MLA Forum on French Sixteenth-Century Language, Literature, and Culture

FRENCH SIXTEENTH-CENTURY CALLS FOR PAPERS: MLA 2025

 

The MLA Forum on French Sixteenth-Century Language, Literature, and Culture invites proposals (in French or English) on the following topic for the Modern Language Association of America’s annual convention (MLA 2025), to be held in New Orleans, 9–12 January 2025. (MLA membership required by April. For regular members traveling from outside the US, small grants are available.) Feel free to circulate this call.

 

For more information on the MLA convention, please see:

https://www.mla.org/Events/2025-MLA-Convention

 

New Work in Sixteenth-Century French Literary and Cultural Studies

The Executive Committee for the Forum on Sixteenth-Century French Literature invites proposals (in French or English) for papers on any aspect of sixteenth-century French literature and culture to be delivered at the MLA convention in New Orleans, 9–12 January 2025. We will consider scholarship from a variety of perspectives and theoretical approaches, and welcome abstracts from scholars at any stage of their careers. Please send a 250-word abstract and brief CV to Hassan Melehy (hmelehy@unc.edu) by 15 March 2020.

 

Teaching the French Sixteenth Century in the Twenty-First century

How do we teach sixteenth-century literature and culture in the twenty-first century? The Executive Committee for the Forum on Sixteenth-Century French Language, Literature, and Culture invites proposals for a roundtable on this subject at the MLA Convention in New Orleans, January 9–12, 2025. We are interested in all aspects of the question. Please send a 250-word abstract and brief CV to Charles-Louis Morand-Métivier (cmorandm@uvm.edu) by 15 March 2020.

 

Seeing, Watching, Looking in Sixteenth Century France (1480–1630)

Beyond eyewitness testimony and our modern emphasis on eyesight, how do writers and characters see, watch, look at things and beings in the long sixteenth century (1480–1630), in France and in other Francophone regions? What implications do literary and cultural explorations of scopic acts have on fields of knowledge and practice such as—among others—aesthetic representation, embodied cognition, relationality and intersubjectivity, and power and agency? What figurative implications prevail? How does seeing intersect with other sensory perceptions? We welcome proposals examining significant genre differences, in particular: What are the messenger recounting acts of violence on the tragic stage, the mystic transcribing her vision, the ethnographer watching alien rituals, the philosopher eulogizing a blind sage, the lover circumscribing forbidden sights, the prophet articulating the invisible, or the poet dismembering beauty in a blason or satire, really doing, literarily? And—within and beyond literature—how do different forms afford different ways to experience and think about seeing and looking? Please send a 250-word abstract and brief CV to Corinne Noiroit (cnoirot@vt.edu) by 15 March 2020.