Proposal Special Session. New Approaches to Existentialism and the Absurd (MLA 2017, Philadelphia)

MLA 2017: Proposal Special Session:

New Approaches to Existentialism and the Absurd

(Philadelphia, PA, USA)

We would like to announce a call for papers for our panel proposal for the 2017 MLA conference (Phladelphia, PA, January 5-8, 2017). This panel will explore new approaches to the study of the existentialist and absurdist movements in the 20th century.  We invite proposals for papers that rethink these movements in light of recent scholarship related to gender, race, ecology, transnationalism, and immigration. We welcome papers that rethink issues at the heart of these two movements: the category of the Other, the search for meaning in the world and its environment, freedom and oppression, the political and the private. We are also interested in how these movements have been in dialogue with each other. Finally, this session will consider how wartime immigration and exile, as well as interrelated movements towards civil rights and decolonization, prompted twentieth-century writers to become more transnational and transcultural in their outlook, resulting in increasingly diverse strains of existentialism and the absurd.  

Please send a 300-word abstract and 1-page CV by 15 March 2016; Lauren Du Graf (lgraf2@jhu.edu) and Julia Elsky (jelsky@luc.edu).