click on link for call for the
Seventh International Conference on the State of Mark Twain Studies
One Man, Many Legacies
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American Literature Association
2013 National Convention
Boston, Westin Copley Hotel, May 26-29.
The AHSA plans to sponsor two sessions at the 2013 national meeting. We seek cogent, provocative, well-researched papers on the following subjects:
1. “Humor in Periodicals: From Punch to Mad”—Abstracts (300 words max.) are encouraged on the role of humorous literature in American periodicals from the early national period to the present. Subject adaptable to both humorous periodicals and humor in serious periodicals across a wide time range; thus, title will change to reflect composition of panel.
2. “Reading Humorous Texts”–Abstracts (300 words max.) are encouraged on the interpretation, recovery, or pedagogy of humorous texts from novels and poems to plays and stand-up. Some focus on the act of interpretation of humor in its historical, performative, formal, or other cultural context is encouraged.
Please e-mail abstracts no later than January 15, 2013 to Tracy Wuster (wustert@gmail.com) with the subject line: “AHSA session, 2013 ALA.” Notifications will go out no later than January 20, 2013.
*****
The Humor Studies Caucus of the American Studies Association is seeking papers for the 2012 ASA Conference:
American Studies Association Annual Meeting:
“Beyond the Logic of Debt, Toward an Ethics of Collective Dissent,”
November 21-24, 2013: Hilton Washington, DC
http://www.theasa.net/annual_meeting/page/submit_a_proposal/
Proposals on any aspect of American Humor will be welcome, including, but not limited to:
Stand-Up Comedy Jokes Wit Merriment
Literary Humor (both high- and low-brow) Richard Pryor
Film Satire Will Rogers
Comedy Jokes Risibility Sitcoms
Laughter
Mark Twain Dirty Jokes Lenny Bruce
Ventriloquism the Circus Marietta Holley
subtle humor broad humor
Margaret Cho regional humor
transnational humor ethnic humor
and even puns…
Proposals due by: January 11th
Panels will be assembled for submission by the January 26 deadline.
Proposals should be no more than 500 words and should include a brief CV (1 page). Please include current ASA membership status.
Proposals (and questions) should be sent to Tracy Wuster and Jennifer Hughes: wustert@gmail.com & jahughes@yhc.edu
***
3rd North East Texas Humor Research Conference (NETHRC) 2013
Humor in the Professions, Psychology, Pedagogy: Intercultural perspectives
http://www.tamuc.edu/humor
February 22-24, 2013 | Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas
Hosted by:
The Division of Communication Studies
SMU Meadows Schools of the Arts
The College of Humanities, Social Sciences & Arts
Texas A&M-Commerce
The 3rd North East Texas Humor Research Conference 2013 invites submissions for a multidisciplinary 3-day conference in Dallas, TX. The conference theme is “Humor in the Professions, Psychology, Pedagogy: Intercultural Perspectives.” While submissions on the theme are strongly encouraged, all submission in humor research are welcome. NETHRC 2013 will include an opening plenary roundtable and reception, paper sessions, panels, posters, and workshops.
Please submit:
* Abstract for general submission (up to 250 words; plus 1 extra page for images, references, etc.); indicate if paper (20m + Q/A) or poster or either.
* Panels of 3 papers (90 minutes)
* Workshops (90 minutes)
* Submission email: CHSSA@tamuc.edu
Important Dates:
* January 4, 2013: Submission deadline
* January 11, 2013: Notification of acceptance
* January 22, 2013: Preregistration deadline
* February 8, 2013: Deadline for special hotel rate
Conference Organizers:
Christian F. Hempelmann, Ph. D.
Department of Literature & Languages
Texas A&M-Commerce
Hall of Languages
Commerce, TX 75429
c.hempelmann@tamuc.edu
Owen Hanley Lynch, Ph. D.
Communication Studies
Meadows School of the Arts
Southern Methodist University
Umphrey Lee Building
Dallas, TX 75275
olynch@mail.smu.edu
Program Committee:
* Salvatore Attardo, Texas A&M-Commerce
* Sean Guillory, Dartmouth
* Christian F. Hempelmann, Texas A&M-Commerce
* Owen Hanley Lynch, SMU
* Lucy Pickering, Texas A&M-Commerce
* Jyotsna Vaid, Texas A&M-College Station
Conference Fee:
* $40 preregistration by January 22, 2013 ($50 on site)
* $20 for students (please provide proof of student status)
* Submission email: CHSSA@tamuc.edu
* Conference fee includes conference refreshments, Friday night reception, Saturday lunch, and Saturday dinner for students.
* Address for preregistration checks:
NETHRC 2013
College of Humanities, Social Sciences & Arts
P.O. Box 3011
Texas A&M University-Commerce
Commerce, TX 75429-3011
Accommodation:
* Holiday Inn Dallas Central – Park Cities
* 6070 North Expressway, Dallas, TX 75206
* (214) 750-6060
* $95/night if booked by February 8, 2013
* Group reservation code: Humor Conference
* Booking link: http://ichotelsgroup.com/redirect?path=rates&brandCode=HI&GPC=HUM&hotelCode=DFWHI&_PMID=99801505
* 0.8 mi from campus
* Hotel offers breakfast and a shuttle to the SMU campus.
* If you’re a student interested in sharing a room, please email: CHSSA@tamuc.edu.
* Closer and more expensive rooms are available at the Lumen: http://www.hotellumen.com/
Conference Venue:
Umphrey Lee Center, 3300 Dyer Street, SMU campus
***
Studies in American Humor is now considering essays for our spring 2013 issue. Deadline for submission November 30, 2012. Since this will be an open issue, submissions may be on an topic pertinent to American literary humor or the humor of American popular culture.
Our Fall Issue is a special issue dedicated to Kurt Vonnegut.
****
Call for Papers: Reimagining the American Dream
Panel discussions: Friday, April 5, 2013Keynote Speaker: Claire Jean Kim, Associate Professor, Political Science and Asian American Studies at the University of California – Irvine.The graduate students of the American Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin invite submissions for our 2013 Graduate Conference. We encourage submissions that relate to our theme, “Reimagining the American Dream.”In the early 20th century, historian James Truslow Adams wrote that the American Dream was “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller,” and yet time and again this promise of opportunity has fallen short: opportunity and prosperity are not demonstrably available to all, and yet this promise, this dream, continues to circulate in the personal and political imagination. After Adams’ early statements on the dream, there emerged a particular vision of dream-status in American postwar prosperity that was countered by global revolutionary and post-colonial movements. Yet the dream bore on into the cocaine-fueled 80s, only to be brought into question once more by a succession of bursting economic bubbles.Given its historical weight, we hope to interrogate and reimagine the American Dream through a series of conversations. To what extent is the American Dream a myth rather than a real possibility? Who has access to its promises? What are the limits of prosperity? How have people leveraged the dream myth? What does the “American Dream” even mean in the 21st century, as the country is in the midst of vast demographic and technological changes? If we have an American dream, what is the American nightmare, and how might American dreams and nightmares coexist or be mutually constitutive?We welcome both individual paper submissions and panel submissions on a wide range of topics related to the conference theme, including but not limited to the following:
§ Dreams and archetypes in American literature
§ Technological determinism and utopianism
§ The religious imagination and the future of the nation/world
§ American dystopias
§ Socioeonomic mobility and education
§ Historical and contemporary explorations of immigration to America
§ Psychoanalysis and the subconscious
§ Spaces real and imagined—historically, nostalgically, culturally, fictitiously or materially constructed
§ The DREAM Act
§ Dream Teams
§ Literary, filmic, artistic, or other representations of ideas pertaining to the American Dream
§ The position of “The American Dream” trope in political campaigns
§ Consumerism and advertising
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Call for Papers
AHSA at MLA 2013
Boston, 3-6 January 2013
“Laughing to Keep from Crying”
The American Humor Studies Association invites papers addressing the complex relationships between pain and humor. Theoretical submissions are encouraged so long as they are thoroughly grounded in primary texts or performances. Some possible questions to explore: How does humor function in regard to the painful topic? Does finding humor in a painful situation confer any sort of responsibility on the part of the humorist? Is it possible to go too far, and how do we draw those lines? Does laughter generated in this way make us part of a community of shared experience or mark our distance from it? Is it an act of hopelessness or aggression or a defense mechanism against these? Do we, as a Robert Heinlein character once asserted, “laugh . . . because it’s the only thing that will make it stop hurting?” Or is this a naïve perspective? Does explaining the joke, or delineating the pain behind it, spoil the joke or make it more powerful? Are there productive ways to avoid binaries when thinking about pain and humor?
250-500 word abstract by 15 March 2012
Sharon D. McCoy
sdmccoy@uga.edu
sdmccoy@bellsouth.net
Teaching the Humor of Race: (CFP–ASA)
Sponsored by the Humor Studies Caucus, this roundtable will explore the practices, possibilities, and pitfalls of the pedagogy of race and humor. Most, if not all, American humor contains some element of racial meaning—from the central question of black laughter in representations of both ante- and post-bellum America to the complicated intersections of racial categories in 21st century stand-up. Teaching about race through humor, and teaching the racial dimensions of humor, presents unique benefits and challenges.
For this roundtable, participants will present (in 8-10 minutes) a theoretical quandary, insight, question, or inquiry into the connection between humor and race in the classroom. Each presentation should be grounded in one main text—a novel, a stand-up performance, a movie or television show, a joke, a cartoon, etc. We are especially interested in pieces that connect the study of humor and race to other categories of analysis, such as gender, region, sexuality, religion, class, and especially (given the conference theme) nation, empire, and transnationalism.
If you are interested, please contact Tracy Wuster at wustert@gmail.com as soon as possible, but by January 13 at the latest. Provide a general idea of your subject and your current ASA membership status.
***
Postmodern Structures of Humor in America (CFP–ASA)
The Humor Studies Caucus is assembling a panel that explores the postmodern turn in comedy and humor. While scholars have considered at length the postmodern content of literature, art, history, drama, and other cultural areas, there is a space for considering how postmodernism has manifested in humor in our contemporary moment. As we can see from television shows like 30 Rock and Community, self-referential, intertextual, absurd narratives are increasingly common in television and film. This panel will not only explore how postmodernism has manifested in comedy, but also what this development suggests about American cultural and political life.
Potential topics include self-referential comedy shows, the “mockumentary” medium, the politics of televisual satire, shifting forms of media consumption evidenced by cable-cutting, the cultural role of the stand-up comedian, the blending of comedy and news, do-it-yourself web series and podcasts, transnational comparative studies of postmodern humor, absurdist fiction and theater. Ideally, the conversation will address humor as expressed in a variety of forms and through a variety of media.
Please send proposals and inquiries to Carrie Andersen at candersen@utexas.edu by January 8, 2011. Please also include current ASA membership status.
***
CALL FOR PAPERS
American Literature Association
23rd Annual Conference
May 24-27, 2012
San Francisco, CA
American Humor Studies Association
The AHSA hopes to sponsor two sessions at the 2012 national meeting. We seek cogent, provocative, well-researched papers on the following subjects:
1. “Humor, comedy, wit: what can these words mean now?” Abstracts (300 words max.) are encouraged which seek to refresh and clarify fundamental terminology in humor studies, or to shed light on the recent history of those terms.
2. “Humor as American Cultural Practice.” Abstracts (300 words max.) are encouraged on how the history of comic discourses can and should figure into broader constructions of literary, political, and cultural history.
Please e-mail abstracts no later than January 15, 2012 to Bruce Michelson (brucem@illinois.edu<mailto:brucem@illinois.edu> ) with the subject line: “AHSA session, 2012 ALA.” Notifications will go out no later than January 20, 2012.
***********************************************
The Humor Studies Caucus of the American Studies Association is seeking papers for the 2012 ASA Conference:
“Dimensions of Empire and Resistance:
Past, Present, and Future”
November 15-18, 2012: Puerto Rico Convention Center, San Juan, Puerto Rico
http://www.theasa.net/annual_meeting/page/submitting_a_proposal/
Proposals on any aspect of American Humor will be welcome, including, but not limited to:
Stand-Up Comedy
Jokes
Wit
Merriment
Literary Humor
(both high- and low-brow)
Richard Pryor
Film
Satire
Will Rogers
Comedy Jokes
Risibility
Sitcoms
Laughter
Mark Twain
Dirty Jokes
Lenny Bruce
Ventriloquism
the Circus
Marietta Holley
subtle humor
broad humor
Margaret Cho
regional humor
transnational humor
ethnic humor
and even puns…
Proposals due by: January 13th
Panels will be assembled for submission by the January 26 deadline.
Proposals should be no more than 500 words and should include a brief CV. Please include current ASA membership status.
Proposals should be sent to Tracy Wuster: wustert@gmail.com
***
Call for Papers
Mark Twain Circle Sessions
American Literature Association Conference
San Francisco, CA
May 24-27, 2012
The Mark Twain Circle of America invites proposals forconference sessions (80 minutes per session) or individual papers (15-20 minutes) for the 2012 ALA conference (San Francisco; May 24-27). The topics are entirely open, provided that they’re Twain-related. Send your proposal (abstract, 1-2 pages) to Jim Leonard by January 7, 2012, at the following address: jim.leonard@citadel.edu.
***
Call for Papers
Special Joint Session: Henry James and Mark Twain
American Literature Association Conference
San Francisco, CA
May 24-27, 2012
The Mark Twain Circle and the Henry James Society invite proposals for a conference session tentatively titled “Getting Real: Henry James and Mark Twain,” at the 2012 ALA conference (San Francisco; May24-27). Papers may focus on James-as-Realist, Twain-as-Realist, or both James and Twain; or they may address American Realism in general. Send your abstract (1-2 pages) to Jim Leonard by January 7, 2012, at the following address: jim.leonard@citadel.edu. John Carlos Rowe (johnrowe@usc.edu), 2012 President of the Henry James Society, will serve as contact person for the session on the Henry James side.
***
CFP: Mad Magazine at ALA 2012
I am organizing a special panel on Mad Magazine for the American Literature Association conference in San Francisco, May 24-27, 2012. I have two papers lined up, and can accept one or two more. So far, we have papers on the music of Mad and on Dave Berg’s satire. I am seeking proposals on any topic related to Mad Magazine, its humor, its cultural and historical importance, etc. Please send a proposal, a title, and your affiliation to me:
birdj@winthrop.edu
I am asking for a firm commitment to attend ALA, if our special session is selected.
***
ASA 2012!
The Humor Studies Caucus of the American Studies Association is gauging people’s interest in working on panels for ASA next year–November 15-18–in San Juan, Puerto Rico. CFP is pasted below.
In the past, we have sought individuals who wanted to propose individual panel topics, which allows/requires you to write a short CFP, choose papers, find a chair, write the abstract, and submit. In order to submit, you must be a current member of the ASA.
Once we have any individual panel ideas, we will send out both the specific CFPs and a general call.
Please let us know as soon as possible if you would like to propose a panel idea. Please contact Tracy Wuster at wustert@gmail.com
—–
Dimensions of Empire and Resistance: Past, Present, and Future
The Caribe Hilton Hotel, San Juan, Puerto Rico. The site of the 2012 conference calls on us to continue thinking deeply about the conceptual and methodological demands of a truly transnational American Studies. From Christopher Columbus’s second voyage in the late fifteenth century to the irony of an African American president’s state visit to Puerto Rico in the early twenty-first, the long history of this island and its peoples evokes many crucial themes regarding the transnational traffics generated by imperialism and anti-imperialism: indigeneity, conquest, and resistance; the administrative and juridical structures of empire; slavery and emancipation; migrations and diasporas; the mutually constitutive relationship between gender and sexuality on the one hand and imperial practice, subjugation, resistance, or citizenship on the other; the politics of inclusion and exclusion; militarism; local, national, and transnational feminisms; the footprints of corporate capitalism, from extraction to tourism; globalization and neoliberalism; the circuits of slavery and escape, political exile, and cultural production that link Puerto Rico with the larger Caribbean and the Americas; the travel and syncretism of circum-Atlantic arts and musics; the aesthetic traditions of a transnational imaginary; drug traffic; environmental degradation; appalling inequities and the endurance of genius and spirit. Equally important for a transnational American Studies is Puerto Rico’s unique relationship to the United States. From the perverse imperial logic of the Insular Cases, whereby the Supreme Court could define Puerto Rico as “foreign in a domestic sense” — that is, somehow “in” the United States but not “of” it — to Sonia Sotomayor’s ascendance to that very bench (amid dissenting characterizations of her as perhaps more “foreign” than “domestic”) a century later, the history of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans sheds a very particular light on the ongoing contradictions of the United States: the limits of U.S. citizenship, the displacements stimulated by neoliberal capitalism, the culture and politics of migration and diaspora. Finally, the simultaneously local and transnational specificities of Puerto Rican history and culture — from the Taíno revival movement to the Young Lords and the Nuyorican Poets Café, from bomba and plena to Salsa and Reggaeton, from the island’s rich journalistic tradition to the alternative political movements of squatters, students, and anti-military activists — remind us that a transnational American studies must also be a truly interdisciplinary inquiry into how the material and symbolic are imbricated, how “culture” encompasses the imaginary and the everyday, how big political events and ideologies, are lived in intensely translocal ways.
Dimensions of Empire and Resistance. Since the publication of Donald Pease and Amy Kaplan’s Cultures of United States Imperialism in 1994, empire has come to hold a central place in American Studies scholarship, resulting in a rich and varied literature devoted to the topic in direct, unblinking, and sophisticated ways. The current call goes out to the many scholars working on US empire and its “others,” to be sure, whether focusing on Manifest Destiny, the Philippines, Vietnam, or the Middle East, for instance. But by the word dimensions we also seek to broaden the conversation significantly, to set the Hilton Hotel alongside the Baghdad Green Zone, so to say — to consider the vast spectrum of political and cultural practices running from colonial administration and military occupation; to tourism; to the history of sugar or rum or baseball; to the power dynamics either fostered or legitimated by educational practices and institutions — in places like Puerto Rico, for instance — or by “knowledge” and the disciplines themselves; to the quotidian imperialist slanders carried in US popular culture — and equally, the constant articulations of dissent; to metaphorical usages, like “media empire,” which are nonetheless embedded in histories of empire proper; to the transnational logic of a canonical “national treasure” like Moby-Dick; to the thick traces of the imperial past and the anti-imperialist present in a text like Empire of Dreams, by Puerto Rican poet Giannina Braschi.
Past, Present, and Future. Although “past” in this context is likely to concentrate the mind on the “splendid little war” of 1898 or on the cartography of US interventionism across ensuing generations, here we also mean to invoke the deep past and its most enduring trajectories, beginning with “encounter” and with conquests now many centuries distant. If European exploration and conquest continue to cast a long shadow across the lands currently under the purview of American Studies, so was the struggle among contending empires a crucible for the political culture of what eventually became the United States. It is one of the great intellectual losses to American Studies in recent years that so many specialists in the colonial and early national periods have withdrawn, as the field itself has gravitated toward the more recent past and the present. The ASA ought to be a natural locus for the rich conversation among specialists in many periods and many social science and humanities disciplines around conceptions like the “extended Caribbean,” or reckoning the stakes of “the global South” for the study of the United States. We seek to re-engage the insight and energy of early Americanists across the disciplines. A high value will be placed on papers and sessions that touch upon aspects of pre-1865 history and culture, panels that span different periods in thematic or comparative perspective, and panels that challenge standard categories of periodization — colonial, early national, antebellum — in the light of a truly transnational perspective.
In recent years, “empire” has become an increasingly complicated word in the US political lexicon — openly and quite positively embraced in some quarters in the early years of the Iraq War, and now increasingly discussed — also openly, even amid ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya — as something that is quite evidently at its end, as in “the fall of the American empire” or “the end of the American Century.” Even Time magazine recently announced on its cover, “Yes, America Is in Decline.” Both meanings seem to be integrally embedded within and conveyed by a text like The Wire, for instance, and there is much to explore here from an interdisciplinary perspective. By “present and future,” then, we mean to provoke discussion of these complexities as they affect the peoples both within and without the United States. The behaviors of neoliberal states are crucial here — the shift, as Phillip Bobbitt puts it, from the “nation-state” to the “market-state” — as are the ways in which the corporation has displaced the state as the most significant aggregation of power in many hemispheric or regional contests and has displaced the citizen in many local ones. These developments, though traceable to the longer trajectories of “empire,” have begun to unite the working people of Michigan and Wisconsin with the working people of San Juan in new and unforeseen ways. The Caribbean vantage point of the 2012 conference is also a compelling invitation to rethink or reinterpret the United States’ geopolitical strategies and discourses, both historically and in the future, and to reckon with artistic and literary work that has been devoted to reimagining the boundaries of utopianism and futurity.
***
The topic is open, and we welcome papers on any aspect of Kurt Vonnegut’s life, work, and legacy. Presenters may focus on a particular text or cover a range of Vonnegut’s writings. We are always interested in papers that look at ways of teaching Vonnegut, and we encourage participation from graduate students, independent scholars, emerging critics, and interdisciplinary researchers. Of course, we also welcome contributions from experienced Vonnegut scholars and literary critics. Please address queries to Robert Tally at robert.tally@txstate.edu.
In addition to this open topic panel, the Kurt Vonnegut Society will host a roundtable on Charles Shields’s new biography, And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut, A Life. The roundtable will feature Charles Shields himself, along with a number of current Vonnegut scholars to be announced later.
Also, whether you plan to participate in or attend either the panel or the roundtable, please join members of the Society at our annual “Timequake Clambake,” a pay-as-you-go dinner-and-drink event (details to be determined).
*** Ted Gournelos, editor of the essay collection, A Decade of Dark Humor, is looking for people to review the book for a number of possible publications. If you are interested, please contact Ted at: tgournelos@rollins.edu The book looks excellent. http://www.upress.state.ms.us/books/1391
***
ASA!
One time only….
Such an assembly of scholarship is only seen
ONCE PER YEAR!
Featuring:
Panels on HUMOR
Sponsored by
The Humor Studies Caucus
HUMOR AS REPARATION AND REPRESENTATION
Schedule Information:
Scheduled Time: Sat, Oct 22
10:00am – 11:45am
Building/Room: Hilton
Baltimore, Key Ballroom 09
Session Participants:
Chair: Leah Dilworth (Long Island University, Brooklyn (NY))
Against All Odds: Imagination, Transformation, and Humor after the
Dred Scott Decision
Ellen J. Goldner (City University of New York, College of Staten
Island (NY))
Stop Addressing Us as ‘Sir’: Women, Imagination, and the Humor of the
World Wars
Scott Hamilton Suter (Bridgewater College (VA))
Supreme Laughter: The Reparative Function of Laughter in the American
Courtroom
Fran McDonald (Duke University (NC))
Comment: Thomas Ferraro (Duke University (NC))
*****
ETHNIC HUMOR: PLEASURES AND PROBLEMS
Scheduled Time: Sun, Oct 23
10:00am – 11:45am
Building/Room: Hilton
Baltimore / Key Ballroom 10
Participants:
Chair: Holger Kersten (Otto-von-Guericke University of Magdeburg,
Germany)
Claiming an Asian American Comedic Tradition: The Case of Harold &
Kumar Go to White Castle
Caroline Kyungah Hong (City University of New York, Queens College
(NY))
Listening to Change: Radio, Humor, and the Future of Cuban Miami
Albert Sergio Laguna (Columbia College (IL))
Beyond a Cutout World: Ethnic Humor and Discursive Integration in
South Park
Nick Marx (University of Wisconsin, Madison (WI)), Matt Sienkiewicz
(University of Wisconsin, Madison (WI))
Comment: Holger Kersten (Otto-von-Guericke University of Magdeburg,
Germany)
*************************************
CALL FOR PAPERS
Modern Language Association Annual Convention
Boston, 3-6 January 2013
“Laughing to Keep from Crying”
The American Humor Studies Association invites papers addressing the complex relationships between pain and humor. Theoretical submissions are encouraged so long as they are thoroughly grounded in primary texts or performances.
Some possible questions to explore: How does humor function in regard to the painful topic? Does finding humor in a painful situation confer any sort of responsibility on the part of the humorist? Is it possible to go too far, and how do we draw those lines? Does laughter generated in this way make us part of a community of shared experience or mark our distance from it? Is it an act of hopelessness or aggression or a defense mechanism against these? Do we, as a Robert Heinlein character once asserted, “laugh . . . because it’s the only thing that will make it stop hurting?” Or is this a naïve perspective? Does explaining the joke, or delineating the pain behind it, spoil the joke or make it more powerful? Are there productive ways to avoid binaries when thinking about pain and humor?
250-500 word abstract by 15 March 2012
Sharon D. McCoy
sdmccoy@uga.edu
sdmccoy@bellsouth.net
posted 29 September 2012
************************************
If you’re going to be at the Modern Language Association Meeting this year, please join us at the American Humor Studies Association panel:
MLA 2012, Seattle
January 5-8, 2012
177. “Satire’s Double-Edged Irony: Self-Satire and the Control of the Satirical Object”
Friday, January 6, 8:30–9:45 a.m.
304, Washington State Convention Center
Program arranged by the American Humor Studies Association
Presiding: Sharon D. McCoy, Univ. of Georgia
1. “‘The National Joker’ and the ‘Stealing Back and Forth of Symbols,’”
Todd Nathan Thompson, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
2. “The Cubies’ ABC and the Modernist Debt to Antimodernist Satire,”
Eric Rettberg, University of Virginia
3. “Marianne Moore’s Empathetic Satires,”
Rachel V. Trousdale, Agnes Scott College
posted 29 September 2011
*************************************
February at the Red Lion Inn (Stockbridge Mass.)
The Weekend before Valentines Day
The AHSA is considering throwing a “For Publication” mini-conference at the Red Lion Inn. we would invite the Mark Twain Circle also. The Red Lion is the grand-daddy of New England Inns, but with gorgeous up-dated rooms and an outdoor all-year round hot-tub. This is Norman Rockwell and ski country, also.
The conference would be for Thursday Friday Saturday of February (9th-11th). Everyone coming would have a place on the program as chair/responder or presenter and the sole object of the mini-conference would be to help advance publication plans for books and articles by advice from other scholars. Presenters could bring questions, pages, chapters, or anything else and receiveprofessional feedback.
Sessions would be held from 9 to noon to allow for skiing and wintering in the Berkshires. Room rates would be around $159 plus tax for rooms that usually go in the high $200-350 range. Registration $25.
Would people who are interested or willing to commit relatively soon please email Dave Sloane at dsloane@newhaven.edu at once so that we can tell if we have enough positive interest to go to stage 2 planning. Thanks everyone.
Posted 9/20/11
***********************
Title: Vonnegut and Humor: special issue of *Studies in American
Humor* (proposals due Nov. 1, 2011)
Date: 2011-11-01
Description: Vonnegut and Humor: special issue of *Studies in
American Humor* (proposals due Nov. 1, 2011) 2011 may well be
called The Year of Kurt Vonnegut. In April the Library of
America issued a volume including his novels from 1963 to 1973,
effectively canonizing Vonnegut. A school board of Republic,
Missou …
Contact: robert.tally@txstate.edu
Announcement ID: 187889
http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=187889
Posted 9/20/11
*****************
Posted 9/20/11
***********
CFP: Humour and the Fantastic
Humour has been a recognisable part of literature ever since antiquity. The ‘Homeric laughter’ has become proverbial and Lucian dazzled the readers of his Vera Historia with a firework of comic (and absurd) ideas. Nevertheless, the co-existence or even symbiosis of humorous and fantastic elements is the exception rather than the rule. Lucian’s work points the way for most of the later instances, and we find elements of the fantastic and the humorous co-existing most often in texts that show a self-reflexive genre awareness; in consequence the ‘funny’ fantastic results from parodistic exaggeration of certain traits.
Non-parodistic fantastic literature is, at least in the Western tradition, mostly free of humour. A cursory glance at the ‘canon’ of the fantastic affirms this impression, though we can also note attempts at combining the Gothic with the humorous, as in Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost(1887), or the absurd (as another category of the humorous) with the fantastic, as in Nicolai Gogol’s The Nose (1835), or the fantastique with the French humour tinged with bitter irony, as in Honoré de Balzac’s L’Élixir de longue vie (1846) or Gérard de Nerval’s Le Monstre vert (1852). It is only at the end of the 20th century that the subcategory of ‘the humorous fantasy’ makes an appearance, most notably in the works of Terry Pratchett and his highly successful parodies of the genre.
Fastitocalon is pleased to solicit proposals for papers for its third volume, which explore the relationship between Humour and the Fantastic. Contributions may focus on individual works or protagonists, discuss the historical development and transformations, or explore the literary-theoretical aspects connected with these aspects. Even though the language of publication is English, we would like to encourage the contributors to include works in other languages in their discussion of the phenomenon.
Deadline for abstracts (issue 1): 30 November 2011
Deadline for full papers (issue 1): 29 February 2012
Deadline for abstracts (issue 2): 31 January 2012
Deadline for full papers (issue 2): 30 June 2012
Fastitocalon is a peer-reviewed journal. Abstracts and/or full papers submitted will be reviewed by the editors and members of the board of advisors.
Abstracts (c. 600 words or 3,000 characters) or full papers (up to c. 8,000 words or 40,000 characters), together with a brief biographical sketch, are to be sent to either of the following addresses:
Prof. Dr. Fanfan Chen
Email: ffchen@mail.ndhu.edu.tw / chenfantasticism@gmail.com
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Call for Papers, Hawthorne’s Humor
A special issue of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review is being planned on Hawthorne’s humor, to be published in fall, 2013. Essays (no longer than 9,000 words, WORD doc files) are invited for consideration on the following topics, although the list is not meant to be exhaustive:
1) Hawthorne’s humor compared to that of other nineteenth-century writers (e.g., Irving, Poe, Fanny Fern, Twain)
2) Hawthorne’s self-deprecating humor, especially of his work (in his introductions to his fiction; his notebooks; his letters)
3) Humor in his children’s stories; humorous depictions of his own children.
4) Hawthorne’s dark, macabre, or acerbic humor; Hawthorne’s Gothic humor
5) Hawthorne’s comic characters; Hawthorne’s caricatures
6) Hawthorne’s romance theory and comic excursions enacting that theory
7) Hawthorne’s philosophy of life and humor
8) Hawthorne’s injection of humor in his formulation of Puritan history
9) Hawthorne’s sketches and the humor of the everyday
10) Hawthorne’s humorous assessments of European life during his travels abroad
11) Hawthorne’s theory of writing (or his attacks on the marketplace) and humor
12) Hawthorne’s humor and its relationship to psychoanalytic, philosophical, and aesthetic theories of humor
13) Hawthorne’s humor and its relationship to nineteenth-century gender roles
14) Parodies and uses of Hawthorne and his works in comic strips, cartoons, and graphic narratives and how they reflect on his reputation as a great American author
Deadline for submission of completed papers is Nov. 15, 2012. Deadline for final revised submissions (of accepted essays) is April 30, 2013. Queries are welcome. Send essays to the guest editor, Prof. M. Thomas Inge at tinge@rmc.edu and to Prof. Monika Elbert, Editor of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, atelbertm@mail.montclair.edu
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MARK TWAIN’S HANNIBAL: The Clemens Conference
August 11-13, 2011
The Mark Twain Museum in Hannibal, Missouri, announces its first Mark Twain Conference to be held in Hannibal August 11-13.
Details and a registration form are on the Museum’s web site at
http://www.marktwainmuseum.org/index.php/conference
Make plans now to attend this inspiring and educational three days experience in Hannibal, Missouri – inspiration for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and many other episodes in Mark Twain’s writings.
Henry Sweets, Curator
Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum
henry.sweets@marktwainmuseum.org
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AHSA at the Modern Language Association
Seattle, WA January 5-8, 2012
Satire’s Double-Edged Irony
The American Humor Studies Association is seeking papers that explore the often ambiguous nature of satire’s object, the lines that blur between satire and celebration, and the difficulty of predicting or controlling audience response.
Recent studies, such as “The Irony of Satire,” suggest that perception of satire’s object often rests in the reader’s or viewer’s own biases. This panel is interested in exploring the implications of this ambiguity in the production, deployment, and teaching of satire. How does this affect satire’s admittedly subversive purpose? Is this satire’s power, its limitation, or both?
250-word abstract by 15 March 2011 to Sharon D. McCoy at sdmccoy@uga.edu
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AHSA at the Rocky Mountain MLA
Scottsdale, AZ October 6-8, 2011
Abstracts are being solicited for a panel on American Humor for the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Assn. meeting in Scottsdale, AZ, October 6-8, 2011. Any area of American humor studies is welcome, including teaching American humor in the college classroom. Please submit any questions or your abstractsby March 1 to Dr. Judy Sneller, SD School of Mines & Technology at jsneller@sdsmt.edu. Applicants will be advised within 3 weeks of acceptance status. Additional information can be found at the RMMLA website: http://rmmla.wsu.edu/call/.
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AHSA Call for Papers
American Literature Association Conference
Boston, MA May 26-29, 2011
Session 1: Exploring distinctions between wit and humor. Admittedly some of the distinctions between and definitions of humor and wit are often less than helpful. AHSA invites papers that look at “historical” definitions, attempt to create and sustain new distinctions, or demonstrate shifts in how humor scholars think about and negotiate humor and wit. Email abstracts (250 words) to Bruce Michelson by1/10/2011.
Session 2: Humoring Genre. From classic films such as Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein to more modern examples like Scream and Scary Movie, humor has been used as commentary on various genres. AHSA invites papers concerning film, literature, or other media that use pastiche to comment on genre conventions. Abstracts of 250 words should be sent to Jan McIntire-Strasburg by January 10, 2011.
