Call for Papers

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS IS CLOSED.

LATE SUBMISSIONS WILL BE WAIT LISTED.

Our window for submissions closed on Friday, October 18th, 2024 at 11:59 EST.

If you would like to submit a late abstract, we will automatically wait list your paper and contact you if a spot opens up.

CALLING ALL LITERATURE & CULTURE ENTHUSIASTS

for the 52nd Annual Louisville Conference on Literature & Culture 

February 17-18 (Virtual) – 20-22 (In-Person), 2025

Featuring Keynote speakers - BEN LERNER, RACHEL KUSHNER, JAHAN RAMAZANI, and GEORGIE MEDINA MARCANO!

The Louisville Conference on Literature & Culture invites critical & creative papers and full panel discussions about literature from the 20th and 21st centuries. Applicants may submit papers that connect to other art forms and academic fields.

The conference also welcomes creative submissions, such as literary compositions, videos, or hybrid genres, as well as critical-creative submissions exploring poetics, crafts, or writing practices. We encourage proposals that bring together people from different universities or organizations, with varying levels of experience in academia, and from various fields of study.

Submissions are accepted in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Hebrew, and Italian. Panels involving global literature and culture in other languages are encouraged.

Confirmed LCLC52 events include The Hero Project of the Century: As iZ by Tyrone Williams (Aldon Nielsen, organizer) and The Function of Music in Poetry (Adeena Karasick and Mark Scroggins, organizers.) And so much more to come!

SUBMISSION PROCESS

The deadline for submissions is 11:59 P.M. EST on October 18th, 2024.

• Email submissions to lclc@louisville.edu

Please use the subject line exactly:

LCLC52 Submission, [presentation type] - [preference of Virtual or In-Person presentation]

• Example: LCLC52 Submission, Roundtable Session – Virtual
• LCLC52 Submission, Individual Creative – In-Person

Participants can submit up to two proposals, but only one proposal per category

Registrants may chair one or more panels

▶Individual Critical / Critical-Creative Submissions

Please send as 2 separate attachments

1. Cover sheet: Name as it is to appear in the program with any institutional affiliation, Paper Title, and a biographical statement (250 words).
2. Abstract: be sure to omit all references to the author and the author’s name (250-300 words).

▶Individual Creative Submissions

Please send as 2 separate attachments

1. Cover Sheet: Name as it is to appear in the program with any institutional affiliation, Title of Work Submitted, and a biographical statement (250 words).
2. Writing Sample: suitable for a 15-20 minute presentation.

▶Full Panels, Roundtables and Society Sessions (single panels or streams) Submissions:Sessions are to be designed for a 90-minute time slot. The organizer should submit the following documents:

Please send as 2 separate attachments

1. Cover Sheet: All names as they are to appear in the program with any institutional affiliation, and a biographical statement (250 words).  Please include the proposed session name. 
2. Depending on the subject of the submission please submit either:
   1. Abstract: be sure to omit all references to the author and the author’s name (250-300 words).
   2. Writing Sample: suitable for a 15-20 minute presentation.

SEMINARS

These 120-minute sessions typically feature informal conversation moderated by the seminar leader(s) on the topic and or activity. See below for the current line-up of the current LCLC52 seminars. All seminars will be conducted in-person. Each seminar has its own submission requirements, so please read each description carefully.

Translation Chapbook Workshop and Reading

Dr. Mark Mattes & Dr. Clare Sullivan

Participants will take part in a bookbinding workshop led by Dr. Mattes of Louisville-based Hot Brown Press and create chapbook anthologies of the participants' translations. All tools and materials will be provided. Then, in a subsequent panel, chapbook contributors will share their work and participate in a group discussion led by LCLC committee member Dr. Clare Sullivan. Participants should submit 1) Cover sheet and 2) Sample of original, unpublished translations into English from any language. Limit your selection to 150 words - excerpts are fine. Include the source text with your submission and a brief citation.

Poetry, Games, and Magic

Dr. Brandon Harwood & Dr. Robert Eric Shoemaker

This seminar explores the interplay between poetry, magic, and games. What similarities, practical and theoretical, may be drawn from these fields? How can the poetics of play, or the magic circle of the video game, inform our understanding and practice of each? What do today's multimedia games and poetries say about or to ancient rituals, sociocultural stratification, or morality and purity rules? What openings do we see in language and culture to bend rules in order to break open systems? Participants should submit 1) Cover sheet and 2) Abstract touching two of these fields: game studies, poetry/poetics, and the magical/occult.

Pandemic Studies

Martha Greenwald

Participants will pursue the imaginative structures, disputed narratives, cross-pollinating conspiracies, and contested knowledge used to make sense of COVID-19 as well as other past, contemporaneous, or future pandemics. As we accept that life now is increasingly lived with the COVID-19 virus as a normalized and never-ending event, narrative frameworks and perspectives of the pandemic experience have shifted. We seek surprising, ambitious, and provocative responses. Contributions that introduce fiction, poetry, and/or interdisciplinary examinations of pandemic studies including linguistics, art, anthropology, and history are welcome. Participants should submit 1) Cover sheet and 2) Abstract.

Disenchantment, Re-Enchantment, and Form in Fiction

Dr. Delmar Reffett

In this seminar, participants will discuss the complications and challenges presented to fiction of the 20th and 21st centuries by the phenomenon of disenchantment, that is, modernity’s transformation of meaning from an inherent part of the universe to a human construct placed upon the universe. Relatedly, discussions should consider how certain formal innovations and literary movements of this period can be understood as, in some sense, responses to this phenomenon. With its seeming removal of meaning from the wider world, disenchantment would appear particularly challenging to fiction, given its tendency to invest things and actions in the world with just such a meaning. For instance, can symbolism be relevant to a world where objects and places are not significant in themselves? Can something like plot still have resonance with readers when the events described are not seen as intrinsically meaningful? And how can we see the formal experimentations of individual authors and broader movements since the early 20th century as trying to answer these questions?

Participants should submit 1) a cover sheet, and 2) a 200-300 word abstract.

PANEL STREAM

American Afterlives

Dr. Mark Alan Mattes, Organizer

This panel stream is dedicated to crossing the pre-1900/post-1900 divide. Presentations will focus on ways of rethinking the chronologies by which we structure stories and studies about American literature and culture. Previous panels have focused on aesthetic experiments and traditions, remediations of early American texts, speculative and historical fiction, cultural histories of technology, and more.

Participants should submit 1) Cover sheet and 2) Abstract. Please indicate your interest in “American Afterlives” in your proposal and please indicate your preference for virtual or in-person participation.

PRICING

Please know that LCLC does not require separate membership fees as we are mindful of the financial challenges of conference travel and housing. We offer reduced registration rates for graduate students, contingent faculty, and independent scholars, and we offer both virtual and in-person options.

Deadline for early bird pricing is midnight January 31, 2025.

VENDORS and EXHIBITORS are welcome. Contact Emily Ravenscraft, Conference Coordinator at lclc@louisville.edu to learn how you can be a part of LCLC52.