Reconfiguring Boundaries Shaping the Self

Reconfiguring Boundaries: Shaping the Self in 20th Century French and Francophone Literature

Northeast Modern Language Association

40th Anniversary Convention

Hyatt Regency

Boston, Massachusetts

February 26 - March 1, 2009

How do bodily states, influenced as they are by mental states, figure into definitions of self and other, inside and outside, native or foreign? How are boundaries drawn between a social body and its outcasts? How does the physical self adapt to external (or internal) change?

This panel seeks papers that examine fictional selves in all their complex figurations: as gendered selves, aesthetic selves, melancholy selves, as well as diseased bodies, disfigured bodies, aging bodies, innocent bodies, or bodies at war with themselves.

Please send 250-word abstracts to Alina Opreanu (opreanu@fas.harvard.edu) and Loren Wolfe (lwolfe@fas.harvard.edu) by September 15, 2008. Abstracts and papers may be in English or French. Please include the following in your e-mail: name and university affiliation, postal address, telephone number.

Interested participants may submit abstracts to more than one NeMLA panel; however panelists can only present one paper.

Access the complete Call for Papers at www.nemla.org.