AMERICAN LITERATURE ASSOCIATION 29th ANNUAL CONFERENCE

Call for Papers
American Literature Association Annual Conference
May 24-27, 2018
San Francisco, CA

www.AmericanLiteratureAssociation.org/

The Hemingway Society will sponsor three panels at the upcoming ALA Conference:

Hemingway Open Panel - Any Hemingway-Related Topic 

Peter Hays will chair a Hemingway Open Panel at the May 2018 ALA conference in San Francisco. Any Hemingway topic may be submitted. The submission is restricted to a paper length of one page (just the abstract) with the hope to seat at least 6 participants in order to have a round-table discussion of Hemingway among the panelists and the audience. Please submit the abstracts to plhays@ucdavis.edu by Jan. 31.

Ambulance Driver: Hemingway and the First World War

One hundred years previous to this year’s ALA conference, around 23 May 1918, Ernest Hemingway sailed from New York with the American Red Cross to serve as an ambulance driver in World War I. In light of the centenary of Hemingway’s first trip abroad, this panel proposes to examine Hemingway’s relationship to the First World War, particularly in the context of his service with the Red Cross. Hemingway’s Red Cross experience had an immense influence on his development as a writer and provided much of the raw source material for A Farewell to Arms and other writings. Furthermore, the recent publication of James McGrath Morris’s The Ambulance Drivers: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and a Friendship Made and Lost in War adds to this timely topic the question of Hemingway’s turbulent friendship with John Dos Passos and their mutual experiences in the Red Cross during the First World War. Topics for this session may include but are not limited to: teaching Hemingway and WWI; depictions of WWI in Hemingway’s fiction and/or nonfiction; the trauma of WWI in Hemingway’s life and/or writing; Hemingway’s physical and/or psychological war-wounds; Hemingway’s WWI correspondence; differences/similarities between Hemingway and other writers’ depictions of WWI. Special consideration will be given to papers that consider James McGrath Morris’s The Ambulance Drivers.

Please direct your 250 word proposal and a short professional bio to Jace Gatzemeyer at  jace.gatzemeyer@gmail.com. The deadline for proposals is January 1, 2018. Papers will be limited to 15-20 minutes.

Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Hemingway and the Second World War

The story of Hemingway’s involvement in World War II is a story of spycraft. During the Second World War, Hemingway was involved to varying degrees in a wide range of intelligence-collecting actions, from reporting to the U.S. Treasury Department as a sort of investigator in China, to organizing a spy network (the “Crook Factory”) in Cuba, and later even joining a group of French partisans to gather intelligence about enemy defenses around Paris. Nicholas Reynolds’s recent book, Writer, Sailor, Solider, Spy: Ernest Hemingway's Secret Adventures, 1935-1961, has also raised interesting questions about Hemingway’s possible spy-work for the Soviet Union. This panel proposes to examine Hemingway relationship to the Second World War, particularly in the context of his involvement in spycraft. Topics for this session may include but are not limited to: teaching Hemingway and WWII; depictions of WWII in Hemingway’s fiction and/or nonfiction; Hemingway’s WWII correspondence; Hemingway’s WWII journalism; differences/similarities between Hemingway and other writers’ depictions of WWII; Hemingway’s editorial work and introduction to Men at War; Hemingway and spycraft. Special consideration will be given to papers that consider Nicholas Reynolds’s Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy.

Please direct your 250 word proposal and a short professional bio to Jace Gatzemeyer at  jace.gatzemeyer@gmail.com. The deadline for proposals is January 1, 2018. Papers will be limited to 15-20 minutes.