Old Email Archive

digest 1996-09-02 #001



11:24 PM 9/2/96 -0700
From: "Society for Literature & Science" 

Daily SLS Email Digest
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Date: 2 Sep 1996 13:44:37 -0700
From: Wayne Miller 
Subject: Forwarded: CFP:  American Women Writers Imagin
From: "Karen  Waldron" 
FOR the Literature and Science List:
Dear colleagues:
I would appreciate it if you could draw attention to the following CFP.
While I realize this is short notice - 10-page papers or abstracts must
be postmarked by Sept. 15, 1996 - I would like to broaden the scope of
materials received.  The text of the session proposal follows.
Please cross-post and distribute to colleagues!
American Women Writers:  Imagining Science
Northeast Modern Language Association
April 4-5, 1997
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
The American Women Writers session has a long history of creating a
forum for simultaneously interdisciplinary and thematic approaches to
women's literature of the U.S.  I propose a session that continues the
tradition - with the support of a large crowd at the 1996 session on
"Women Writing Nature" - at the same time as it breaks new
ground.  This
panel follows "Women Writing Nature" by considering how
women's
imaginative representations of nature, society, and their interaction
get mediated by scientific discourse and practice.  Although there has
been considerable scholarship on both gender and science and science
and
literature, neither NEMLA nor MLA offer panels which consider the
relationship between gender, science, and the literary imagination. 
The
panel will provide an opportunity to examine the role and implications
of scientific theories in the literature of American women writers, and
look through the lens of gender at the embrace of science, while
examining the term's authority within American culture.  The primary
aim
of gathering such investigations is to more fully articulate the role
gender plays in the process of incorporating scientific theories,
methods of work, and technological results into literary imagery and
plots.  A secondary purpose is to bring the work of discourse analysis
done by scholars of gender and science (for example, Linda Fox Keller
and Carolyn Merchant) to literary study.  Examining Kate Chopin's
argument with Darwin, Adrienne Rich's poetry about women scientists,
new
age refutations of science as rationality, and the use of science
fiction to "write beyond the ending" and traditional
story-lines, to
cite only a few examples of the kind of work this panel might solicit,
would help us better understand how women writers have  responded to
the
presence of science in American society, illuminating gender, science
and literature as well as their relation.
Phone and internet inquiries encouraged; Internet submissions welcome.
Send papers or abstracts to:
Karen Waldron 
Germanic Languages             2326 Murphy Hall
Humanities Computing Facility   343 Kinsey Hall
University of California, Los Angeles     90095
(310) 206-2004              Fax: (310) 825-7428
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