CFP: AJLS 2009 "RETHINKING GENDER IN THE POSTGENDER ERA" (Rutgers, NJ; 1 June; 6-8 Nov)

The Eighteenth Annual Meeting
RETHINKING GENDER IN THE POSTGENDER ERA
November 6-8, 2009
Rutgers University

CALL FOR PAPERS
Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own (1977) proposed a three-stage
model of the growth of feminist theory, beginning with an androgynist
poetics, then a feminist critique and female aesthetic, and finally gender
criticism. If feminist theory could but explain gender relations, the
promise of eliminating inequality between the sexes seemed within reach.
Perhaps contrary to Showalter’s expectations, the trajectory of gender
studies in the intervening three decades has moved it away from feminist
theory and in other directions.

Several forces motivated this shift, including the theoretical focus on
gender identity and sexual difference in the 1980s, and the growing
perception in the 1990s that gender was also a men’s issue. Gayle Rubin’s
“Thinking Sex” (1984) rejected the feminist assumption that sexuality is
simply derived from gender and argued that gender relations alone could not
account for the complexity of sexual behaviors. Judith Butler, in Gender
Trouble (1990), further identified subversive strategies of gendered
performance, such as parody and drag, as central to understanding how the
codes of gender work in creating normative and non-normative identities. The
recent postgenderism movement, galvanized by Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg
Manifesto (1991), advocates the voluntary rejection of biologically or
socially normative sexual and gender identities altogether in favor of an
understanding of human fulfillment outside the bounds of the male/female,
man/woman binary.

In the context of Japanese literary and visual culture, scholarship on
gender reflects a close engagement with these trends and is producing
numerous new critical approaches and concepts. Studies have addressed topics
such as: literary “intersexuality,” defined as representations of
ambivalence towards or rejection of categories of sex; the “postgender”
phenomenon of ambiguously gendered or ambiguously sexed bodies in popular
media; and narrative constructions of gender as a complex and porous
“labyrinth” rather than a simple binary; to name but a few.
This conference begins with a set of questions: How do texts and images work
to create gender identities or postgender alternatives to them, and for what
purposes? How are those gender or postgender identities related to or
distinct from sexual, national, ethnic, and other identities? What is the
history of these questions we inherit, and how does that history complicate
our attempts to address Japanese literary and visual culture? Conversely,
what questions has Japanese literary and visual culture raised about gender,
and how can they challenge our inherited set of questions?
The 2009 AJLS Conference at Rutgers welcomes proposals that approach gender
in innovative ways and examine its relationship to, or intersection with,
any issue relevant to Japanese literary and visual culture:

� Femininity and masculinity; their construction, representation,
performance
� Female and male authorship
� “Voice” in oral performance, such as biwa h�shi, ningyo j�ruri, kabuki,
etc.
� Readership; who reads what, and why
� Escaping the limitations of gender binary: gender bending, gender
blending, postgenderism
� Literary genres: travel diaries, detective fiction, etc.
� Media analysis: film, theater, and anime
� Race and ethnicity
� Rhetoric and ideology of nationalism, including the production of national
language
� Rhetoric of desire (for example, within the triangular relationship as
described by Rene Girard)
� Construction of pre-modern or modern subjectivities and identities
� Normative and non-normative sexualities
� Place, space, landscape
� Japan and Japaneseness
� Diaspora

Papers and panels are especially welcome that address the life and literary
legacy of Oba Minako (1930-2007).
Deadline is June 1, 2009 for receipt of abstracts of no more than 250 words
on these and other questions. We welcome individual submissions as well as
three- or four-person panel proposals. Abstracts should be submitted by
e-mail attachment and must include the presenter’s name, institutional
affiliation, and e-mail address. (You may use the proposal form included in
the electronic version of our newsletter). In the case of panel proposals,
the organizer of the panel should send a cover sheet briefly explaining the
panel’s unifying rationale along with the abstracts for each paper and the
name of a chair and a discussant. Presentations will be organized in 1-hour
time blocks. The conference languages are English and Japanese.

Proposals should be submitted to: ajls2009.rutgers at gmail.com
All other correspondence may be directed to the organizers: Paul Schalow
schalow at rci.rutgers.edu or Janet Walker
jwalk at rci.rutgers.edu

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PAPER/PANEL PROPOSAL FORM
DEADLINE: June 1, 2009
Title:


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Name and Status:


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Institution:


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Address:





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Telephone:

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Fax:

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E-mail:

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Please attach your 250-words proposal to this form and send to:
ajls2009.rutgers at gmail.com
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Summer Program in Advanced and Classical Japanese (Kyoto; 1 Mar; June 1-July 14)

The Kyoto Consortium of Japanese Studies (KCJS) is pleased to announce its new Summer Program in Advanced and Classical Japanese. This six-week program offers intensive training in advanced and classical Japanese for highly motivated undergraduate and graduate students who have completed three years of Japanese or the equivalent. Eight points of credit are awarded on a Columbia University transcript upon completion of the program.

Language instruction will be provided by the regular faculty of KCJS,
which is now in its 20th year as a highly successful junior-year-
abroad program in Kyoto, and by visitors from member schools of the
KCJS consortium. For the summer of 2009, Introduction to Classical
Japanese will be taught by Professor Jamie Newhard of Washington
University in St. Louis.

Classes will be small, with 5-7 students in each of the three sections
of modern Japanese, and an anticipated 10-15 in classical Japanese.
Field trips, guest lectures, and other activities that utilize Kyoto's
rich cultural resources complement classroom instruction.

In 2009, the program will begin on June 1 and end on July 14 (just
prior to the Gion Festival). The program fee is $3,750, and limited
financial support is available from KCJS; the program should also be
eligible for summer language support for graduate students. The
application deadline is March 1, 2009.

For further details about the program, please visit http://kcjssummer.columbia.edu

CFP: The Construction of "Memory" in Asia, EAA (journal; 20 Dec; spring 2009)

Remember that EAA is looking for relatively short pieces aimed primarily to educators at the secondary and undergraduate level. A number of EALC students have published in this journal. It's a great way to get your feet wet, if you haven't already.

Call for Manuscripts: The Construction of "Memory" in Asia, EAA Spring 2009

Education About Asia (EAA) is the peer-reviewed teaching journal of the
Association for Asian Studies. Our readers include undergraduate
instructors as well as high school and middle school teachers. Our
articles are intended to provide educators, who are often not specialists,
with basic understanding of Asia-related content. Manuscripts submitted
for consideration are evaluated by qualified referees.

We are in the process of developing a special section in the spring 2009
issue entitled "History, Literature, and the Construction of "Memory" in
Asia." It is hoped that articles will be published where authors develop
manuscripts that will enable teachers and students to better understand
how academic and popular historical narratives and works of literature
influence the way Asians perceive their past and those of other cultures.
Manuscripts will also be considered where authors address how history and
literature influence a non-Asian's perception of Asia. I am looking for
essays that will be particularly applicable to educated non-specialists.
We are especially interested in obtaining more manuscripts that focus upon
South and Southeast Asia.

Prospective authors should be aware that approximately sixty percent of
our readers are secondary or middle school teachers and the rest teach at
the undergraduate level. Therefore, we are most interested in manuscripts
that are useful for survey-level courses.

Prospective authors should consult the EAA guidelines, available on the
Web site under my signature, before submitting a manuscript for this
special section. Prospective authors are also encouraged to share possible
manuscript ideas with me via email. The deadline for initial receipt of
manuscripts for this special section is December 20, 2008.


Cordially,
Lucien Ellington
Editor, Education About Asia
302 Pfeiffer Stagmaier Hall
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Chattanooga, TN 37403
Phone (423) 425-2118, Fax (423) 425-5441
email: l-ellington at comcast.net
Web Site: http://www.aasianst.org/

CFP: Midwest Conference on Literature, Language, and Media (2 Jan; 20-21 Mar; Dekalb, Illinois))

The 17th annual Midwest Conference on Literature, Language, and Media (MCLLM) will be held March 20-21, 2009 at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois.
MCLLM invites papers on all areas of literary, language, and media studies, especially proposals that interrogate identity and its representation through the prism of literature, language, or media in all their diverse contexts.

Deadline for submission: January 2, 2009.
Please include a cover page with your name, affiliation, mailing address, and e-mail address.
Accepted contributions will be notified via e-mail by January 19, 2009.
Please submit your 250 word (one page) abstract as an attachment to mcllm2009@gmail.com

Proposals are being solicited for fifteen minute papers from scholars at all career stages, from beginning graduate students to established and senior scholars.

Individual or panel proposals are welcome.

Contact Conference Co-Chairs: Alisa Smith-Riel, Ellen Stuart, and Paul Petrovic
Graduate Department of English
Northern Illinois University
Email: mcllm2009 at gmail com
Visit the website at http://www.engl.niu.edu/mcllm/

CFP: "Rethinking Visual Narratives from Asia: Intercultural and Comparative Perspectives" (5 Sept; 8-9 June; Hong Kong)

The Department of Fine Arts at the University of Hong Kong will host an nternational conference on Rethinking Visual Narratives from 8-9 June 2009. The conference will bring together approximately fifteen scholars presenting new and original research to discuss how visual narratives function in different cultures and exploring connections and interactions between the arts of Asia and that of Asia and the West. The papers and discussion will consolidate academic understanding of visual narrative theories and augment them through analysis of their potential as a tool for exploring inter-cultural interactions and questioning cross-cultural assumptions. The focus will be on the visual with a cross-cultural dimension and dating to any time period within a broadly defined art historical discipline and material culture studies.

Possible panel topics include, but are not limited to –
The place of narrative: architecture and the disposition of imagery Theories of narration
Word and image: illustration and interpretation
Printed texts and images: semiotic dialogue
The social embeddedness of narrative
Narratology
The role of non-narrative or anti-narrative elements in imagery

Papers will be hosted on the conference website by the end of April 2009. It is expected that a conference proceedings will be published.

Abstracts due on 5 September 2008 by email to -

Dr. Alexandra Green
Research Assistant Professor
Department of Fine Arts, University of Hong Kong
Email: greenar_ _hkucc.hku.hk

CFP: AJLS 17th Annual Mtg: "Parody" (1 Apr; 19-21 Aug; Vancouver)

The Seventeenth Annual Meeting
"Parody"
August 19-21, 2008
University of British Columbia

Call for Papers
As defined by Linda Hutcheon and other recent literary theorists, parody is "imitation with a critical difference, not always at the expense of the parodied text" (A Theory of Parody, 7). Because of parody's perceived "critical difference," it has been elevated in Anglo-European literary scholarship above other, similar tropes that draw connections
between disparate texts in terms of content or form, such as pastiche,
allusion and simulacra, which are seen as playful and apolitical at best
(as in Hutcheon's own discussion of pastiche), and politically dangerous
at worst (as in Jameson's discussion of the simulacrum).

In the context of Japanese literature and art, much attention has been
drawn to the frequency of allusion and intertextuality, but it remains
largely unrelated to distinctions between simple pastiche, allusion,
and/or parody in their critical senses. Consideration of the nature of
Japanese intertextuality in various genres and time periods raises a
host of questions:

. How can we determine whether what we read as simple allusion, such as
honkadori in a waka, might have had true parodic force to its original
audience? To what extent does the readers' horizon of experience
determine what distinguishes (valorized) parody and (merely formulaic)
allusion? Does a literature of parody (or some other kind of
intertextuality) require a small, homogeneous, and contemporaneous
audience to be appreciated?

. What is the relationship between form and substance in a work of
literature or art, and does a parody of form (as frequently seen in
Japanese examples) have the same function as a parody of substance? Does
Japanese literature and art prize form over substance, as some critics
have claimed, and, if so, does that change the way parody should be
conceptualized in the Japanese case?

. How has parodic intertextuality been used in times of censorship or
political oppression to produce subversive messages?

. Gender parody appears in the literature and art of many periods of
Japanese cultural production. What is its function in different
contexts? Does its meaning depend on the readership? Is it subversive or
merely playful? How can we tell? What does such parody tell us about
gender conceptualization?

. Can we consider parody in literary or artistic texts without reviving
the idea of authorial intention?

. Does the ubiquity of intertextuality in Japanese literary forms
indicate a lack of originality, and what value do we as critics place on
the Romantic ideal of the artistic genius producing original work?

. Because tropes such as parody and pastiche are sometimes considered
hallmarks of a postmodern aesthetic, what would an examination of
Japanese literary and artistic parody suggest about definitions of the
premodern, modern and postmodern in Japan?

. Is it only parody ("repetition with a critical difference") that
should be valorized by critics looking for social/political significance
in a text (as is largely the case in Anglo-European criticism), or does
the Japanese literary use of multiple forms of intertextuality suggest
other possible theorizations of the relationship between text and society?

Deadline for receipt of abstracts of no more than 250 words on these and
other questions is April 1, 2008. We welcome individual submissions as
well as three- or four-person panel proposals. Presentations will be
organized in 3-hour time-blocks. The conference languages are English
and Japanese. Papers and panels on both Japanese verbal and visual
culture are welcome.

Proposals should be submitted electronically to: ubcajls@gmail.com
All other correspondence may be directed to the organizers:
Joshua Mostow (jmostow@intherchange.ubc.ca) or
Sharalyn Orbaugh (sorbaugh@interchange.ubc.ca).
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PAPER/PANEL PROPOSAL FORM
"Parody"
DEADLINE: April 1, 2008
Title:

____________________________________________________________________________
Name and Status:

____________________________________________________________________________
Institution:

____________________________________________________________________________
Address:

____________________________________________________________________________
Telephone: Fax:E-mail:

____________________________________________________________________________
Please attach your 250-word proposal to this form and send to:
ubcajls@gmail.com

CFP: 16th Annual Meeting of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies (15 May; 2-4 Nov; Princeton)

This is a reminder that the deadline for submission of abstracts for the
16th Annual Meeting of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies to
be held at at Princeton University is *May 15, 2007. *

The 16th Annual Meeting of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies

Princeton University, November 2-4, 2007

"Literature and Literary Theory"

What is literature? What is literary theory? What are the boundaries of
/Japanese/ literature? /Japanese/ literary theory? Discussions on
these questions are inexhaustible yet unavoidable in our study. These
basic questions govern our practices because they define our discipline
as well as our approaches to our objects of inquiry. In Japan and
elsewhere, historical contingencies have defined and redefined*
*"literature" and "literary theory"; numerous theoretical trends have
further configured and reconfigured the contours of "literature." The
categories "Japan" and "Japanese" too have gone through much
transformation, further complicating this line of inquiry. This
three-day conference will revisit these basic questions and attempt to
rigorously explore the foundation of our study.

As Michel Foucault has shown, literature as we know it now is a 19^th
Century invention. But works we categorize under the rubric
"literature" have existed since time immemorial and across the globe.
Various approaches have been taken to theorize literary works: in
premodern Japan, we have, for example, a variety of /karon/ (poetic
theories)* *such as the famous "Preface"* *to the /Kokinshu-/ by Ki no
Tsurayuki and other genre-specific treatises such as those on /renga/
(linked verse) and /haiku/. Discussions of prose narratives have also*
*appeared* *throughout history. Western literature, aesthetics, and
philosophy entered Japan of the modern period, and literature took a
dramatic turn: the discipline of "literature" was produced, along with a
new sense of aesthetics and new attitudes toward expression and form.
Whether in the premodern or modern era, theories thus not only offered
paradigms* *by which to compose and interpret their putative* *literary
objects, but they often arose out of complex negotiations* *with the*
*varying forces of history.

The above questions* *cannot be divorced from the more recent
theoretical trends, evidenced in the surge of theories* *that we often
categorize under the blanket term "postmodernism" that have further
reconfigured our literary practices: these include post-structuralism,
postcolonialism, feminism, queer theory,* *and other* *theories of
gender and sexuality to name a few. Many such movements have questioned
the basic tenets of our past and present literary studies and hence the
boundaries of "literature." How do these theoretical perspectives*
*define Japanese literature? What are their strengths and weaknesses?
What are the main theoretical issues governing our study for literature
today? This conference hopes to address such issues and more.

The scope of inquiry will range from ancient writings to contemporary
texts. We hope the participants will explore a variety of issues,
including but not limited to:

* Recent theoretical trends: their possibilities and limits
* Historical changes in how we perceive literature and literary
theory in Japan
* The transformation of the role of the author and his/her relation
to the literary production in the history of Japanese literature
* Historical development of literary theory from the premodern to
modern times.
* Shifting boundaries of "Japan" and "Japanese-ness"
* The mutual relationship between theory and practice and how they
have evolved in the history of Japanese literature
* The relationship between a chosen mode of discourse and its "object"
* How theories of translation, cultural studies, and nationalism
engage with the production of Japanese cultural and literary
boundaries
* Relationship between history, memory, and literature in Japan
* Relationship between politics and literature in Japan
* "Anti-theory" and "pro-theory" in the study of Japanese literature


Deadline for receipt of abstracts of no more than 250 words is *May 15,
2007*. We welcome individual submissions as well as 3 or 4 person panel
proposals. To facilitate maximal audience participation, there will be
no formal discussants. Conference languages are English and Japanese.

Proposals should be submitted electronically to the conference website:
http://www.princeton.edu/ajls/

All other correspondence may be directed to the organizers Richard H.
Okada and Atsuko Ueda via the contact information listed below:

AJLS 2007
Department of East Asian Studies
211 Jones Hall
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544
ajls2007@princeton.edu

CFP: (Update) M/MLA

The Midwest Modern Language Association has posted many sessions soliciting
abstracts for the upcoming M/MLA Convention, held November 8-11 in
Cleveland. Please see http://www.uiowa.edu/~mmla/call_2007.html, where
details and contact information for each session is provided. The deadline
to submit an abstract to most panels is April 16, but some sections list
different dates.

Please direct any questions to:
Carolyn Jacobson
Midwest Modern Language Association
302 EPB
Univ. of Iowa
Iowa City, IA 52242-1408
mmla@uiowa.edu

Many more details are available online at http://www.uiowa.edu/~mmla.

The original EGO post can be found here.

CFP: Chinese Poetry Translations (Deadline: 15 Dec.)

basalt: A Journal of Fine and Literary Arts would like to receive
literary translations of contemporary Chinese poetry for our next
issue (April 2007), devoted to contemporary world poetry in
translation. Include up to five poems with original text and
translations, a brief biography of the poet, and permission from
the poet to translate his or her work. Send your submissions, with
SASE, to Jodi Varon and David Axelrod, editors, basalt, Eastern
Oregon University, One University Boulevard, La Grande, Oregon
97850 until December 15, 2006. Payment is two translator copies,
plus two copies for the poet. We will also consider short (500
words) prose pieces, documents, journals, and ephemera. To view
fuller guidelines for the special issue on translation, visit our
website:

http://www.eou.edu/artsci/basalt/index.html

We look forward to your submissions!