AMERICAN LITERATURE ASSOCIATION
2023 CONFERENCE
CALL FOR PAPERS
Boston | May 25-28, 2023
The Hemingway Society is hosting a panel at the American Literature Association’s 34th annual conference, which will meet at the Westin Copley Place in Boston, May 25-28, 2023. We are seeking papers that address representations of trans and nonbinary experience, influence, and applications in/to the work of Ernest Hemingway.
Paying Attention to Gender: Hemingway Studies in/and Transition
The critical and commercial success of Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters (2021) indicated a paradigm shift in mainstream literary fiction—a sea change, if you will. Though allusions to Hemingway’s work are certainly not a requirement to win the PEN/Hemingway award for Debut Novel, Peters, who won the award in 2022, nevertheless indicated her familiarity with Hemingway with a number of overt and oblique references throughout her novel, and at the heart of the novel itself, as in Hemingway’s own de facto debut The Sun Also Rises, is the triangulation of queer (or queer-coded) desire. As Peters told journalist Steve Paul in an interview for the Hemingway Society’s newsletter, “If you’re somebody for whatever reason who is paying attention to gender, Hemingway is a great place to start.”
Potential paper topics might include: Reconsiderations of gender identity in work by Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms, The Garden of Eden, The Sun Also Rises, and others); intersections of race and gender in Hemingway’s African writings; Hemingway’s influence on contemporary literature (Torrey Peters and others); deadnaming in the field of life writing; Esquire magazine and/or pulp magazines and the formulation of the American masculine ethos; pedagogical approaches to teaching Hemingway in an inclusive classroom.
Please send your 250-350 word proposal and a short bio to Dr. Verna Kale (vlk123@psu.edu). The deadline for proposals is January 14. To ensure time for Q&A and discussion, papers must be no longer than 15 minutes. Please direct any questions about this panel to vlk123@psu.edu. For further information about the conference in general, please consult the ALA website at www.americanliteratureassociation.org.