Calls for Papers (Children’s Literature): MLA 2015, Vancouver, BC

Scholars of Children’s Literature, Young Adult Literature, Children’s Culture!  Attention! Here are some calls for papers, for the 2015 Modern Language Association, held from January 8 to 11, 2015, in Vancouver, British Columbia. All are sponsored or co-sponsored by the MLA’s Children’s Literature Division. Send in a proposal to one of the organizers!  Come to Vancouver! (Whether or not you present, do come to Vancouver, if you can. It’s a beautiful city — one of my favorite cities, in fact.)

Geography and Memory in Children’s and Young Adult Literature.  DUE 15 March 2014

Investigating the conference theme of “Negotiating Sites of Memory,” this panel considers the ideological and spatial implications of physical places depicted in children’s and young adult literature. The geographies of these texts demonstrate that constructions of places and people are related processes. In works for young people, the material and the social are mutually constitutive, shaping and reflecting environments that depend on the discursive and/or physical participation of child characters and child readers alike. Importantly, these geographies as produced through literature are imagined representations rather than tangible locations, a gap that explicitly invites the contributions of memory, nostalgia, and fantasy.

Topics prospective panelists might wish to address include, but are not limited to:

• Place’s role in the development of a children’s literature canon
• The role of nostalgia and/or memory in shaping depictions of place in writing for children
• The relationship or interplay between material places and literary representations (for example, Prince Edward Island and Avonlea)
• The function of maps and illustrations in children’s texts
• The sustained hold of specific places in children’s and YA literature on cultural imaginations and memory, including the Hundred Acre Wood, Toad Hall, the Four-Story Mistake, Mr. Brown’s antique shop, Hogwarts, Panem, the Island of the Blue Dolphins, and many others
• Regionalism in children’s and YA literature
• Virtual places and spaces in digital literature and/or media for young people
• The geographies of books themselves as physical artifacts of material culture

---

Sites of Memory in Children’s Literature. DUE 15 Mar. 2014

Remembering, remembrance, memory, and forgetting shapes children’s literature: authors’ personal memories of childhood that inform their texts or are preserved in cross-written texts or memoirs; larger cultural memories adults wish to pass down to future generations; and events, incidents, and topics elided or “forgotten” in the canon. Indeed, the genre of children’s literature relies on the remembrance, reinterpretation, or revision of past works. This panel invites papers considering all aspects of memory in children’s and young adult literature (historical, literary, nostalgic, patriotic, personal, repressed, traumatic, etc.) as well as papers that explore how literary memory shapes the canon of children’s and YA literature through intertextuality, another site of memory.

Topics prospective panelists might wish to address include, but are not limited to:

• Adult memories of childhood mined from archives, letters, diaries, memoirs, libraries, school classrooms, or childhood reading practices
• Cultural and historical events remembered, forgotten, elided, or revised in works of children’s and young adult literature
• The role of remembrance and nostalgia in canon formation: forgotten texts that are making a comeback (e.g., Henty’s novels in the homeschooling community) or texts that should be remembered
• How intertextuality functions to challenge, negotiate, or reinterpret ideas of youth, children’s literature, and/or YA literature
• Genre: historical, theoretical, or institutional practices of remembering and forgetting what constitutes children’s literature
• Traumatic memories: how they’re represented in individual works as well as how they’re presented to younger readers
• Iconic texts about remembrance: anything to do with war, but also “holiday” books and texts about important historical events

Please send 500-word proposals by March 15 to Karin Westman at westmank@ksu.edu.

---

World War I in Children’s Literature. DUE: 27 Feb. 2014

Children at home dream of war; children in war zones dream of home. War poets such as Robert Service, Wilfred Owen, and Robert Graves were haunted by childhood narratives of home and play, to the point where they were interpreting their own immediate experience through lenses tinted by memory and childish linguistic patterns; novelists such as L.M. Montgomery, Kate Seredy, and Ethel Turner became increasingly obsessed with the identity of place and how war expands (and sometimes explodes) a community’s sense of self. Through picture books and graphic novels, fiction and nonfiction, this session invites us to pause, in this centenary of the Great War, and consider how both immediate and more long-term memories of the war were shaped by children’s literature of the period and how they are continually reshaped by contemporary authors and illustrators using very diverse techniques, including such artists as Michael Morpungo, Diana Preston, Penelope Farmer, Jacques Tardi, Jim Murphy, Kevin Major, David Hill, and Sonya Hartnett. For consideration in this unguaranteed MLA session, please send a 350-word abstract to Jacquilyn Weeks (weeksj@iupui.edu) and Lissa Paul (lpaul@brocku.ca) by February 27th, 2014.

The MLA session will be comprised of three speakers, each of whom will have 15-20min to present their research on this topic. These presentations will be followed by a 15-30min open Q&A. We’ll be looking for a set of three papers that present the strongest and most original arguments while adhering to our general guidelines.

The focus in this context is on research rather than the pragmatic details of publishing or a detailed description of published literature; however, we’d be very interested in a paper that thinks about patterns of contemporary Canadian children’s literature and it’s engagement with the First World War. You would be welcome to offer an analysis of your own work. The 350-word abstract should outline your central argument and give us a sense of what you would discuss in your 15-20min paper.

This non-guaranteed panel is sponsored by the MLA’s Children’s Literature Division. The 2015 MLA will be held in Vancouver, BC from January 8-11, 2015.

---

Visual Cultures and Young People’s Texts in Canada. DUE 15 Mar. 2014

Exploring visual culture produced by, for, and about young people in Canada, including comics, animation, picture books, photography, and digital forms. 350 word abstracts by 15 March 2014; Jennifer Blair (Jennifer.blair@uottawa.ca) and Catherine Tosenberger (ctosen@gmail.com).

This non-guaranteed panel is co-sponsored by the MLA’s Children’s Literature Division and the MLA’s Canadian Literature in English Discussion Group. The 2015 MLA will be held in Vancouver, BC from January 8-11, 2015.