Below is a round-up of CFPs for sessions at this year's MLA Convention
in San Diego (27-30 December). Further details at:
<http://www.mla.org/>. Topics: Germanic Philology; German Literature
to 1700; Brecht; Goethe; Ironic Enlightenment; Kant's Political Theory
and the Literary Imagination; Photography and Memory in Contemporary
German Literature.

------- Forwarded message follows -------
From: Paul Bennett <[log in to unmask]>

Modern Language Association Annual Convention

Short Title: MLA
Location: San Diego, CA, United States of America
Date: 27-Dec-2003 - 30-Dec-2003
Call Deadline: 24-Mar-2003

Web Site: http://www.mla.org
Contact Person: Marc Pierce
Meeting Email: [log in to unmask]

The Discussion Group for Germanic Philology will be sponsoring a
session at this year's MLA convention. Faculty, graduate students, and
independent scholars are invited to submit abstracts for papers on any
linguistic or philological aspect of any historical or modern Germanic
language or dialect, including English (to the Early Modern period) and
the extra-territorial varieties. Papers from a range of linguistic
subfields, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax,
semantics, sociolinguistics, language acquisition, contact, and change,
as well as differing theoretical approaches, are welcome. Please submit
abstracts electronically to Marc Pierce at <[log in to unmask]>, or send
an e-mail to ask for more information.
___________________________________________________

From: Stefani Engelstein <[log in to unmask]>

CALL FOR PAPERS - 2003 MLA CONVENTION, 27 - 30. December, SAN DIEGO, CA
The MLA Division for German Literature to 1700 invites abstracts for
papers to be delivered at the 2003 MLA conference from 27 - 30.
December in San Diego, California. There are two special topics
sessions and one open topic session. Please take a look at the special
topics below:

1) Power/Powerlessness: Textual Strategies, Social Phenomena. This
session will investigate themes such as power, powerlessness,
resistance, and marginalization as represented or inscribed in medieval
and early modern German texts, both literary and non-literary.

2) ROUNDTABLE Teaching Early Texts to New Generations: What is the
place of pre-modern literature in the current curriculum? Is there a
crisis, and if so, how do we make early texts relevant for students and
colleagues?

3) Open Topic:
Submissions are welcome on all aspects of medieval and early modern
German literature.

Please note that you must be a member in good standing of the MLA by 7
April 2003 in order to have your name listed in the conference program.

All Abstracts and inquiries, by MARCH 10, 2003, to
Ann Marie Rasmussen ([log in to unmask])

Ann Marie Rasmussen Direct Line/Voice Mail (919) 660 3173
German Department Fax (919)660 3166
116C Chemistry Bldg. Home (919)286 5850
Box 90256 Duke University
Durham, NC 27708-0256
___________________________________________________

From: Alan Ng <[log in to unmask]>

Forwarded from the International Brecht Society:

> Please note the upcoming submission deadlines for the two
> IBS-sponsored panels that will be held at the 2003 MLA in San Diego.
> Communications concerning the panels should be directed to their
> respective contacts.
>
> "Visual Culture and Brecht". Session sponsored by the International
> Brecht Society. Send abstract by March 24, 2003, to Stefan
> Soldovieri ([log in to unmask]).
>
> "Brecht's Essayistic Writing". Session sponsored by the
> International Brecht Society. Send abstract by March 24, 2003, to
> Astrid Oesmann ([log in to unmask]).
>
> Accepted participants will need to join the IBS before presenting,
> but anyone can send in a paper proposal.
___________________________________________________

From: Angela Borchert <[log in to unmask]>

PARODY: RE-VISIONING GOETHE

The Goethe Society of North America invites proposals for a panel on
the forms and functions of parody in and of Goethe’s work at the 2003
MLA Convention, 27-30 December in San Diego.

Goethe still provokes. 250 years after Nicolai remodeled the sorrows
into Die Freuden des jungen Werthers, Enzensberger wrote Nieder mit
Goethe! Eine Liebeserklärung. Parody challenges authority while
reinscribing it. No wonder that Goethe, who himself was an avid
practitioner of parody in his early career, later judges such
subversive transgressions ambivalently.

Parody seems to mark the intersections between invention and critique,
adaptation and revision, combination and competition, similarity and
difference. This panel is interested in re-visioning Goethe by
examining parodies in diverse media and from a broad range of
theoretical orientations and methodological approaches.

With a view to Goethe, papers might focus on the pragmatics of parody:
on effects ranging from ridicule to reverence, on forms from the comic
to the ironic or on contexts from the 18th to the 21st centuries.
Papers might consider Goethe in regards to a variety of parodistic
discourses including pastiche, travesty, satire, caricature or
burlesque. Papers might also explore more theoretical perspectives such
as those of Schlegel, Bakhtin, Deleuze, Genette, Kristeva or Hutcheon
in relation to Goethe and parody. Feminist perspectives are especially
welcome!

Panelists must be MLA members. Please submit 1-2 page proposals by
March 15th, 2003 to:

Angela Borchert
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures
University College 256
The University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario
N6A 3K7, Canada
E-Mail: [log in to unmask]
(paste-in message preferred)
Fax: (519) 661-4093
___________________________________________________

From: Karl Maurer <[log in to unmask]>

Call for Papers for a panel sponsored by the Lessing Society at the
Annual Convention of the Modern Language Association, December 27-30,
San Diego, CA

Panel Title: Ironic Enlightenment
Deadline for Submissions: 3/15/03

Some Lessing scholarship of recent decades has depicted Lessing as
aware of the limits of the Enlightenment project. These limits have
been identified in several, although related, ways: for example, as the
indefinite process of Enlightenment due to the perforce historically
contingent status of any given standpoint; or as the impossibility to
communicate about the conditions of communication itself. The image of
Lessing as a proponent of a self-doubting Enlightenment poses the
question of irony in his writings and in their relation to the works of
other authors. Is Enlightenment an impossibility which Lessing only
promotes ironically; or is irony itself functionalized to enable
Enlightenment to continue despite its own undermining? How is Lessing's
irony different from, or similar to, ironic elements in some
contemporary theoretical discourses?

Papers should address these and related questions, possible topics may
include, but are not limited to: teleology, religion, pedagogy,
tolerance, history, metaphor, tragedy, and ironic exchanges between
Lessing and his contemporaries.

Inquiries are welcome. Please mail or E-mail one-page proposals by
3/15/2003 to

Karl-Heinz Maurer
Campus Box K-121
Knox College
2 E South St.
Galesburg, IL 61401-4999
[log in to unmask]
Office phone: 309-341-7290
___________________________________________________

From: thelon <[log in to unmask]>

MLA Special Session Proposal: Call for Papers for the 2003 Convention
in San Diego

Kant's Political Theory and the Literary Imagination

We invite papers that examine Kant's political theory and its impact in
philosophy, the sphere of political practice and/or the German literary
imagination. Possible topics include but are not limited to; Kant and
the French revolution, Kant and the political dimensions of German
Idealism, Kant's role in the development of Romanticism, Nietzsche
versus Kant, the political implications of Neo-Kantianism, the role of
Kant's political thought in German philosophy early in the twentieth
century via Lebensphilosophie, phenomenology or fundamental ontology.
In addition we are particularly interested in seeing papers that treat
the implications of Kant's political theory with regard to the
development of globalization.

Please send abstracts no longer than one page to Joel Freeman at
[log in to unmask] or [log in to unmask] by March 26.
___________________________________________________

From: Susanne Lenne <[log in to unmask]>

CALL FOR PAPERS

PHOTOGRAPHY AND MEMORY
IN CONTEMPORARY GERMAN LITERATURE

Proposals are invited for a Special Session at the 2003 MLA Convention,
27-30 December in San Diego.

Through the last two decades, questions of memory have been both
subject of scholarly scrutiny as well as of creative works. To a large
extent, these attempt to negotiate the remembering of major traumatic
historical events, above all the Holocaust. Although approaches and
discourses vary greatly, the reliability of memory in the
reconstruction of individual and collective histories remains a
principle concern. At the same time, historical facts alone appear to
be insufficient in the recollection and representation of the past.

Almost contrary to the suspicions towards a “historical truth”, the
need to authenticate experience seems greater than ever. Particularly
over the last decade, German language autobiographical and
fictionalized accounts of past lives, events, and places have appeared
that engage the reader in an often unsettling dialogue with photographs
and text as they propel a confrontation with the forgotten or
repressed.

This Call for Papers invites proposals investigating the highly complex
relationships between photography and memory in contemporary German
language literature. How does photography function in these literary
texts? What are the present-day implications of such works? Papers may
wish to explore questions of authorship, agency, authenticity and
authentication, reference, representation, post-memory, narrative
forms, trauma, melancholy, postmodernism, individual vs. collective
history, death, absences etc.

Papers taking interdisciplinary approaches are especially welcome.
Panelists must be MLA members by 7 April.

Please submit a one-page proposal and a CV by March 10th, 2003 to

Susanne Lenné
Dept. of German Studies
University of Cincinnati
P.O. Box 210372
Cincinnati, OH 45221-0372
Email: [log in to unmask]