CALLS FOR PAPERS: MLA 2020, OCCITAN LLC FORUM
(1) Hospitality: Human and Inhuman in Medieval Occitania
(2) Animal Thinking
Dear colleagues,
The Occitan Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Forum of the Modern Language Association has just published
Calls For Papers for two Sessions at the MLA annual convention in January 2020 in Seattle. Both panels invite
reflections on the presidential theme of the convention, “Being Human,” and its subthemes.* Please consider
submitting an abstract, and please do share these calls with colleagues and students who might be interested.
(1) Hospitality: Human and Inhuman in Medieval Occitania
“Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.”
“Chacun appelle barbarie ce qui n’est pas de son usage.”
By examining the trope of hospitality and lives that matter in Occitan culture, this panel intends to inquire into
the Human and the Inhuman. It will investigate the terms of inclusion and ethical exchange between orthodoxy
and heterodoxy, heresy, and—as Lévi-Strauss put it—a return to a time when humans and animals were still able
to speak to each other. The MLA 2020 theme, “Being Human,” coincides with echoes of Montaigne in the oeuvre of
Lévi-Strauss—Histoire de lynx (1991), Nous sommes tous des cannibales (2013), etc.—and, considered as a whole, that
life work’s inclusion of a whole world, as a world as a whole, an “ecology” in the fullest sense: a sense of “home.”
Submissions might consider, for example: religion, language, environmental humanities; medicine and law; the
Albigensian Crusade and the Canso de la Crozada; borders, borderlands, and animals of the land, waters, air;
populations in movement and in flight, wandering poets, refugees, divided families, exiles; Jews, Muslims,
multilingualism, and cosmopolitanism in the western Mediterranean; cultural contacts, divisions, conflicts,
continuations; myth and mythopoesis; literary and cultural traditions that intersect with the medieval Occitan;
environment, place, belonging, rights and freedoms; destruction, annihilation, silence, creativity, song; identity, a
sense of place, refuge, hospitality, being.
Please send abstracts (250 words) by 20 March 2019 to Dr Juliet O'Brien, University of British Columbia
([email protected]).
MLA call for papers: https://mla.confex.com/mla/2020/webprogrampreliminary/Paper8956.html
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(2) Animal Thinking
This panel invites you to listen to the thought of animals in both textual and graphical representations in the
works and manuscripts of Occitan and associated cultures. Resonances of Kalila wa Dimna—central for endless
philosophers, including al-Ghâzâlî and Averroes—would encourage contributions from scholars of Arabic, the
Mediterranean, the Global Middle Ages, manuscript studies and book history, comics and graphic narratives,
philosophy, and/or ecocriticism and environmental humanities.
Submissions might consider, for example: animals thinking; thinking animals; thinking about animals; thinking
like animals and as animals; anthropomorphism and its discontents; the animal, the animate, anima; listening,
learning, understanding, comprehension, and entendemen
Please send abstracts (250 words) by 20 March 2019 to Dr Juliet O'Brien, UBC ([email protected] ) or Prof.
Jesús R. Velasco, Columbia University ([email protected]).
MLA call for papers: https://mla.confex.com/mla/2020/webprogrampreliminary/Paper8958.html
* “Being Human,” from https://www.mla.org/Convention/MLA-2020/2020-Presidential-Theme:
What has been the role of the creative imagination in marking out the social spaces of what we call
humanity? How has literature been called upon to bear witness to both the possibility and limits of the
human in the modern world? How has the human condition been thought and written about in diverse
historical periods and geographic spaces? Can literature and its criticism continue to inspire the desire
for human freedom in an age of intolerance? What is the role of a diverse community of writers and
readers in the thinking of the world and our relation to it?
[…] think about these questions from a range of perspectives—ethics and ethnicity, linguistics and literary
history, environmental studies, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, criticism, writing,
composition studies, pedagogy, public culture, and civic engagement.
• Defining the human: How is the human defined in the multiple languages and traditions we work in?
What is the relation of the human to the animal, the material, and the inanimate?
• Literature and human rights: How have writers and critics responded to old and new threats to the
rights of human beings? What is the relationship of texts and forms of suffering such as slavery,
racial oppression, colonialism, and gendered violence?
• Citizenship and belonging: In an age of increasing xenophobia and social division, can literature
provide a space of gathering, of the making of alternative communities? Can we come together in
texts and other spaces of reading?
• Technology and the new media: How are new technologies transforming the way we imagine and
think about the human? Has literary scholarship affected the conception of technology and its
service to humanity?
• Encounters in the classroom and workplace: How can we imagine more humane spaces of working
and teaching? Is a pedagogy of care possible in late industrial society?
• The public sphere: Does literature still have the capacity to transform the public sphere? How can we
use our skills as teachers and critics to engage a public outside the university and secure the place of
the humanities in a democratic culture?