NEWS 

CCL Session at MLA 2018 | New York

CALL FOR PAPERS: “The Secular and the Literary”

Convened by Caleb D. Spencer & Mark Eaton

In the wake of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, many scholars have begun to think about the ways that religious beliefs, experiences, and affects have been sublimated in unusual places. John A. McClure, Amy Hungerford, Tracey Fessenden, and Jared Hickman have each separately argued against seeing various authors’ works as secular fictions, suggesting instead that they are representative of a “postsecular” outlook in late-modern culture. According to McClure, the “postsecular” is a “mode of being and seeing that is at once critical of secular constructions of reality and of dogmatic religiosity” (McClure ix). These partial faiths, in McClure’s formulation, represent a third way between religious dogmatism on one hand and militant secularism on the other. Similarly, Hungerford has suggested that writers such as Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, and others have appropriated the cultural authority and discursive power of religion, but without wholly embracing a traditional religious point of view. Yet it remains unclear just how much the “secular” has been abandoned as the dominant critical framework of literary studies. As Peter Coviello and Jared Hickman write in an introduction to a special issue of American Literature, “the things we kill off tend not to disappear. They have a mysterious tenacity, afterlives not easily reckoned with. Just so, it is our sense that, here in the aftermath of the demise of the secularization thesis, we are only now beginning to grasp how deeply we remain in it: how shaped our conceptual frameworks are, down to their most elemental premises, by secularization” (646). Attending to the ways that literary studies and literature have advanced, altered, or intercepted the conversation about the secular and the literary, this panel seeks to address questions such as: What is the place of the literary within the history and formation of the secular? What histories of the field, discipline, or literary object might have purchase on the secular/religion binary? If that binary has outlived its usefulness, what might replace it? We are also interested in critical engagements with those modes of analysis that have become most prominent in so-called postsecular literary studies, from the turn to religion and the presumed demise of secularization theory to the political and ethical implications of naming something (a text, an era, a methodology) postsecular. Does the term “post-secular,” which has begun to appear with some frequency, describe anything more than an academic trend? Papers should advance the conversation about the secular and the literary.

Papers or Abstracts and CV should be sent by March 1, 2017 to cspencer@apu.edu.

Special Session MLA 2018 | New York

"Kathleen Norris: Torpor and Memoir"

Please consider submitting an abstract for the Conference on Christianity and Literature’s proposed panel for the 2018 MLA Convention in New York City. Kathleen Norris will be reading and commenting on her work at this panel.

Kathleen Norris has typically been celebrated for her unexpected discoveries of the spiritual in the regional (Dakota) and the mysterious in the quotidian (The Cloister Walk). However, as Acedia and Me makes clear, such moments of intensified perception are the hard-earned counterpoint to her struggle with profound indifference. This inability to care may take the form of debilitating melancholy on a personal level and frustrating paralysis on an artistic level, but Norris also recognizes that it underlies a pernicious apathy that threatens to make heart-sick an entire nation. This panel seeks to explore the often-ignored torpor that has darkened, complicated, and animated Norris's works.
As contributors examine the relationship between acedia and the various works that comprise Norris's ongoing spiritual autobiography, they may want to focus on how acedia in Norris underwrites her explorations of writing, faith, and such temporary homeplaces as South Dakota, Vermont, New York, Minnesota, and Hawaii. They may want to connect Norris's sense of acedia with various traditions in women's autobiography, spiritual writing, and critical theory. They may want to read Norris by way of dialogue with such writers as Emily Dickinson, Flannery O'Connor, Marilynne Robinson, Annie Dillard, and Mary Oliver. They may want to view Norris's struggle with acedia in terms of other religious traditions that have recognized the same torpor. Or they may want to use any approach that usefully interrogates the malaise with which Norris has struggled as a woman, believer, and writer.
Please send abstracts (250 words) to Gary Ciuba <gciuba@kent.edu> by March 1, 2017.

CCL at MLA 2015 | Vancouver

see more

CCL at MLA 2014 | Chicago

see more