Below you can find detailed information about seven CFPs for  member-organized sessions for the 2013 ACQL conference at the University of Victoria. The documents for download contain details about the organizers as well as bilingual descriptions (French/English) for each session:

“Searching the Image in Canadian Poetry”

In his 1947 treatise on The Poetic Image, C. Day Lewis wrote that while the image is “the constant” in all poetry, “the very word ‘image,’ has taken on, during the last fifty years or so, a mystical potency.”  Since the early twentieth century, with the rise of modern culture and the advent of new imaging technologies—such as photography, film, the computer, etc.—poets have grown increasingly concerned about the status of the image and its role in their poems; Canadian poets were no exception.

This panel will address Canadian poets’ considerations of the idea of the image, and experimentations with the image itself—whether verbal, mental, perceptual, graphic, photographic, etc.—since the early twentieth century. Contributors are invited to consider how the role of the image in Canadian poetry has changed and adapted with new technology over the last century and/or how the image has influenced the ideological, aesthetic, and formal content of the nation’s poetry.

For more info download: Canadian Poetry and the Image.

“Digital Tools in the CanLit Classroom”

On August 27, 2012 Canadian Literature launched canlitguides.ca, an online resource to facilitate reading and writing about Canadian literature in the undergraduate classroom.  This resource draws on both archival material and scholarly research to both model and engage students in the use of secondary source material about key issues in CanLit.  Other large projects, including the Canadian Writing and Research Collaboratory and Editing Modernism in Canada, have begun to produce tools to enhance the way we interact with Canadian texts.  How do online resources like these change the experience of teaching Canadian Literature?  How are you currently implementing digital tools and technology into the Canadian literature classroom?  Have you created a new assignment with a digital humanities component?  Do you have a class wiki or blog?  In this panel, we would like to explore the way digital tools have demanded that you rethink the delivery of Canadian literature.

For this panel at the 2013 ACQL conference at the University of Victoria, we seek papers that engage with new developments in digital pedagogy, with a specific emphasis on the teaching of Canadian literature.

For more info download: Digital Tools in the CanLit Classroom.

“New Canadian Modernisms: Beyond Centre and Edge”

Brian Trehearne notes in The Montreal Forties that “the placement of Canadian writing against the backdrop of international modernism is very rare.” Situating Canadian modernism in relationship to its international contexts has been discouraged by the centre-periphery model that long dominated modernist studies, one that places Canada “@ the edge,” far from the Anglo-American centre. As Susan Stanford Friedman notes, this model assumes that modernist aesthetic and cultural innovations are “first produced in the great culture capitals of Europe and the United States and then exported to…colonies and postcolonial nations … where they exist in diluted and imitative form as ‘trickle down’ effects.”

This panel invites re-readings of English and French-Canadian modernisms through the lens of New Modernist Studies—situating them as local modernisms and/or placing them in relationship to other mutually constitutive international modernist centres in order to re-examine their position within global modernist networks that have neither centre nor edge.

For more info download: New Canadian Modernisms.

“New Poetics and Aesthetics  in Western Canada’s Francophone Theatre” 

Francophone theatres of Western Canada develop both discursive and aesthetic strategies whose novelty is derived from the specificity of the contexts in which they are anchored.  Those who create in the margins invest in their marginality by exploring its constraints and perspectives in order to advance new theatrical representations through their own specific modes of production.  These modes of production can entail the recourse to diverse techniques that lead to new narrative forms and new theatricalities. Thus, the use of surtitles allowed Franco-Canadian playwrights to explore the potentialities of their bilingualism and of heterolinguism on the stage by offering translations that take into consideration the diverse linguistic profiles of the audience.  This session will focus on the techniques of playwriting, directing and producing that contribute to the development of new poetics or theatrical aesthetics recently put forward by Franco-Canadian theatres in the margins.

For more information download: New Poetics and Aesthetics in Western Canada’s Francophone Theatre.

“At the Crossroads of Technologies: Sex, Gender, Sexuality and Space in Contemporary Texts”

The proposed session links sex, gender and sexuality with space and spaces in order to explore the contemporary configurations that determine the distribution of space between men and women. We will be questioning space and place in contemporary Quebec and Canadian works of literature (produced since 1990) in order to tease out the conceptualizations of gender they suggest. As the formerly strict lines of demarcation between the sexes and the private and public spheres have become blurred, with both sexes tending to cross/transcend the border between the spheres (with men becoming more involved in the world of emotions and affect, as women move increasingly into the public sphere), are literary representations evolving in the same direction? Since sexuality is by definition a space where the sexes meet (in a hetero-normative environment at least), where and how does that meeting take place? Are the spaces in question gender-marked? If so, are they coded as masculine or feminine? How do these texts represent the relationship between gendered spaces and the ways in which literary characters are depicted as experiencing their sexualities and genders? The series of papers will address the question of the distribution of space/place with a focus on sexuality as a locus where gender relationships are both located and exacerbated.

For more information download: At the Crossroads of Technologies.

Ties that Bind?: Precarity, Power Relations, and the Advent of Technological Innovations.

Many argue that the world in which we live is increasingly characterized  by precarity. The unpredictable aspect of contemporary life, the fear of falling or risk of exclusion from the global hi-tech economy have produced a preoccupation with insecurity over the past four or five decades in Canada and Québec. Contemporary prose and poetry in Canada and Québec testify to a profound degree of othering, exclusion, and policing of precarious subjects, who, in many cases, correspond to international social theories of wasted lives (Bauman), disposable youth (Giroux), and the “fear of small numbers” (Appadurai). Fear, mistrust, and discredit are increasingly projected upon and experienced by precarious subjects, who may in turn project exaggerated fear or hope onto technology.    Both modernist and contemporary fictional representations of precarious subjects in dialogue with technology often reveal uneven power structures behind the advent of technological innovations. In Gabrielle Roy’s collection La rivière sans repos, for example, when short stories examine technological innovations as part of the process of the (neo-)colonization of the Inuit, the “gift” of  technology (as represented by the telephone, the airplane, the radio, and even the wheel chair) is ultimately found wanting, though initially alluring. What are the ties that bind technology to economic and cultural power and how do literature and other cultural performances of self and community express the relation between precarious subjects and technology? This panel invites analyses of power relations behind the distribution and ideological incorporation of new technologies, as they appear in texts, social texts, or social media.

For more information download: Ties that Bind.

Transforming Knowledge Dissemination in Quebec and ROC: A Bilingual Roundtable 

Bilingual Canadian literary institutions like the journal Canadian Literature at UBC and the Canadian Literature Centre at the University of Alberta face evolving challenges regarding translation, the circulation of information, the shifting modes of knowledge dissemination, and the moving boundaries of popular and academic discourse.  How do we constructively address such challenges? What are the roles of literary institutions in public debate?  Is a bilingual journal or centre still feasible in Canada?  How can scholars working in both languages co-produce research? And what is the place for research pursued in other, non-official languages? Why do public intellectuals (such as, for instance, Charles Taylor, Roméo Dallaire, Michael Ignatieff, and Chantal Hébert) tend to cross borders (linguistic, geographic, cultural) when academics hesitate? The current speed of humanities research and the speed of technology are not in sync. What could the new rhythms of research look like? How do we use the compression of time and space of globalization to our intellectual advantage?

For more information download: Transforming Knowledge Dissemination