CALL FOR PAPERS
MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION CONVENTION
TORONTO
JANUARY 8-11, 2026
The Ernest Hemingway Society will sponsor a panel at the upcoming MLA Conference:
The Sun Also Rises at 100
Hemingway’s first novel made an impact on its publication in 1926. For many readers,
the story of young people adrift in Paris and Pamplona captured their own sense of a
lost generation’s waywardness and wandering. Here, for the first time, the young writer
put his hard-won prose style to work in a sustained narrative that explored questions of
value, aesthetic commitments, and moral order in a world where guideposts and
authority had been destroyed in the destructive conflicts of the First World War. Over the
hundred years since its publication, readers have continued to find much of interest and
value, as well as much to critique, in the novel. While it was sometimes read as a
straightforward roman á clef, it has much more interestingly been read in terms of
modernist irony, the complexities of gender and sexuality, the insatiable character of
desire, and the dissolution of binary oppositions. For this panel, we invite papers on The
Sun Also Rises in light of recent critical approaches and scholarly research. What does
the novel have to say to today’s readers in search of meaning and value?
Please direct your 250-word proposal and a short professional bio to Michael Thurston
(mthursto@smith.edu). The deadline for proposals is 15 March 2025. Papers will be limited to 15-20
minutes.