his/her topic of discussion. Workshop proposals should include an outline of the workshop curriculum and materials needed.

We are also accepting proposals for presentations or programs for Camp Laura, an activity-based conference for elementary school children, running concurrently with Laurapalooza 2012. Please follow the same submission guidelines outlined above, but denote “Camp Laura” at the top of your abstract.

Be sure to include all contact information. Abstracts should be sent via email to amy.lauters@mnsu.edu, conference chair. Acceptance notifications will be sent out via email on the birthdate of Laura Ingalls Wilder: February 7. Those with accepted proposals will be expected to register for and attend the LauraPalooza 2012 conference. (Registration begins in February.)

[Find a PDF of the Call for Proposals here.]