Austin, Texas
January 7-10, 2016
Theme: Literature and Its Publics: Past, Present, and Future
Who is the public for literature? This question is foundational to the work we do and to the state of our discipline and profession. Literature as a cultural category and a human activity, the place of literary studies in the humanities, the composition of the academic workforce, the Common Core State Standards Initiative—all these issues concern the MLA and involve a notion of our public.
This theme invites MLA members to consider the public face of all our objects of attention: literature and other kinds of texts, as well as film, digital media, and rhetoric. It encourages us to discuss how these objects move among the arts and how our field engages other intellectual disciplines; to reflect on literature’s past publics and speculate on its future publics; and to think about media, reception, audience, commentary, translation, and adaptation—and more—as ways of connecting to a public.
The Hemingway Society has organized a panel for this conference.
“Hemingway and the American West”
Presider: Mark Cirino, University of Evansville
1. “The Devil’s Disciple in the American West: Hemingway vs. Ford,” Michael Von Cannon, Louisiana State University
2. “As We Found It: The American West in Green Hills of Africa,” Ross Tangedal, Kent State University
3. “A Cowboy Runs Through It: Western Allusions and Anchors in Hemingway’s Fiction and Code,” Jean Jesperson Bartholomew, The Carlbrook School