CFP Studies in American Humor – Special Issue on Native American Humor
In Custer Died for Your Sins, Vine Deloria stated that, “One of the best ways to understand a people is to know what makes them laugh. Laughter encompasses the limits of the soul. In humor life is redefined and accepted. Irony and satire provide much keener insights into a group’s collective psyche and values than do years of research.” In a North American context, the notion of cultural exchange and understanding through humor appears somewhat unilateral in that settler forms of humor often erase indigenous existence and refuse native sovereignty. At the same time, indigenous forms of humor often expose and critique the oppressive, colonialist logic of this humor as acts of sovereignty reclaiming power over (self-)representations.
Thus, rather than viewing humor as mere entertainment, this special issue seeks to examine the complex ways in which humor critiques, interacts with, and produces power; functions as a means of oppression or subversion; destabilizes a dominant narrative or gives rise to a counter-narrative; or behaves differently when performed in a sacred or profane text. Some of the questions to consider are: What is the purpose and function of humor and laughter? How is Native American humor culturally specific? How does Native American humor inform or perform identity? How is Native American humor communicated and what is lost in translation? How can humor be oppressive or subversive? By what means is humor produced? What different effects might different forms (visual, verbal, oral, written, musical etc.) of humor produce?
To open up possibilities for interdisciplinary discussion, the editors welcome research from a variety of fields, including but not limited to literature, religion, philosophy, law, political science, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, history, archeology, museology, gender/queer studies, popular culture, art and media studies. Please note that our journal’s charge is the study of humor, so any disciplinary investigation must also include an emphasis on humor. We are also open to proposals for original creative works of Native American humor.
We invite proposals that address Native American humor through one or more of these topics:
* Language/rhetoric of humor * Satire, sarcasm, and irony
* Humor as weapon, critique, and/or healing * Tricksters
* Formal representations: * Performance: stand-up;
visual art; literature; theater; music sketch comedy
* Popular culture: cartoons; new media * Humor in/and politics
* Humor in/and society and/or social movements * Tragedy and trauma; the tragicomic
* Humor and sexuality * Laughter v. the lack of humor
* Hollywood misrepresentations and
other cultural stereotypes
Please submit proposals (500-1000 words) to StudiesinAmericanHumor@roosevelt.edu no later than March 1, 2019. Those whose proposals are selected will submit essays (6000-8000 words) by September 1, 2019. Please direct any questions to Marianne Kongerslev, guest co-editor (kongerslev@cgs.aau.dk) or Larry Howe, co-editor (lhowe@roosevelt.edu).
AMERICAN HUMOR STUDIES ASSOCIATION
Call for Abstracts for ALA 2018
Panel 1:
The American Humor Studies Association seeks abstracts for a session titled “Dirty Words: Profanity, Power, and American Humor” for the American Literature Association annual conference in San Francisco, May 24-27, 2018.
AHSA welcomes submissions that explore any facet of profanity as a rhetorical force in American humor. Abstracts may propose focused analyses of specific texts from any time frame or medium as well as theoretical considerations of profanity as tied to literary, linguistic, and/or comedic form and structure. Potential participants should feel free to blur distinctions between literary humor and popular culture as they examine the power of profanity to subvert normal structures and expectations.
Please email a brief CV and 300-word abstract (and please indicate any audio/visual needs) by 08 January 2018 to Jeffrey Melton (jmelton@ua.edu) using “Dirty Words Panel” as the subject line. All panelists will need to be current members of AHSA.
Panel 2:
The American Humor Studies Association seeks abstracts for an Open-Topic session for the American Literature Association annual conference in San Francisco, May 24-27, 2018.
AHSA encourages submissions on any topic related to American humor for this session.
Please email a brief CV and 300-word abstract (and please indicate any audio/visual needs) by 08 January 2018 to Jeffrey Melton (jmelton@ua.edu) using “Open Topic Panel” as the subject line. All panelists will need to be current members of AHSA.
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You may apply for both our ALA panels and our quadrennial conference (next notice). If you apply for ALA and your paper does not fit, then you are more than welcome to submit that paper to the CFP for Chicago. If you have any questions, please let us know.
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Humor in America 2018
Call for Participants
Sponsored by:
American Humor Studies Association
Mark Twain Circle of America
Website: https://humorinamericaconference.wordpress.com
“Humor in America” will be held on the campus Roosevelt University in downtown Chicago from July 12-15. The conference will feature paper panels and roundtables on all aspects of American humor and/or any subject related to Mark Twain.
Please send proposals to americanhumor2018@gmail.com by February 1, 2018. Notifications will be sent by March 1. Please feel free to contact the conference organizers, Tracy Wuster, Larry Howe, and Pete Kunze, with any questions at americanhumor2018@gmail.com.
PAPERS:
Proposals for paper presentations of 15-18 minutes should consist of a 250-word proposal and A/V requests.
PANELS:
Proposals for organized panels of 15-18 minute papers moderated by a chair should include individual 250-word proposals, an overview of 100 words, a proposed Chair (not required), ad A/V requests.
ROUNDTABLES:
Each roundtable participant will speak for 7-9 minutes on a topic related to the larger theme (see below). Participants may present both a paper and participate in a roundtable, should space allow. If you wish to participate only in a roundtable, please indicate with your submission. Please submit a title and 100-word abstract if interested by February 1, 2018.
Roundtable topics:
–Theory, Methodology, and Practice of Humor Studies: New Directions
–MT and Graphic Humor: Icon and Caricature
–Gender and Humor: Can Men be Funny?
–Race, Ethnicity, and the Study of Humor
–Mark Twain and Today’s satirists: Colbert, Bee, and Oliver
–The Publics of Political Humor and Satire
–Violence in the humor of Mark Twain
–Humor, Comedy, and Historiography
We welcome proposals for paper presentations and panels on any topic related to American humor and/or Mark Twain, broadly conceived. Scholars across the humanities are invited to present research on any of the following topics (or others related to humor, comedy, laughter, etc., etc.):
- literary humor (including but not limited to Chesnutt, Fanny Fern, Parker, Faulkner, Melville, Vonnegut, Ellison, Morrison, Kingston, Beatty, Ephron, Sedaris, etc.)
- humor and gender, race, sexuality, class, religion
- stand-up comedy, sketch comedy, and other humorous performances
- radio comedy, television, and film comedy
- visual humor, comics, and graphic narratives
- podcasts, internet humor, memes, and other new media
- satire, ridicule, parody, and other forms of humor
- humor in “serious” contexts or works
- humor in regional, national, transnational, international, and other spatial contexts
- All topics related to Mark Twain (especially the following topics: Mark Twain language play, MT and Political humor, MT and stand-up, MT a and gendered humor, Laughter and the Color Line: Huckleberry Finn and Pudd’nhead Wilson, The Fantastic and The Comic in MT, The Comic Rhetoric of MT’s Speeches and/or Interviews)
We especially welcome proposals from scholars of color, junior scholars, and independent scholars. Graduate students attending the conference will be eligible for “Constance Rourke Travel Grants” to assist with travel funds. We highly encourage scholars to contribute to this fund. See the conference website for more information.
Attendees must be (or become) a member of the American Humor Studies Association or the Mark Twain Circle of America. Presenters will be highly encouraged to submit article-length versions of their work for possible publication in Studies in American Humor, a peer-reviewed journal published by the American Humor Studies Association since 1974 and in conjunction with the Penn State University Press since 2015. Presenters on Mark Twain will be encouraged to submit article-length versions to the Mark Twain Annual, published by Penn State University Press.
The conference registration fee will be $40 for graduate students, adjunct faculty, and independent scholars, and $75 for tenure-track faculty members.
American Humor Studies Association
CFP for MLA 2018
The American Humor Studies Association is soliciting proposals for its panel, “Humor and Satire in Online Formats/ on Social Media.” Abstracts of no more than 500 words on comic artfulness in digital formats—e.g. YouTube, streaming services, podcasts, Facebook, Twitter. How do these formats enable and constrain humor and satire (e.g. Funny or Die, Ask a Slave, parodic Trump Tweets) in what amounts to a digital public sphere? Send proposals to Jim Caron (caron@hawaii.edu) no later than March 15th.
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Conference: 2017 AATH Annual Conference – Call for Research Posters
The Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor is the recognized authority and the primary membership organization for people with a common interest in applied humor and laughter. Its mission is to serve as the community of professionals who study, practice, and promote healthy humor and laughter.
We encourage all those who submit proposals to attend the April 27-30, 2017 conference in Orlando to exchange ideas, answer questions and create new connections; however, only submissions by researchers able to attend, in person, will be considered. Conference registration is required and is the responsibility of the researcher. There will be 4-5 presenters awarded.
If interested, please follow the link below and fill out the brief online form on or before Friday November 11, 2016 at 11:59 PM EDT
Through our generous scholarship donors, AATH is able to offer FIFTEEN SCHOLARSHIPS* to the 2017 conference that cover registration fees….
Sholarships are for Conference Registration or Humor Academy Registration Fee. Recipient is responsible for any additional membership fees, travel to the conference, and conference hotel stay.
To apply for a scholarship,
click HERE.
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Once again I am organizing a special session on Mark Twain at the annual So=
uth Central Modern Language Association (SCMLA) Conference, Oct. 5-8, 2017.=
The theme for the conference is ?”Moving Words: Migrations, Translations,=
and Transformations” and will be held in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at The Renaissan=
ce Tulsa. I am organizing this special session because the SCMLA has no re=
gular session on Mark Twain and I hope to ultimately establish a regular pa=
nel. Please submit abstracts to me by February 28, 2017. The panel description follows:
Mark Twain’s Moving Words: The Travels, Texts, and Talks of the Authentic =
American Author
Mark Twain’s career as a writer and speaker embodies this conference’s them=
e of “Moving Words: Migrations, Translations, and Transformations.” Beginn=
ing his career as a travel writer, he shared his adventures with the world.=
As he developed as an author and gained notoriety, Twain transformed the A=
merican style of writing to one that reflects the uniquely American experie=
nce. Finally, through his lectures and travels across America and Europe, =
he translated the American experience to the world, thus providing an inter=
pretation of what it was and is to be an American. This panel encourages p=
apers on the various aspects of his career as a writer and lecturer.
Carolyn Leutzinger Richey
Tarleton State University
Department of English and Languages
Richey@Tarleton.edu
254-968-9511
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Conference: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Stand-Up Comedy
April 5-8, 2017
This conference aims to bring together scholars and practitioners interested in stand-up comedy from a range of academic disciplines, including but not limited to philosophy, performance studies, women’s and gender studies, African-American studies, theatre, art history, and culture studies.
In addition to academic papers, panels, comments, and discussion, the conference also includes workshops, an open mic night, roundtable discussion with comedians, and stand-up comedy performances.
Sponsored by Bucknell University and the American Society for Aesthetics.
Conference registration will open on Dec. 10, 2016 and close on March 10, 2017.
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Call for Papers for the 2016 SAMLA Convention, November 4-6, Jacksonville, FL. See SAMLA.org. for more convention information.
IS THIS DYSTOPIA OR UTOPIA? HUMOR PERFORMANCE AS SOCIETAL REFLECTION
AMERICAN HUMOR STUDIES ASSOCIATION
Humor, whether in an historical realm (satirists and court jesters) or in a modern sense, has always held up the mirror to society. The American Humor Studies Association panel for the 2016 SAMLA Conference welcomes papers about any aspect of humor performance (stand up, essay, fiction, film, television, or other) as it pertains to society. Paper proposals addressing the SAMLA theme are especially welcome. By June 3, 2016, please submit a 300-word abstract, brief bio, and A/V requirements to Todd Thomas, American Humor Studies Association, at tthomas@gmc.edu.
CFPs for AHSA sessions at ALA 2017.
I propose three panels: 1) Dirty Words: Profanity, Power, and American Humor; 2) Open Topic; and 3) Humor and Travel (in collaboration with the Society for American Travel Writing).
1) The American Humor Studies Association seeks abstracts for a session titled “Dirty Words: Profanity, Power, and American Humor” for the American Literature Association annual conference in Boston, Massachusetts, May 25-28, 2017.
AHSA welcomes submissions that explore any facet of profanity as a rhetorical force in American humor. Abstracts may propose focused analyses of specific texts from any time frame or medium as well as theoretical considerations of profanity as tied to literary, linguistic, and/or comedic form and structure. Potential participants should feel free to blur distinctions between literary humor and popular culture as they examine the power of profanity to subvert normal structures and expectations.
Please email a brief CV and 300-word abstract (and please indicate any audio/visual needs) by 10 January 2017 to Jeffrey Melton (jmelton@ua.edu) using “Dirty Words Panel” as the subject line. All panelists will need to be current members of AHSA.
2) The American Humor Studies Association seeks abstracts for an open-topic session for the American Literature Association annual conference in Boston, Massachusetts, May 25-28, 2017.
AHSA encourages submissions on any topic related to American humor for this session.
Please email a brief CV and 300-word abstract (and please indicate any audio/visual needs) by 10 January 2017 to Jeffrey Melton (jmelton@ua.edu) using “Open Topic Panel” as the subject line. All panelists will need to be current members of AHSA.
3) “I just flew in from Miami Beach, and, boy, are my arms tired.”
The American Humor Studies Association and The Society for the Study of American Travel Writing seek abstracts for a collaborative session on “Humor and Travel” for the American Literature Association annual conference in Boston, Massachusetts, May 25-28, 2017.
We welcome papers focusing on individual authors/travelers from any time period as well as conceptual or theoretical discussions that consider the intersections between travel experiences and expressions of humor.
Proposals might consider the following questions:
How do the often destabilizing effects of travel elicit humor as a response?
How are travel or tourism targets of humor?
What are the rhetorical effects of humor on telling the travel story?
Please email a brief CV and 300-word abstract (and please indicate any audio/visual needs) by 15 December 2016 to Jeffrey Melton (jmelton@ua.edu) or Susan Roberson (susan.roberson@tamuk.edu) using “Humor and Travel” as the subject line. Scholars of American humor, American travel writing and practicing travel writers are particularly encouraged to submit proposals. All panelists will need to be current members of AHSA or SSATW.
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CFP: Mark Twain at ALA 2017
The Mark Twain Circle of America will sponsor two panels at the annual American Literature Association conference, which will be held 25-28 May 2017, at Boston’s Westin Copley Place Hotel. Please send a one-page abstract to Circle president Kerry Driscoll ( kdriscoll@usj.edu) on or before 7 January 2017.
*Panel 1. Mark Twain and Immigration*
Papers are invited examining Twain’s representation of national and
cultural borders (as well as more abstract conceptual boundaries) and the various individuals crossing them–from Chinese immigrants in the Western U.S. and the Quaker City in Palestine to the dynamic of ethnic imposture.
*Panel 2. Open Topic: New Directions in Mark Twain Studies*
Papers are invited on any aspect of Twain’s work and legacy.
The Mark Twain Circle of America is organizing a session for SAMLA 2016, November 4-6, 2016, in Jacksonville Florida. The session is entitled “Mark Twain in Heaven and Hell.” This panel welcomes papers that deal with Mark Twain’s life and/or work as it relates to the idea of heaven and hell, drawing on the biography, the autobiography, his fiction, or his nonfiction. By May 30, 2016, please send a 250-word proposal, brief bio, and A/V requirements to John Bird, Winthrop University, at birdj@winthrop.edu.
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CFP: MLA 2017 (deadline past)
The American Humor Studies Association is seeking papers on any aspect of humor studies for the 2017 MLA convention in Philadelphia. Special consideration will be given to papers that connect to the conference theme (see below). Send 250 word abstract and CV to Tracy Wuster by March 27. Participants will need to become MLA members by April 7. Please write with any questions: wustert@gmail.com
We are also looking for someone interested in being the chair for a panel.
The 2017 MLA Annual Convention will be held in Philadelphia from 5 to 8 January. The presidential theme for the convention is Boundary Conditions.
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The Northeast Popular/American Culture Association (NEPCA) is seeking papers on the topic of humor in popular culture for its annual conference, which will be held on Friday and Saturday October 21-22, 2016 on the campus of Keene State College in Keene, New Hampshire.
NEPCA papers are generally 15-20 minutes in length, and the organization strongly encourages creative delivery of papers, though they can also be read. The deadline for applications is June 15, 2016. Please send a 1-2 page paper proposal and a one-page vita to both Humor Program Chair, Virginia Freed vfreed@baypath.edu and to Conference Chair, Karen Honeycutt khoneycutt@keene.edu.
NEPCA entertains both single paper and entire panel proposals. All aspects of humor will be considered, the only restriction being that NEPCA is a scholarly organization and accepts only original works (fiction, poetry, film, memoir) if they are framed within a broader analytical perspective.
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American Literature Association
27th Annual Conference
May 26-29, 2016
Hyatt Regency San Francisco
5 Embarcadero
San Francisco, CA
Conference Director:
Alfred Bendixen, Princeton University
Conference Fee: For those who pre-register before April 15, 2016: $90 ($60 for Graduate Students, Independent Scholars, and Retired Faculty). After April 15, the fees are $100 and $75.
American Humor Studies Association
Call for Papers
The AHSA plans to sponsor three sessions at the 2016 national meeting. We seek cogent, provocative, well-researched papers on the following subjects:
- “Sketch Comedy: from Minstrel Shows and Vaudeville to Radio, TV, and New Media Forms.” Abstracts (300 words maximum) are encouraged on the form of the comic sketch in a variety of periods. Papers on comic sketches or artists within a specific era/format as well as comparative and historical perspectives are welcomed.
- “Humorists as Organic Intellectuals.” Abstracts (300 words maximum) are requested using Antonio Gramsci’s concept as a heuristic to explore the ways in which comic forms function as a public square for the truth-telling antics of humorists on issues of the day, social as well as political. How do humorists speak for and/or criticize their audiences as well as provide mass entertainment?
Please e-mail abstracts no later than January 10, 2016 to Jim Caron (caron@hawaii.edu)
with the subject line: “AHSA session, 2016 ALA.” Notifications will go out no later than January 20, 2016.
- “Humor and Children’s Literature”—Abstracts (300 words maximum) are encouraged on subjects addressing any aspect of humor in relation to children’s literature by an American author. Panel sponsored by the American Humor Studies Association and the Children’s Literature Society.
Please e-mail abstracts no later than January 10, 2016 to Jim Caron (caron@hawaii.edu), Dorothy Clark (dorothy.g.clark@csun.edu), and Linda Salem (lsalem@mail.sdsu.edu) with the subject line: “AHSA/CLS session, 2016 ALA.” Notifications will go out no later than January 20, 2016.
The American Literature Association’s 27th annual conference will meet at the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco on May 26-29, 2016 (Thursday through Sunday of Memorial Day weekend). The deadline for proposals is January 30, 2016. For further information, please consult the ALA conference website at www.alaconf.org or contact the conference director, Professor Alfred Bendixen at ab23@princeton.edu with specific questions.
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CFP: Transgressive Humor of American Women Writers, edited volume, Palgrave Macmillan
Send abstracts (250-500 words) and brief c.v. by Feb. 1st to editor,Sabrina.FuchsAbrams@esc.edu
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HUMOSEXUALLY SPEAKING Laughter and the Intersections of Gender Giuseppe Balirano and Delia Chiaro (Eds.) Humour can be a very dangerous activity, especially if laughter works at downplaying minority groups. People will generally laugh at anything despite the fact that somebody – or some specific groups – may be insulted by being the butt of a joke. The biased image which tends to pass through humour construes LGBTI people within negative representations, encompassing illness and death, but also depicting them as sex maniacs or perverts. Through humour, these features are often taken for granted by the whole of society, constituting the origin of prejudices which are commonly based upon the rejection of the targeted group. The repetition of the very same biased representation can lead to the formation of accepted discourses in various societies bringing jaundiced ideological representations to the status of semiosis, therefore no longer visible as negative or exclusionary ideologies. Focusing on the social function of humour in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex communities in postcolonial settings, we wish to posit that humour also has the power to constantly strengthen and re-interpret the social, cultural and legal exclusion of some fully-fledged members of society. Homosexuality in humorous discourses is a very hot topic. However, there has been very little systematic investigation into the relationship between humour and LGBTI people, and in particular, there is no consistent research about the issue in postcolonial contexts. We invite original contributions on theoretical reflections, as well as analytical exploration into the language of jokes, stand-up comedians, internet blogs, films, TV series and other written and/or audiovisual materials connected with the themes identified and produced in English speaking countries. Intercultural and interdisciplinary approaches are most welcome. For submissions and queries please write to us at degenere.journal@gmail.com Deadline for abstract proposals (300 words and short bio): 30 January 2016. Articles will be due on 31 March 2016. For submission guidelines and further info please check our submissions page.
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The Comedy and Humor Studies Special Interest Group of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies has set up a listserv for scholars and critics working on comedy and humor. If you wish to join, please email Pete Kunze at pkunze@utexas.edu.
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Call for Papers: “Is American Satire Still in a Postmodern Condition?”
Special issue on contemporary satire for Studies in American Humor (Fall 2016), James E. Caron (University of Hawaii—Manoa), Guest Editor; Judith Yaross Lee (Ohio University, Editor).
In response to the torrent of satiric materials that has been and continues to be produced in recent years, Studies in American Humor invites proposals for 20-page essays using the rubric of “the postmodern condition” as an analytical gambit for demarcating a poetics of American comic art forms that use ridicule to enable critique and promote the possibility of social change. Proposals might focus on aspects of the following issues.
What problems are associated with defining satire as a comic mode, and how do recent examples fit into such debates? How useful is the term postmodern to characterize satire—i.e. does it refer to a period or an operation? How useful for understanding recent and contemporary satire are terms designed to indicate we have moved into something other than postmodernism: e.g. trans- or post-humanism, cosmodernism, digimodernism, post-theory? In accounts of satire as a mode of comic presentation of social issues, what differences arise from varied technologies and platforms, not just print but also TV sitcoms (live-action or animated), movies, comic strips, stand-up formats, or the sit-down presentation of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert? Do significant differences emerge from satires on YouTube (or the video-sharing service, Vines) and various Internet sites (e.g., Funny or Die) and social media? If ridicule, broadly speaking, is the engine of satiric critique, what ethical concerns are entailed in its use?
Various disciplinary perspectives and methods are welcome. StAH values new transnational and interdisciplinary approaches as well as traditional critical and historical humanities scholarship. Submit proposals of 500-750 words to StAH’s editorial portal <http://www.editorialmanager.com/sah/> by June 15, 2015, for full consideration. Authors will be notified of the editors’ decisions in early July. Completed essays will be due by January 15, 2016. For complete information on Studies in American Humor and full submission guidelines see <http://studiesinamericanhumor.org/ >. At the time of publication all authors are expected to be members of the American Humor Studies Association, which began publishing StAH (now produced in association with the Penn State University Press) in 1974. Queries may be addressed to the editors at <studiesinamericanhumor@ohio.edu>.
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The Northeast Popular/American Culture Association is seeking papers on the subject of television for its annual fall conference to be held on Friday, October 30 and Saturday, October 31, 2015 on the campus of Colby-Sawyer College in New London, NH. NEPCA prides itself on holding conferences which emphasize sharing ideas in a non-competitive and supportive environment. We welcome proposals from graduate students, junior faculty and senior scholars. NEPCA conferences offer intimate and nurturing sessions in which new ideas and works-in-progress can be aired, as well as completed projects.
NEPCA Fall Conference information, including proposal form and other instructions, can be found at http://nepca.wordpress.com/fall-conference/. Proposals should be sent to the 2015 Program Chair Kraig Larkin (Kraig.Larkin@colby-sawyer.edu) and to the television area chair, Kathleen Collins (kcollins@jjay.cuny.edu). Please be sure to include the acronym NEPCA in the email subject line. The deadline for proposals is Monday, June 15, 2015.
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I am writing to inform you about a unique event happening this spring in Philadelphia. On May 28-31st The Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor, an international association of professionals in the fields of health, education and business, will be holding their 28th Annual Conference at the Hilton Philadelphia at Penn’s Landing. Planned are four days of learning and inspiration with leading speakers in the fields of neuroscience and therapeutic humor, including two well-known Philadelphians, Scott Barry Kaufmann of the Imagination Institute- University of Pennsylvania and Saranne Rothberg, founder of Comedy Cures. Attached you will find a press release and brochure with more information. As a fellow humor-based organization I invite you to share this information with any of your members who may be interested in attending.
Registration is done online at www.aath.org and early bird registration rates are available until April 1st. Should you have any questions or would like further information, please do not hesitate to contact me.
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Call for Papers
2015 SAMLA Annual Conference November 13-15
Sheraton Imperial Hotel and Convention Center, Durham, NC
Topic: Humor in Social Media
This panel welcomes papers about any aspect of Humor in Social Media. Paper proposals addressing the SAMLA 87 theme (In Concert: Literature and the Other Arts) are especially welcome. By May 1, 2015, please submit a 300-500 word abstract, brief bio, and A/V requirements to Joe Alvarez, at jalvareznc@gmail.com.
Participants must be members of SAMLA to participate in this session. Proposers must express a firm commitment to attend the conference.
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Call for papers for a book on Mad magazine. We are looking for scholarly examinations of the magazine, its humor, its artists, its cultural and political impact, and its influence. The book is under consideration by a major university press, and will expand what was covered in a recent special issue of Studies in American Humor. Here is the link to the contents of that issue: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/studamerhumor.issue-30
Possible topics include the following: feminist approaches; racial issues; humor types/genres/media; movie and TV parodies; recurring features, such as “Spy vs. Spy”; examinations of specific artists/writers; precursors; legacy/influence; and others.
Please send queries or proposals by September 15, 2015 to Judith Yaross Lee, the editor of Studies in American Humor: leej@ohio.edu
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THE CLEMENS CONFERENCE 2015
Hannibal, Missouri – July 23-25, 2015
REGISTRATION DEADLINE JULY 10
The Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum is hosting The Clemens Conference in Hannibal July 23-25. The three days feature a wide range of papers on Mark Twain related topics, and trips to area Mark Twain sites. The deadline for registrations is July 10.
If you are registering from outside the United States, contact Henry Sweets for instructions.
If you only can attend part of the workshop, a reduced fee can be arranged. Send details of your attendance plans and you will be provided the appropriate registration fee.
General information, a schedule, and registration forms are available on-line at http://www.marktwainmuseum.org/index.php/education/conference . Inexepnsive rooms are available at Hannibal-LaGrange University; details are included on our web site. Contact us with any questions.
The Conference is open to anyone with an interest in Mark Twain.
Henry Sweets henry.sweets@marktwainmuseum.org
Henry Sweets, Executive Director
Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum
120 North Main Street
Hannibal MO 63401
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Columbia College Chicago is hiring two full time lecturer positions to serve its rapidly growing B.A. in Comedy Writing and Performing.
The degree is the only one of its kind in the United ecoetates and had its beginnings in 2007 in a partnership between Columbia College Chicago and The Second City. The Comedy Studies semester (www.comedystudies.com) provides a semester abroad style program in which students come to Chicago and study comic acting, improvisation, sketch and solo writing, comedy history, and physical and vocal prep for comedy. All courses in the semester are held at The Second City’s historic location on Wells Street in Chicago.
Alumni of the Comedy Studies semester include SNL’s Aidy Bryant, performers for Second City’s resident and touring companies, writers for The Onion as well as network, cable, and Netflix television shows as well as numerous regularly performing stand-up, improv, and sketch comedians, as well as at least one ordained minister.
The B.A. in Comedy Writing and Performing enters its third year in 2015-2016 with an estimated 200 majors. This interdisciplinary degree is housed within the Columbia College Theatre department and builds on the philosophy of the Comedy Studies semester; successful comedians require training and experience as writers, performers, directors, and producers across media. In addition to the semester at The Second City, major requirements include foundation work in theatrical principles and acting, comedy specific training in theory and practice, as well as coursework in television and self-management and freelancing.
Job descriptions for the two positions are listed below. If you have questions about the positions or about the program in general please feel free to contact Program Coordinator and Director of Comedy Studies, Anne Libera at ALibera@colum.edu.
Lecturer, Comedy Writing and Performing Program, Theatre Department (Focus in Clown and Physical Comedy)
The Theatre Department of Columbia College Chicago has an opening for the position of Lecturer in the Comedy Writing and Performing Program. The candidate would possess an advanced degree in Theatre or related disciplines or have the equivalent professional experience. Successful candidates will possess strong teaching experience and collaboration skills and have at least five years professional experience as a performer or director in the field of physical theater, circus arts, mask work, or clown. Experience with Chicago style improvisation, standup, or sketch comedy a plus.
Duties include: Teaching four classes a semester within the program; Advising students; Co-coordinating freshman foundation classes; Organize activities for majors; Curriculum development; Collaborate on interdisciplinary projects and ancillary departmental tasks as needed.
Lecturer, Comedy Writing and Performing Program, Theatre Department
(Focus on Writing and Directing)
The Theatre Department of Columbia College Chicago has an opening for the position of Lecturer in the Comedy Writing and Performing Program. The candidate would possess an advanced degree in Theatre, Writing, or related disciplines or have the equivalent professional experience. Successful candidates will possess strong teaching experience and collaboration skills and have at least five years professional experience as a writer or director in the fields of sketch, standup, film, television, or internet comedy. Performance experience is a plus.
Duties include: Teaching four classes a semester including one within the television department; Advising students; Developing curriculum for advanced performance classes; Developing and overseeing cabaret space with performance opportunities for majors; Collaborating with Business, Film and Television departments on interdisciplinary projects and ancillary departmental tasks as needed.
http://about.colum.edu/human-resources/employment.html
Columbia College Chicago is an undergraduate and graduate institution whose principal commitment is to provide a comprehensive educational opportunity in the arts, communications, and public information within a context of enlightened liberal education. Our intent is to educate students who will communicate creatively and author the culture of their times.
To further the mission of the College, and contribute to the creative student-centered community, we are committed to attracting and retaining outstanding and diverse faculty and staff. Columbia encourages qualified female, LGBTQ, disabled, and minority individuals to apply for all positions.
***
Call for Papers
27th ISHS Conference
Holy Names University
Oakland, CA
June 29-July 3, 2015
Sponsored by American Humor Studies Association
Revisionary Strategies for the Study of 19th Century American Humor
In many ways scholars from the early part of the 20th century have set the stage for the study of 19th century humor. Early humor scholars Jeannette Tandy, Constance Rourke, and Walter Blair’s seminal texts took a very particular stance on what constituted American Humor. The titles of their books give a good idea of their thinking concerning “American” humor: American Humor: A Study in American Character (Rourke 1931), Crackerbox Philosophers in American Humor and Satire (Tandy 1925), and Horse Sense in American Humor from Benjamin Franklin to Ogden Nash (Blair 1931). The texts focus almost exclusively on white, male, vernacular humorists from the Southwest and Down East “schools,” with very few exceptions.
While these authors did a great deal to bring humor into the serious study of literature, their focus tended to leave out quite a few humor writers from the time period. As a consequence, they give the mistaken impression that “American Humor” was much more unified and homogeneous than it actually was.
This call for papers seeks presentations from scholars whose study is the humor of the 19th century from a broader perspective, one that includes more women, authors of color, and authors who do not fit the mold of “Crackerbox Philosopher” or exhibit their humor as “horse sense”—with an eye toward revising who and what defined American Humor in the 19th Century.
Abstracts containing title and 250 word description of the presentation should be sent to Janice McIntire-Strasburg via email at mcintire@slu.edu by March 10, 2015.
****
MLA 2016, Austin, TX
Roundtable on Keywords in American Humor Studies
This roundtable seeks to address the questions of humor and its publics as a part of the conference’s Presidential theme of: “Literature and Its Publics: Past, Present, and Future.” The theme asks:
Who is the public for literature? How is our work as teachers, historians, editors, and critics—above all, as interpreters—a public act?
This roundtable will seek to start a conversation on the public dimension of humor studies by focusing on keywords of humor studies—such as “laughter,” “text,” and “humorist.” Other keywords in addition to those terms are welcome. Presenters will post a short position statement online six weeks before the conference.
Please submit a short abstract (100-200 words) by 3/15 to: wustert@gmail.com Presenters will have 4-8 minutes, depending on number of participants. Presenters must be members of both the MLA and the AHSA.
****
American Literature Association
26th Annual Conference
May 21-24, 2015
The Westin Copley Place
10 Huntington Avenue ,
Boston MA 02116-5798
Conference Director:
Olivia Carr Edenfield, Georgia Southern University
Conference Fee: For those who pre-register before April 15, 2015: $90 ($60 for Graduate Students, Independent Scholars, and Retired Faculty). After April 15, the fees are $100 and $75.
American Humor Studies Association
Call for Papers
The AHSA plans to sponsor three sessions at the 2015 national meeting. We seek cogent, provocative, well-researched papers on the following subjects:
- “American National Humor(s).” Abstracts (300 words max.) are encouraged on American humor as it relates to concepts of national identity, “American character,” and related concepts. We are also willing to consider papers that consider other national traditions in ways that illuminate the links between humor and imagined national identies.
- “Page to Screen: American Literary Humor and the Silent Film Comedy.” Abstracts (300 words max) are requested on the relationship between American literary humor and its transmutation to the silent film screen. While one-to-one correlations between text and film of the same title are obvious foci for this panel, more oblique relationships are encouraged—of the coincidental misidentification of lookalike characters, as in Charlie Chaplin’s characters in, say, The Idle Class, which clearly hearken back to a story like Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Adaptions in silent animation are also acceptable. The importance of the English music hall and American vaudeville stage is well known and understood in the development of screen comedy, but what is the role of silent film comedy’s literary precursors?
- “Humor and Charles Chesnutt”—Abstracts (300 words max.) are encouraged on subjects addressing any aspect of humor in relation to Charles Chesnutt or related topics. Panel sponsored by the American Humor Studies Association and the Charles Chesnutt Society.
Please e-mail abstracts no later than January 10, 2014 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 American Literature Association’s 26th annual conference will meet at the Westin Copley Place in Boston on May 21-24, 2015 (Thursday through Sunday of Memorial Day weekend). The deadline for proposals is January 30, 2015. For further information, please consult the ALA conference website at www.alaconf.org or contact the conference director, Professor Olivia Carr Edenfield at carr@georgiasouthern.edu with specific questions.
****
Dear ALA Societies Contact,
Please accept this short message to call your attention to an American Literature Fulbright grant at the University of Bergen in Norway. This grant provides an opportunity to explore American literature and culture in a foreign country where English language proficiency is not an issue, and to experience a different system of higher education. As program alumni will readily attest, time spent in Bergen is worthwhile and the benefits long-lasting.
Cassandra Falke, who is wrapping up her stay recently sent in a piece for our website reflecting on the year. In it she talks about the experience, noting succinctly,”…I have flourished here, and my work has benefitted from that.” Among other things, she mentions appreciating the combination of a light (by American standards) teaching load and little committee work with full participation in departmental decisions related to her courses.
The scholar normally teaches eight hours per week in the fall and two hours per week in the spring, which allows considerable time for independent research. Detailed information about this grant and the online application can be found here. The application deadline for the 2015-16 academic year is August 1st.
I hope you will give the possibility of applying to become a Fulbright scholar in American Literature some consideration. Please do not hesitate to contact me with any questions.
Sincerely,
Rena Levin
Program Officer
US-Norway Fulbright Foundation
*****
MLA 2015–AHSA Deadline extended!
Session 1:
| Session type: | Allied Organization |
| Organization: | American Humor Studies Association |
| Title of session: | Comic Dimensions and Varieties of Risk |
| Submission requirements: | 250-word abstracts |
| Deadline for submissions: | 10 March 2014 |
| Description: | Papers on thematic complexity and varieties of risk in American texts in which humor, wit and comic perspectives conjoin with other moods and intentions.
MLA 2015: Vancouver, Canada, January 8-11, 2015 SESSION 2 Joint Session of Mark Twain Circle and American Humor Studies Association Over the past two centuries, book-length autobiography has been commonly regarded as a high-serious project: a culminating apologia, a settling of accounts, a view from heights of maturity or old age. Within the genre, however, there are important exceptions: works distinguished by outbreaks of humor, pervasive wit, the reconstruction of the life experience as inherently comic. With the new Mark Twain Autobiographycommanding so much attention, we invite proposals that study ambitious autobiographical texts in which humor, wit, and laughter play a major role, and that speculate on the thematic importance of these qualities. Please send 1-2 pp. proposals for 20-page papers to John Bird,birdj@winthrop.edu, by March 10, 2014. Please note: at the time of acceptance, potential presenters must be or become members of MLA. MARK TWAIN CIRCLE CFP Mark Twain Circle Main Session: Vulnerable Twain Examinations of vulnerability in Mark Twain: characters, themes, biography, autobiography, other. Please send 1-2 pp. proposals for 20-page papers to John Bird, birdj@winthrop.edu, by March 10, 2014. ***************************************************** |
Humor in Hawthorne
The Fall issue of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review (Vol. 39, No. 2) is a special issue devoted to the subject of “Humor in Hawthorne.” The Guest Editor, M. Thomas Inge of Randolph-Macon College, has noted, “Scholars are generally dubious of the idea that there is such a thing as humor in Hawthorne, but those who read his gloomy Puritanic fiction with a careful eye will detect beneath the surface the strong presence of irony and a satiric sensibility.” The 210-page issue offers essays by James E. Caron, Joel Conway, Steven Petersheim, Ed Piacentino, Mimosa Stephenson, and Derek Parker Royal. Also included, and featured on the cover, is a parody of The Scarlet Letter by John Sikoryak in the style of the Little Lulu comic books by John Stanley. This may be the first time a critical literary journal has published a complete comic book story in its pages. Individual copies may be purchased for $15.00 from the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society Treasurer, Leland S. Person, Department of English, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 45221-0069. Membership in the Society for $25 annually includes a subscription to the Review.
*****
|
Please send responses—paper abstracts (max 100 words), or interest in moderating— by Friday, February 14, to kgr13@gwmail.gwu.edu.
****
Here is the CFP for AHSA – SAMLA – Atlanta, GA Nov 7 – 9, 2014.
19th and 20th century authors use of humor on environmental/sustainability =
issues.
The American Humor Studies Association seeks papers for a panel, which is f=
ocusing on 19th and 20th century authors and their use of humor on environm=
ental/sustainability issues. The panel takes place for the 2014 South Atlan=
tic Modern Language Association (SAMLA) Conference at the Marriott Atlanta,=
GA from November 7-9, 2014. This panel will examine how humor and sustaina=
bility can work together through various authors, such as, Caroline Kirklan=
d, Mark Twain (Roughing It/Life on the Mississippi), Edward Abbey, Dr. Seus=
s, Carl Hiassen, Diane Ackerman, Bill Bryson the definitely unsustainable h=
unting trips of tall tale folks like Davy Crockett, showing how they use hu=
mor for either pro or con sustainability in their works.=20
=09
The session invites academic papers, multi-media, or digital pieces on any =
aspect 20th century authors and their use of humor on environmental/sustain=
ability issues, by May 1, 2014, email or regular mail 300-word abstracts wi=
th the requisite information as noted in the SAMLA call for papers guidelin=
es, http://samla.memberclicks.net/participants
Please send inquiries and proposals to Mrs. Jules A. Hojnowski, at JAH11@co=
rnell.edu or 1690 Trumansburg Rd, Ithaca, NY 14850
********
Dear humor caucus colleagues:
I am writing to solicit proposals for papers or panels for the ASA annual meeting. Since the conference theme is “The Fun and the Fury,” it seems like scholars of humor might well have something valuable to contribute!
I urge you to read the description of the theme carefully, and frame your proposal to pick up some of the specific suggestions that the program committee has offered. If you send proposals for papers to me, I will work with our convener, Jennifer Hughes, to try to assemble them into coherent panels. Please send proposals to me by 5:00 p.m on Monday, January 20th, so that we have time to get back to you before the final ASA deadline of January 26th. My email address is mtmcfadd@colby.edu.
I hope to propose a paper that offers an analysis of the feminist dimensions of Gilda Radner’s solo performance film “Gilda Live” (1980), and would welcome proposals that might connect with that, either thematically or chronologically. But all topics are welcome, and we will do our best to put them together.
Best wishes,
Margaret McFadden
American Studies Program
Colby College
***
American Humor Studies Association
Mark Twain Circle of America
Quadrennial Conference 2014
December 4-7, 2014
Four Points Sheraton French Quarter
The American Humor Studies Association, in conjunction with the Mark Twain Circle of America, sends out this general call for papers on American humor and Mark Twain. The topics below are suggestions for topics that we think will be of interest; other topics are welcome, and we welcome especially submissions of sessions of three papers or roundtables. The topics are broad in the hope that scholars will be able to find one that fits their current research. Submissions should be sent to Jan McIntire-Strasburg via email (mcintire@slu.edu). Please send your submissions by May 15, 2014.
Those sending in submissions for the Mark Twain Circle of America can email their proposals to Ann Ryan at ryanam@lemoyne.edu.
Early American Humor and its European Roots
Nineteenth Century Humor—from Southwest to Northeast to Far West
20th Century Humor and the American Novel
Regional and/or transnational humor
New Media Approaches to Humor
Humor in film, television, comics, and other visual media
Humor and Theatre
Stand-Up Comedy
Online humor
Humor and Ethnicity
Humor and Gender
Humor and Class
Humor and Sexuality
Humor and War
Contemporary Approaches to Irony, Satire, Wit, and other topics
Teaching Humor
New Directions in American Humor Studies
*************
DEADLINE EXTENDED to 1/3–
Jack Rosenbalm Prize for American Humor
*****
MLA 2015
Session 1:
| Session type: | Allied Organization |
| Organization: | American Humor Studies Association |
| Title of session: | Comic Dimensions and Varieties of Risk |
| Submission requirements: | 250-word abstracts |
| Deadline for submissions: | 5 March 2014 |
| Description: | Papers on thematic complexity and varieties of risk in American texts in which humor, wit and comic perspectives conjoin with other moods and intentions. |
MLA 2015: Vancouver, Canada, January 8-11, 2015
SESSION 2
Joint Session of Mark Twain Circle and American Humor Studies Association
Over the past two centuries, book-length autobiography has been commonly regarded as a high-serious project: a culminating apologia, a settling of accounts, a view from heights of maturity or old age. Within the genre, however, there are important exceptions: works distinguished by outbreaks of humor, pervasive wit, the reconstruction of the life experience as inherently comic. With the new Mark Twain Autobiography commanding so much attention, we invite proposals that study ambitious autobiographical texts in which humor, wit, and laughter play a major role, and that speculate on the thematic importance of these qualities. Please send 1-2 pp. proposals for 20-page papers to John Bird, birdj@winthrop.edu, by March 10, 2014.
Please note: at the time of acceptance, potential presenters must be or become members of MLA.
MARK TWAIN CIRCLE CFP
Mark Twain Circle Main Session: Vulnerable Twain
Examinations of vulnerability in Mark Twain: characters, themes, biography, autobiography, other. Please send 1-2 pp. proposals for 20-page papers to John Bird, birdj@winthrop.edu, by March 10, 2014.
Special issue of Studies in American Humor, Fall 2015
American Humor in the 1920s and 1930s: Cross-Media Perspectives
CALL FOR PAPERS
Studies in American Humor, the journal of the American Humor Studies Association, invites submission of scholarly papers on humor across media in the 1920s and 1930s for a special issue of the journal appearing in the fall of 2015, coedited by Rob King (Columbia University) and Judith Yaross Lee (Ohio University). Specifically, we are interested in papers that explore the circulation of humor within and across media industries during this formative period in the consolidation of American mass culture.
Recent research on early twentieth-century mass culture has challenged medium-specific histories of entertainment industries by examining the growing integration of print, radio, film, and music publishing during the 1920s. What has not been researched, however, is the role that humor played within this changing media landscape. What function, for instance, did humor play in greasing the wheels of an increasingly convergent entertainment industry? How were discrete forms of comic expression remediated by comic performers and humorists who adapted their talents to different media forms?
Topics might include, but are not limited to:
- stage comedians’ transition to movies, especially following the advent of sound film (e.g., the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, Mantan Moreland, Moran and Mack);
- comparisons between comic writers’ contributions to periodicals such as The New Yorker and their work in other media (e.g., Ben Hecht, Donald Ogden Stewart, or Dorothy Parker in Hollywood);
- relations between cartoon and comic verbal contents of print media;
- comic celebrity or stardom across media (e.g., Robert Benchley, Anita Loos, Will Rogers);
- racial or ethnic humor or caricature across media (e.g., cross-media representations or themes, works across media by individual humorists);
- radio’s emergence as a mass medium (e.g., adaptations of print and stage traditions to radio shows like Lum and Abner).
Potential contributors should send queries and abstracts (500-750 words) to studiesinamericanhumor@ohio.edu by June 1, 2014. Final manuscripts will be due March 1, 2015. General information on Studies in American Humor and submission guidelines are available at http://studiesinamericanhumor.org.
*********
American Literature Association
May 22-25, 2014
Washington, D.C.
American Humor Studies Association
Call for Papers
The AHSA plans to sponsor three sessions at the 2014 national meeting. We seek cogent, provocative, well-researched papers on the following subjects:
1. “Political Humor from Franklin to Colbert”—Abstracts (300 words max.) are encouraged on the connections between political discourse and American humor. All periods and approaches—from literary texts to stand-up comedy—will be considered. Papers should address both a specific context and the more general context of the uses and limits of humor in political realms.
2. “Teaching American Humor”–Abstracts (300 words max.) are encouraged for a roundtable on the challenges and joys of teaching American humor. Each presenter will have 8-12 minutes (depending on the number of presenters chosen) to present their theoretical and/or practical approach to the teaching of American humor—whether focused on the general subject or on a specific topic. A decent amount of time will be given to discussion of the topic.
3. “Graphic Humor in American Periodicals”—Abstracts (300 words max.) are encouraged on subjects addressing “graphic humor” in American periodicals. Subjects could range from cartoon strips to political cartoons to illustrations, and may include alternative interpretations of the term “graphic.” Papers should focus on the periodical context of the subject, as well as broader concerns of interpreting humor. Panel sponsored by the American Humor Studies Association and the Research Society for American Periodicals.
Please e-mail abstracts no later than January 10, 2014 to Tracy Wuster (wustert@gmail.com) with the subject line: “AHSA session, 2013 ALA.” Notifications will go out no later than January 20, 2013.
**************************************************************************
American Literature Association
May 22-25, 2014
Washington, D.C.
Research Society for American Periodicals
Call for Papers
RSAP seeks proposals for the American Literature Association’s 25th Annual Conference, 22-25 May 2014 at the Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill, in Washington, D.C. Proposals are requested for the following:
1. War and/in American Periodicals after 1914
As spaces of dialogue and dissent, American periodicals have played a formative role in the negotiation of war’s meaning in American culture. This panel seeks 15-20–minute papers that might address any aspect of this topic, including but not limited to: seriality and war; soldier newspapers; trench journalism; periodicals and the home front; fictional representations of war in periodicals; periodicals as spaces for dialogue and dissent about war; anti-war publications; responses to war in black periodicals; war in visual culture; the imagined communities of wartime America; literary style and war correspondence; etc. Please email 300-word abstract and C.V. to Amanda Gailey at gailey@unl.edu by December 15, 2013; please put “RSAP panel submission” in the subject line.
2. “Graphic Humor in American Periodicals”—Abstracts (300 words max.) are encouraged on subjects addressing “graphic humor” in American periodicals. Subjects could range from cartoon strips to political cartoons to illustrations, and may include alternative interpretations of the term “graphic.” Papers should focus on the periodical context of the subject, as well as broader concerns of interpreting humor. This panel is co-sponsored by the American Humor Studies Association and the Research Society for American Periodicals. Please e-mail abstracts no later than January 10, 2013 to Tracy Wuster (wustert@gmail.com) with the subject line: “AHSA/RSAP session, 2013 ALA.”
Notifications will go out no later than January 20, 2013.
****
CALL FOR PAPERS:
THE RED LION SYMPOSIUM ON HUMOR PUBLICATION
(A Joint Project of the Mark Twain Circle and the American Humor Studies Association)
Where: The Red Lion Inn, Stockbridge, Massachusetts (http://www.redlioninn.com/)
When: Thursday-Saturday February 20-22
Purpose: This working conference is intended to advance publication of work on American Humor, Mark Twain, and related work in progress. Individuals papers and group symposiums will be offered relating to work in progress which will be presented by participants and discussed and developed with the help of attending scholars.
Thursday Evening: Welcome Address: Publication, by David E. E. Sloane and Others TBA
Friday: Morning Symposium and presentations and feedback; Afternoon symposium and feedback
Saturday: Morning Symposium; Afternoon, events
Registration: $45.00
Rooms–reserved block of rooms to be reserved by individuals in advance at conference rate of $109 Thursday and $179 Friday and Saturday (plus tax).
Other events to be arranged. Red Lion Inn is one of the grand old Inns of New England, featuring gourmet dining, luxury rooms, heated indoor-outdoor swimming year-round, and other amenities. Stockbridge is the home of the Norman Rockwell Museum and is easily reached from Bradley International Airport in Hartford/Springfield.
You are welcome to REGISTER with or without giving a presentation simply be sending your $45 registration fee and the form below to David E. E. Sloane, English Dept. University of New Haven 300 Boston Post Rd. West Haven CT 06516. To PARTICIPATE as a Speaker, Chair, or Respondent, please send a paragraph outlining your objective/project or experience on a separate page with your reservation fee and contact information. Questions should be addressed to: DSloane@newhaven.edu
NAME________________________________________
ADDRESS_____________________________________
________________________________________
ACADEMIC AFFILIATION_______________________
STATUS ___Guest ___Presenter ___Chair _____Respondent
Proposal:
****************************************************************
*****
View the preliminary 2014 Conference Schedule, and check back soon for information on Speakers, Exhibitor Opportunities, and more!
Are you tired of the same kind of conference? Tired of sitting through boring sessions waiting for the day to end so you can have fun? Do you want to attend a conference where laughing AND learning are the rule and NOT the exception?
Then you won’t want to miss the 27th Annual AATH Humor Conference in Vincennes, Indiana… April 3-6, 2014… at the Red Skelton Museum of American Comedy located on the campus of Vincennes University.
Join in on the informative fun as AATH (the Association for Applied & Therapeutic Humor) meets for its 27th annual, international gathering. Our appropriate conference site will be the brand new “Red Skelton Museum of American Comedy” located on the campus of Vincennes University in Vincennes Indiana. Come to learn, to share “best practices,” to network, to laugh, to see old friends, to meet new ones, and to be genuinely uplifted by the experience! Keynotes, Workshops, Humor Academy, Research Poster Session, CEUs, Scholarships, and a New Curriculum Track Especially for Therapeutic Clowning!
*****
Mark Twain and Money: Call for contributions to a volume of new scholarly
essays
Questions about Mark Twain’s fascination with wealth have played a major
role in Twain criticism from the very beginning. It might be argued, in
fact, that the foundational disagreement in Twain studies hinges on whether
his commercial inclinations fostered his artistic achievement (Bernard
DeVoto) or bastardized his talent (Van Wyck Brooks). Rather than prolong
the biographical debate, this volume of original essays will draw on recent
work at the intersection of economic theory and literary studies (sometimes
referred to as the New Economic Criticism) to reevaluate and deepen our
understanding of Mark Twain’s complicated relationship with money and issues
of economy, broadly understood. Topics of interest might include Twain’s
engagement with:
the profession of authorship
the literary marketplace
concepts of ownership
concepts of intellectual property, real property, and personhood
copyright law and theory
the nature of money and its relationship to art, literature, and
representation
debates about the gold and silver standards
the meaning and significance of debt, credit, and usury
commodities and the commodity form
production and consumption
economic panic and bankruptcy
Webster & Co.
investment and speculation
gender and/or masculinity in relation to economic forces and events
capitalism and capitalists
progressive politics, socialism, and the rights of workers
gift theory
the advertising industry
branding and marketing
the role of fraud in economic transactions/the role of hoax in literary
transactions
work and leisure
play (or childhood) in relation to economic structures and practices
Please send paper abstracts of 500 words and a working title to Harry Wonham
wonham@uoregon.edu by January 1, 2014. Final essays will be between
6,000-8,000 words in length and should conform to the MLA documentation
style. Final papers will be due by September 1, 2014. Questions, comments,
and suggestions should be directed to Harry Wonham, Department of English,
University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403 ( wonham@uoregon.edu ).
****
Dear Colleagues -We are now accepting chapter submissions for a proposed book collection of critical essays examining stand-up comedy as rhetoric, tentatively titled Standing Up, Speaking Up: Stand-Up Comedy and the Rhetoric of Social Change. A brief abstract of the project follows this e-mail.If you are interested in contributing to the collection, please submit
an initial manuscript of your work to crschmitt@wisc.edu by Friday,
April 25th.
Manuscripts will be reviewed by the editors and final inclusion of all
submissions will be contingent on the individual manuscripts’ execution,
scholarly rigor, and adherence to the collection’s primary themes.Contributors may consider the words and routines of, for instance,
George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Dick Gregory, Roseanne Barr, Louis C.K.,
Margaret Cho, Dave Chapelle, or Sarah Silverman, though other
suggestions are certainly welcomed! A full list of suggested topics and
themes appears below.PLEASE NOTE, THIS COLLECTION WILL NOT FEATURE ESSAYS ON:
– humor as a general concept or humor theory (except when humor theory
is uniquely applicable)
– the dissection of jokes or judgments about the “funniness” of routines
– the history of stand-up comedy
– biography
– analysis of non-stand-up comedians
– television or film comedy
– comedians performing outside of comedic rolesWe are at the moment most seeking pieces of rhetorical criticism of
specific speech texts in the hopes that the collection as a whole will
highlight the special rhetorical strategies employed by comic speakers
in comic frames that are otherwise inaccessible to most other speakers
in most other situations.If you are interested, or if you have questions, please contact us via
e-mail at crschmitt@wisc.edu.Thanks again,
Casey R. Schmitt
Dept. of Communication Arts
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Matthew R. Meier
School of Media and Communication
Bowling Green State University
PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
Molded in the tradition of the Ciceronian speech to entertain, stand-up
comedy that features a lone rhetor delivering monologues before an
audience is arguably the most traditional form of public address found
on our contemporary comedy landscape. Moreover, stand-up comedy in the
United States has been uniquely influential in its ability to speak
truth and power, to utter the unutterable, and to publicly consider the
world not as it is but as it should be. In recent decades, some of the
most celebrated, circulated, poignant, and culturally influential
American oratorical performances have come not from leaders or
activists, lawyers or religious visionaries, but from particularly
gifted jesters and fools.
This collection turns a concerted critical eye to the unique rhetorical
artistry of the modern stand-up comedian as a force for social change.
It asks: in what ways is stand-up comedy connected to the issues of
cultural transformation? What impact has stand-up comedy had on American
society and what forms has that impact taken? How has stand-up
manifested as commentary on the politics of race, gender, and the
American dream? In short, how does stand-up comedy facilitate social
change for the publics it addresses?
Other scholars have begun to address these comic conundrums. For
example, Kenneth Burke submits the comic corrective and comic frame as
necessary resources for understanding, critiquing, and changing public
culture.1 Burke’s concepts, with the addition of his construction of the
perspective by incongruity,2 have been fruitful tools for a number of
writers and researchers addressing comic texts.3 Additionally, in his
essay on parody and public culture, Robert Hariman argues that the comic
antagonism of parody both creates and sustains our public culture
through means that are inaccessible via the otherwise serious rhetoric
of officialdom.4 In a rare essay addressing stand-up comedy directly,
Joanne Gilbert-a former stand-up comedian herself-contends that by
performing self and culture the stand-up comedian exercises a special
capacity to offer critique sanctioned as entertainment that can uniquely
engage hegemonic stereotypes and objectifications due to its comedic
context.5 However, while this literature contributes to an overarching
discussion of comedy, it only begins to address the connection between
stand-up comedy performance specifically and actual social change.
In turning a focus toward this connection, then, the essays in this
collection will offer analyses of important moments in the tradition of
American stand-up comedy from comedians who have been especially
involved in shaping that tradition. We invite submissions featuring
rhetorical criticism of specific speech texts in order to highlight the
special rhetorical strategies employed by comic speakers in comic frames
that are otherwise inaccessible to non-comic rhetors in other speaking
situations. Together, these essays will demonstrate that comedy is
inextricably connected to the issues of social and cultural
transformation as an important voice amidst the cacophony of traditional
political oratory, and that the stand-up comic rhetor, through ludic
play and brazen confrontation of incongruities, can uniquely question,
challenge, and re-shape social conventions while still managing to get a
laugh or two along the way.
|
Call for Papers: MAD Magazine and Its Legacies Special issue of Studies in American Humor, Fall 2014 Since 1952, MAD Magazine has regaled humor lovers and inspired humor producers in many media. Studies in American Humor, the journal of the American Humor Studies Association, invites submission of scholarly papers devoted to MAD Magazine and its legacies for a special issue of the journal appearing in the fall of 2014, coedited by John Bird (Winthrop University) and Judith Yaross Lee (Ohio University). Topics might include, but are not limited to: *humor, verbal and/or visual *subversive humor *satire (as technique, analysis of individual examples or themes, etc.) *parody (as technique, analysis of individual examples or themes, etc.) *individual artists and writers *regular and occasional features *one or mode recurrent themes (politics, technology, parenthood, suburbia) *cultural impact and legacies *influence, general and specific (including direct influence on individuals and genres) *reception Potential contributors should send queries and abstracts (500-750 words) by October 1, 2013 or complete manuscripts by June 1, 2014. Email queries and abstracts to studiesinamericanhumor@ohio.edu. General information on Studies in American Humor and submission guidelines are available athttp://studiesinamericanhumor.org/. ***** Call for Articles – Oklahoma HUMANITIES Magazine |
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| The Oklahoma Humanities Council is the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. This “call for articles” is for the January 2014 issue of our magazine, which will feature the topic of “Humor and the Humanities.” Inclusion is honorary; compensation consists of 5 copies of the issue in which your article appears.You can view the magazine online at:http://www.okhumanities.org/publications [current issue] http://www.okhumanities.org/archives WHAT’S SO FUNNY?What do you mean, funny? Funny-peculiar or funny ha-ha? — Ian Hay, The Housemaster, Act IIIA sense of humor, it has been said, is one of the innate qualities that separate humans from animals. In this issue of our magazine, we’ll explore comedy, what it reveals about who we are, and how we employ it to navigate our world. Remember: ours is a “general” audience—not academic. For this “humor” issue, we’re looking for light-hearted content and witty delivery.
The broad questions above are posed to stimulate ideas, not to limit the scope of proposals. Above all, we seek material based in scholarship that is easily understood by and accessible to “general audience” readers. About our publication: Print readership is approximately 10,500 statewide [donors, universities, public libraries, cultural organizations, state and national legislators, etc.] with additional distribution via events, bookstores, etc. The publication is distributed free of charge as a part of our public programming. Previous authors have included: Michael Sandel [What Money Can’t Buy]; Mickey Edwards [The Parties Versus The People]; Krista Tippet [host of NPR’s “On Being”]; Mark Slouka [Harper’s Magazine]; and Kim Stafford [100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do]. Click here for Author Guidelines on the style and tone of articles we publish. We’re looking for a feature article length of about 2000 words. Please send the following:
Please respond by June 17th. If we accept your proposal, the deadline for your text will be September 1st. Feel free to contact me if you have questions. Thanks for your consideration and I look forward to hearing from you. |
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Contact: Carla D. Walker – Editor, Oklahoma HUMANITIES Magazine ****
War and Peace was the theme of our inaugural issue of “So It Goes,” and we were delighted to release the journal during “Veterans Reclaim Armistice Day: Healing through the Humanities,” our 11/11/12 event, which also happened to be Kurt Vonnegut’s birthday. Contributors to our first issue included Morley Safer, Tim O’Brien, Dan Wakefield, as well as several other Hoosiers, veterans, students, and Vonnegut lovers across the planet. Our first issue is now available in the library’s online gift shop throughwww.vonnegutlibrary.org and in person at the library in Indianapolis. Humor is the theme of this year’s edition of “So It Goes.” We want your whimsy, levity, dark satire, political parody, topical tomfoolery, sarcastic spoofs, and wit. Keep in mind that we are looking for your unique voice and not just an imitation of Vonnegut’s trademark, humorous humanism. Please submit your poetry, creative nonfiction, short fiction, original artwork, and/or photography related to the theme of humor. We will accept new and previously published work (simultaneous submissions are allowed with notification) and will credit the original publisher for previously published works. If the work in your submission(s) has been published elsewhere (even if it is your own work), you may need permission to publish it in this issue of “So It Goes.” If this is the case, you must obtain the written permission of the rights holder(s) and include this written permission with your submission(s). Please request worldwide rights for print and electronic formats in all languages and editions. If you are unsure if your usage requires permission, go to https://kvml.submittable.com/submit. You should also go to the submittable site for additional instructions about preparing your submission. Submissions are limited to one work of prose (maximum 1,500 words) or up to five poems, photographs, and/or works of art. Format with double space, use 12-point Times New Roman font, and include a cover letter with a brief biography. We accept both electronic and paper submissions. Submit electronic entries through kvml.submittable.com. Send paper submissions to Vonnegut Library, So It Goes Submissions, 340 N. Senate Ave., Indianapolis, IN 46204. Include a self-addressed stamped envelope with sufficient postage for response. Submitted materials will not be returned. Submissions will be accepted through July 15, 2013. If you have any questions, contact us at SoItGoes@vonnegutlibrary.org. ****
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MMLA Conference [November 7-10, 2013 Milwaukee, Wisconsin] Special Session: “Irony and Authenticity in Contemporary Artistic Production”
Is there room for earnestness and authenticity in contemporary media? In accordance with the 2013 Midwest Modern Language Association conference theme of “Art & Artifice”, This panel explores the intersection of authenticity and irony in literature, film, music, and other media. While stable irony depends upon fixed meanings intended to elicit specific interpretations from an audience, contemporary theories of language, identity, and community emphasize the ultimate contingency and instability of meaning. Thus, the possibility for irony is thrown into question; is irony impossible, or is irony all-pervasive? Likewise, is any form of authenticity or earnestness possible in artistic production? What happens when an earnest art form is treated ironically? How can we interpret irony or authenticity as such?
Papers from a variety of fields that explore at least two different media will be particularly useful for this discussion, though single-media topics are also welcome. This panel would greatly benefit from a respondent, as well. The Midwest Modern Language Association Conference will be held this year at the Hilton Milwaukee City Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin from November 7-10.
Abstract Deadline: June 14. Please send a 250-300 word abstract to panel organizer Janessa Toro
The AHSA has issued a call for papers for sessions at the Modern Language Association Convention in Chicago, January 9-12, 2014. MLA and AHSA membership are required for participation in these sessions.
1) The Tyranny of Irony and Irony’s Edge
300-word abstracts welcome on interpretive practice in the wake of insights from David Foster Wallace, Linda Hutcheon, and others on literary irony. 300-word abstracts. by 4 March 2013; Bruce F. Michelson (brucem@illinois.edu).
2) Wit, Humor, and ‘Serious’ Texts
Abstracts welcome on any subject related to comic dimensions in literary works not normally classified as ‘comic.’. 300 word abstracts by 4 March 2013; Bruce F. Michelson (brucem@illinois.edu).
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TEACHING POPULAR CULTURE
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
*The editors of /Transformations/ seek submissions that explore popular
culture from all pedagogical contexts and interdisciplinary
perspectives. We accept *articles* (5,000-10,000 words), *media essays*
(overviews on books, film, video, performance, art, music, websites,
etc. 3,000 to 5,000 words) and* items for an occasional feature, “The
Material Culture of Teaching.” */Note extended deadline: Submissions for
this special issue on Teaching Popular Culture are now due Feb. 15,
2013. /We welcome jargon-free submissions that explore strategies for
teaching about popular culture in the classroom and in non-traditional
spaces (such as the media, museums, and in public discourse).
*/Transformations/ publishes only essays that focus on teaching.*
For submission guidelines, please go to
http://web.njcu.edu/sites/transformations/Content/default.asp
<https://webmail.exchange.njcu.edu/owa/redir.aspx?C=7f7a69afa69a4a3298abff14647e4b3b&URL=http%3a%2f%2fweb.njcu.edu%2fsites%2ftransformations%2fContent%2fdefault.asp>
Send submissions or inquiries in MLA format (7th ed.) as attachments in
MS Word or Rich Text format to: Jacqueline Ellis and Ellen Gruber
Garvey, Editors, transformations@njcu.edu
<https://webmail.exchange.njcu.edu/owa/redir.aspx?C=7f7a69afa69a4a3298abff14647e4b3b&URL=mailto%3atransformations%40njcu.edu>
Author(s) name and contact information
should be included on a SEPARATE page.
For submission guidelines go to
http://web.njcu.edu/sites/transformations/Content/default.asp
<https://webmail.exchange.njcu.edu/owa/redir.aspx?C=7f7a69afa69a4a3298abff14647e4b3b&URL=http%3a%2f%2fwww.njcu.edu%2fassoc%2ftransformations>
Possible topics for articles:
* Defining popular culture
* Popular culture as a pedagogical tool
* Popular culture and technology
* History and popular culture
* Popular culture, memory, and nostalgia
* Media literacy
* Representations of race, class, and gender in popular culture
* Popular culture in K-12 classrooms
* Popular culture and the corporatization of education
* Subculture, handmade culture, independent culture
* Popular culture and sexuality
* Erasures and omissions in popular culture
* Popular culture and “normality”
* Reading popular culture
* Fandom and style
* Controversies in popular culture: pornography, violence
* Popular culture in national, transnational, and global contexts
* Consumption of popular culture, reading and using popular culture
Past issues of /Transformations/ include: Teaching Feelings, Teaching
Digital Media, Teaching Sex, Teaching Earth, Teaching Nation, and
Teaching Performance. We encourage you to familiarize yourself with the
journal before submitting. Please visit our website to order previous
issues.
CALL FOR PAPERS
Mark Twain Panel
Ms. Jules A. Hojnowski
Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association Conference
October 10-12, 2013=20
Vancouver, WASHINGTON (across the Columbia River from Portland, Oregon – fl=
y into PDX!) at the Hilton Vancouver Washington
Mark Twain
The Western Residences of Mark Twain: Found in Fact or Fiction
This panel is focusing on Mark Twain’s “Residences” out west, converging on=
experiences or relationships while in that residence. Residences could in=
clude a friend’s home, an apartment, a room in a hotel or even a tent. Thi=
s could include works written by Mark Twain, or other authors writing about=
him.
This session invites academic papers, multi-media, or digital pieces on any=
aspect of Mark Twain’s “home” while he was in the west. =20
By March 1, 2013, email or regular mail 300-word abstracts with the requisi=
te information as noted in the RMMLA call for papers guidelines, http://rm=
mla.wsu.edu/conferences/presenters.asp
to Mrs. Jules A. Hojnowski, at JAH11@cornell.edu or 1690 Trumansburg Rd, It=
haca, NY 14850
*****
SAMLA 2013: Humor in the Digital Age
The American Humor Studies Association seeks papers for a panel, “Humor in the Digital Age,” for the 2013 South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA) Conference at the Marriott Atlanta from November 8-10. This panel will examine how the rise of new media (including social media, content-sharing sites, and blogs) has created new contexts for the production, distribution, and exhibition of humor. We welcome papers on humor and comedy as it is employed in viral videos, blogs or vlogs, web series, webisodes, parodies, participatory culture online, memes, or remixes. Papers may cover individual talents Andy Borowitz of The Borowitz Report, Grace Helbig of DailyGrace, Jenna Marbles, Khyan Mansley, Maddox, Tucker Max; groups Derrick Comedy and the Gregory Brothers (“Auto-Tune the News”); sites College Humor, Funny or Die, The Onion, and Stuff White People Like; social media Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter; and other “genres” like mommy blogs, movie trailer recuts, trending hashtags (#firstworldproblems, #drunknatesilver).Prospective panelists could also consider how humorists and comedians/comediennes use websites and social media to connect with their audiences, attract new fans, and disseminate their brand of humor. The overall goal is to examine how digital media technologies either democratize or restrict the creation and distribution of innovative comedy, examining key problems and possibilities posed by new media for the tradition of American humor. Please send inquiries and proposals of 250 words to Pete Kunze atpkunze@lsu.edu by May 1, 2013.
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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.
American Literature Association
Boston, May 23-26, 2013The Mark Twain Circle of America invites proposals for individual papers (15-20 minutes) for sessions it will sponsor at the 2013 ALA conference in Boston, May 23-26, 2013.1.“ Mark Twain and History.” This topic may be broadly considered including, but not limited to, Mark Twain’s writings about historical events, his writing set in earlier historical periods, his place in history, or his works in relation to other historical figures.2. Open topic: The topics are entirely open, provided they are Twain related.Send your proposal (1-2 page abstract) to Linda Morris no later than January 15, 2013: lamorris@ucdavis.edu
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We are just a year away from Elmira 2013: The Seventh International
Conference on the State of Mark Twain Studies. The Call for Papers has
been posted on the web. Google Elmira 2013 Call for Papers for
information about submitting a Developed Abstract of 700 words — due
Monday, February 4th, 2013. Final papers must be suitable for a
20-minute presentation. Please send your attached abstract, via
electronic submission, to bsnedecor@elmira.edu. Provide your name,
mailing address, and email address. Developed abstracts will be
reviewed anonymously for acceptance by selected panel chairs.
We look forward to greeting you in Elmira on August 1 through 4, 2013.
Title: Humor & Horror/SF/Fantasy
Location: Missouri
Date: 2013-04-30
Description: Dear Humor & Horror/SF/Fantasy Scholars, this is your
invitation to SUBMIT to the Midwest Popular Culture
Association/American Culture Association annual meetings in St.
Louis, MO, from Friday through Sunday, October 11-13, 2013.
Going too far in these genre may actually just be considered a
good st …
Contact: jdowell@msu.edu
URL: submissions.mpcaaca.org
Announcement ID: 202555
http://www.h-net.org/announce/**show.cgi?ID=202555<http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=202555>
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Abject Comedy
Division: Film
Exploring abjection in screen comedy. Are comedies of embarrassment, excess, or awkwardness a new development toward the abject, or a continuation of comedy’s traditional relationship to the body? 300-word abstract by 15 March 2013; Nicholas Sammond (nic.sammond@utoronto.ca) and Paul Young (paul.d.young@vanderbilt.edu).
http://www.mla.org/cfp_detail_6157
The 2012 ISHS Conference was held from June 25-29, 2012 at Jagiellonian University in Poland. We hope you were able to attend.
The 2013 ISHS Conference is scheduled for July 2-6, 2013 at William and Mary University in Virginia. You can register for the conference at the following link: http://www.cvent.com/events/25th-international-society-for-humor-studies-conference-2013/event-summary-e7aefa94dc5b4a4b9acd4eb8c0aaf548.aspx .
Contact Larry Ventis: wlveng@wm.edu .
The 2014 ISHS Conference is scheduled for July 7-11, 2014 in Utrecht, Netherlands. Contact Sibe Doosje: S.Doosje@fss.uu.nl .
In the following web site you will find PowerPoints related to “Linguistic Humor and Language Play,” and also PowerPoints related to “Linguistic Humor Across the Disciplines”: http://www.public.asu.edu/~dnilsen .
If you are a member of ISHS, you can obtain information about past and future ISHS conferences in Martin Lampert’s ISHS web site:www.humorstudies.org .
*****
The Mark Twain Circle has the following calls for papers for MLA 2014
(Chicago, January 2014):
1. Mark Twain’s Style(s)–Analysis of Twain’s style, in either fiction or
nonfiction. Preference will be given to papers that break new ground or
challenge old assumptions.
2. Beyond Huck and Puddn’head: Mark Twain and Race–Examinations of Mark
Twain and racial issues in works other than the two most commonly analyzed
texts, Huckleberry Finn and Puddn’head Wilson.
Send 300-word abstracts to me at the address below by March 15, 2013.
Presenters must be members of both MLA and the Mark Twain Circle (can join
after paper is accepted.) Further details will be posted soon to the
circle’s new website: http://marktwaincircle.org/
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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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)
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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
*******
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.
American Humor Studies Association 