THE CONFERENCE ON CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE is an interdisciplinary society dedicated to exploring the relationships between Christianity and literature. Organized formally in 1956, CCL is dedicated to both scholarly excellence and collegial exchange and includes hundreds of members from a variety of academic institutions and religious traditions from the United States, Canada, and more than a dozen other countries.
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LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
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2019 LIONEL BASNEY AWARD
The Conference on Christianity and Literature is pleased to announce Sharon Kim as the winner of the 2019 Lionel Basney Award for her essay, “The Brokenness of Caesar’s Things: On the Unfinished Religious Novel by Zelda Fitzgerald,” published in Volume 68, Issue 2, of Christianity & Literature. The essay exemplarily practices the Christian narrative pattern and ethical imperative it exposits: redemptive recuperation. Kim takes up a novel, Caesar’s Things, surviving in fragments and often dismissed by critics as nonsensical product of a disturbed psyche; an author, Zelda Fitzgerald, taken seriously by scholars primarily as mythologized socialite and “muse and saboteur” (233) of her husband’s writing career, not as Christian convert during mental illness; and a literary modernism often seen as inimical to Christian faith and practice. Kim close-reads the novel to find formal cohesion in its Biblical narrative patterns of fall and redemption, thus establishing Fitzgerald’s authorial competence and the coherence of her faith. Under Kim’s scrutiny, Fitzgerald innovates intellectually and theologically, offering a revisionary account of modernism’s origins within the Christian faith; modernism’s problem is not the forms of its identity but its systematic rejection and effacement of its religious derivation. Committee members praised Kim’s essay for its close and responsible examination of manuscript fragments to build a case about Fitzgerald and her novel that has wide discipline-altering implications for modernist studies. Kim courageously ventures into sacrosanct territory “that even scholars have mythologized, not just the culture at large” and accomplishes a “significant revision of literary history undertaken within the scope of a single essay: . . . a turn towards faith by one of the canonical figures in modernism, and . . . that turn . . . a result of a kind of bottoming out of Bloomsbury.”
CCL for MLA 2022 | Washington, DC
Belief and Dante: Global perspectives on The Divine Comedy
2021 marks the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death and the completion of The Divine Comedy. The Conference on Christianity and Literature invites paper proposals for the 2022 MLA conference that consider the contemporary relevance of Dante’s work, across geographies, traditions, genres, and languages. In particular, this panel invites papers that seek to explore, interrogate, or clarify the stakes and status of belief itself, whether in Dante or in contemporary responses to the poem.
Details forthcoming
CCL at MLA 2021 | Toronto
Details forthcoming
CCL at MLA 2020 | Seattle
CCL at MLA 2019 | Chicago
CCL at MLA 2018 | New York
CCL at MLA 2017 | Philadelphia
CCL at MLA 2016 | Austin
CCL at MLA 2015 | Vancouver
CCL at MLA 2014 | Chicago
THE SCHOLARS OF LITERATURE AND RELIGION (SOLAR) NETWORK HAS LAUNCHED!
The Conference on Christianity & Literature is pleased to invite you to take advantage of this new tool from the Rivendell Center for Theology and the Arts (RCTA) at Yale University. This online directory is designed to serve both students and scholars working at the intersection of literature and religion. Find out more by clicking here.
2019 BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD
At the Modern Language Association 2020 in Seattle, CCL presented the 2019 Book-of-the-Year Award to Michael Mears Bruner for his book A Subversive Gospel: Flannery O'Connor and the Reimagining of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth (InterVarsity Press, 2017).
UPCOMING REGIONAL CONFERENCES
For announcements about upcoming CCL Regional Conferences, please click here.
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Any member of CCL may submit the name of a person to be considered for the award. All nominations are to be made in writing and submitted to the President no later than November 1. Each nomination should be accompanied by a brief letter of recommendation along with either a copy of the nominee’s cv or an equivalent biographical sketch; the latter documents may be supplied in electronic form or as links to web sites containing the information. The CCL Board of Directors will consider the nominations and conclude the selection process at its annual meeting in early January. For a list of the long line of distinguished recipients of the CCL Lifetime Achievement Award, please click here.
CCL FELLOWSHIPS AND GRANTS
For information about CCL Fellowships and Grants, please click here.
IMAGO DEI
Imago Dei: Poems from Christianity & Literature brings together a collection of poems reflecting on faith and art. The editor of the volume, Jill Baumgaertner, a poet herself, was President of CCL from 1999-2003. For more information, please click here
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