November 14-17, 2019
Chicago, Illinois
The Midwest Modern Language Association welcomes, especially but not exclusively, proposals dealing with every aspect of this year’s theme “Duality, Doubles and Doppelgängers.” We invite individual papers, as well as proposals for full panels.
From the invention of writing to the society of simulation, doubles have been present in literatures and cultures throughout the ages. Whether in the form of alter egos, twins, doppelgängers, reflections, or look-alikes, doubles fascinate – in everyday life and culture as well as in literature. As Pirandello confirmed in One, No One and One Hundred Thousand, there are as many versions of one single person as there are others’ eyes looking on, perceiving, reflecting and judging. Individual and social worlds are comprised of a myriad of doubles.
Topics could include, but are by no means limited to:
- Doubles, doppelgängers, twins, mirror images, reflections in world literature(s);
- Identity, transcultural identity, transgender identity, psychology studies, cultural studies, literary criticism, gender studies;
- Duality in pedagogy, doubles in the classroom (the professor’s persona, teaching Gothic and other generic doubles and duplicities, the student-teacher relationship/dichotomy, teaching with various methods, digital teaching, hybrid and on-line teaching vs face-to-face);
- Double-meanings (linguistics, semantics, multiple interpretations);
- Duality of texts and parataxis
- Double entendre: humor, jokes, dark humor, all aspects of laughter (laughter as a social construct, laughter as a cultural construct);
- Chicago, the Second City;
- Literal/metaphorical; Transnational/ global/local
- Translations and translators (translating double meaning, cross-cultural interpretation, choosing the right word, translating the word vs translating the idea);
- Reproductions, mass productions, copies, reproducing the written word (printing press, mimeograph, electric pen, consumerism, capitalism).