CFP: The 29th Annual Stony Brook English Graduate Conference

Approaching Variation
Between Readers and Reception
The 29th Annual Stony Brook English Graduate Conference
Keynote: James Phelan, Ohio State University
24 February 2017

tinyurl.com/sbuEnglishGradCon

Call for Proposals

We read, like we walk, habitually. Both activities are organized through daily practice, embedded in texts and their environments, and so seem to be backgrounded as we focus on the objects aimed at rather than their trajectories. Reflection through literary criticism also often sees through reading and its environments to its results. Many writers, such as Rebecca Solnit and Tim Ingold, have proposed that the stereotypical idea that reading is a passive activity should be upended through recourse to a renewed study of the active reception of literary images. Ingold wonders: “Perhaps it is the very notion of the image that has to be rethought, away from the idea that images represent, on another plane, the forms of things in the world to the idea that they are place holders for these things, which travellers watch out for, and from which they take their direction. Could it be that images do not stand for things but rather help you find them?”

With this focus in mind, we invite proposals for papers and panels that query the act of reading, broadly. This includes historical and speculative studies of individual texts’ reception, in addition to theoretical, interdisciplinary, and cultural research. Why does reading still matter today? What does reading mean in the contemporary context of multiplying media? How do we define reading between narrative and poetry? Abstracts of 250 words should be submitted to stonybrookenglishgradcon@gmail.com by 20 January 2017. Other potential topics include:

book history
reception history
modes of reading
reading in the anthropocene
cognition and reading
identity and reading
misreading
politics and reading
theories of reception
reading digital texts
experience of reading
distant reading
reading narrative
reading poetry
rhetorical approaches
pedagogy
reading communities
empirical studies of reading