Call for Papers: "Formations," UMD English Graduate Conference

Formations: Intersections of Form Across the Literary, Social, and Political
11th Annual Graduate English Organization Conference

Department of English, University of Maryland, College Park,

March 10, 2018
“Forms... mean all shapes and configurations, all ordering principles, all patterns of repetition and difference,” writes Caroline Levine in Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton University Press, 2015). Forms, understood broadly, are at work both within and beyond the realm of aesthetics; they configure and shape politics, culture, and social interactions; they include hierarchies, patterns, dichotomies, containers, and webs. How, then, do the plurality of forms at work in any given context interact, overlap, and influence each other?

We envision “Formations” as an exploration of the myriad and overlapping forms that govern experience and interpretation​, as well as an inquiry into the action of forming. It is action, after all, that Beyoncé implies with her rallying call, “now let’s get in formation,” at the conclusion of Lemonade. There, we are confronted with a collision of the aesthetic, the political, and the social. How do aesthetic formations subvert, reinforce, echo, and fight against social or political formations? By examining actions of forming, re-forming, and deforming, “Formations” attends to the practices of inclusion and exclusion through which forms are marked and maintained.

In addition to critical presentations, we welcome collaborative projects and creative work in fiction, poetry, drama, dance, arts, and film. Topics of potential essays can include, but are not limited to:

• How sociopolitical constructions of race, gender, sexuality, and class interact with each other and with aesthetic form
• How political, social, and literary forms enter and shape one another
• Material forms and perception of them
• How entrenched forms exclude and create Others, particularly in relation to questions of (dis)ability, privilege, and morality
• The persistence, subversion, or reinvention of form in popular culture, protest, social media, and other contexts both literary and beyond
• Technology’s impact on how we perceive and apply aesthetic forms, patterns, and hierarchies
• Forming academic writing, language(s), and classrooms
• Temporal and geographical divisions between areas of literary study
• Points of (dis)connection between creative and critical work
• Form in the materiality of texts and their production
• Historical or geopolitical formations of nations, regions, and communities
• The ways that forms travel across different media, including visual art, sound, film, etc.
• The development and application of linguistic and rhetorical forms
• The body and its representation
• Institutional organization and the formation of academic disciplines

Please submit proposals for fifteen-minute presentations. Panel submissions (three presentations per panel) are highly encouraged, as are other collaborative projects. Proposals for papers or panels should be 300-word abstracts. Proposals for creative work should be a short sample from an original composition or a description of the intended work. Please include your full name and email address.

Abstracts are due January 5 and should be e-mailed to conference.geo@gmail.com.

As always, remember that if you decide to submit proposals to any conferences, be sure to consider applying for funding. See the Graduate Studies Office’s webpage on Conference Travel Funding. And remember that you have to apply for the funding before you attend the conference. (In recent years, the funding has tended to run out early in the spring semester.)