Call for papers
Boundary Conditions in Netherlandish
Literature, Language and Culture
5–8 January 2017, Philadelphia
Sessions organized by the MLA Dutch Forum
At the 2017 convention of the Modern Language Association of America, the MLA Dutch Forum will organize one or more sessions on the 2017 MLA Presidential theme ‘Boundary Conditions’. The convention will be held from 5–8 January, in Philadelphia, one of the earliest Dutch settlements in North America.
The 2017 MLA president Kwame Anthony Appiah described the theme ‘Boundary Conditions’ as follows:
Boundary conditions are, for mathematicians, the parameters that define the space in which one seeks solutions. So the theme offers, first, an invitation to reflect together on the parameters that determine our work. Our boundary conditions are sometimes spatial, sometimes identitarian, sometimes disciplinary and subdisciplinary, and boundaries themselves are sites of artistic production and of scholarship. As students of language and literature increasingly cross national boundaries, physically and virtually, we face new questions about composition and critical analysis, second-language pedagogy, translation, and the ideas of global literature and transnational cultural studies. How do our new boundary conditions affect our understanding of the projects of literary and cultural studies? How do new forms of communication—online education, digital libraries, blogs, hypertext, machine translation, social media, and new tools of textual analysis—reshape the boundary conditions of our work? And how are these boundary conditions affected by the new material circumstances in our universities—the growth of the precariat, challenges from opponents of liberal education, clashing conceptions of freedom of expression?
We believe that the theme of ‘Boundary Conditions’ is a particularly fruitful one in the context of scholarship on the history and culture of the Low Countries. We therefore invite papers that analyse boundary conditions (linguistic, geographical, mental, cultural, generic, disciplinary,…) in any aspect of Netherlandish literature, language and culture.
If you are interested in presenting a paper during one of the MLA Dutch sessions, please send a 250-word abstract by 15 March 2016 to Samuel.Mareel@UGent.be.
More information on the MLA 2017 convention can be found on the MLA website:
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