Call For Papers

Call For Papers

4th Triennial Australian Literary Studies Convention: ‘Chaos and Order’ 
July 2-5, 2024, Western Sydney University Parramatta South Campus

 

 

 

 

www.australianliteraryconvention.com 

This triennial event brings together major associations for the study of literature in Australia and welcomes  scholars and postgraduate students working on any aspect or field of literary studies.

We seek papers on the theme of ‘Chaos and Order’. Literary scholarship and literary practice can both be  understood as ordering processes: a work of creative writing is an attempt to build meaning by drawing on, and  framing, the chaos of experience. So too, whether the research be qualitative or quantitative in method, literary  scholarship considers how meaning might traced and interpreted within literary works, forms, periods and  literary fields, applying modes of order to them through this critical reception.

While literary study involves the broad expanses of time and space that comprise the histories of oral and written  literature, such works are studied now because they continue to speak to us, in what is a challenging present  moment. Order might be applied to make sense of chaos, but equally too much order, or newly applied kinds of  order have the potential to create chaos. Just as ‘order’ might be understood in positive or negative terms, ‘chaos’ does not have to be understood in solely negative terms: it might be understood, rather, as that which allows the  potential for new kinds of creation.

We are open to all interpretations of ‘Chaos and Order’ and all methodologies applied to the study or practice of  literature.

We invite papers and panels, including but not limited to the following topics:

• How literature (from any period or tradition) helps us understand chaos and order.
• What literature can do (be it political, ideological, affective, existential, ethical, imaginative, social,  personal) in relation to the chaos and orders of the present.

• How literature is imbricated in, produces, or resists systems of order or power (reproduces or contests  dominant ideologies; literature and Empire; literature and propaganda; literature and social  change/transformation for example)

• How the opportunity to write and/or publish has been and is now determined by systems of order  (gender, class, sexuality, race, ethnicity, cultural capital, markets).

• How book history and print culture has responded to (or influenced) periods of chaos.

• How particular methodologies might offer new ways of seeing old problems.

• How particular methods might collaborate or generate chaos through conflict.

• How pedagogical systems might solve or cause problems (both within universities and between primary,  secondary and tertiary forms of education).

Deadline for submissions: 1 March 2024. 

Please send an abstract of 150 words and biographical note of 100 words to Anthony Uhlmann [email protected] 

Jointly held by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, the Australasian Universities Languages  and Literature Association, the Australasian Association for Literature, the Australian University Heads of  English, the Australasian Victorian Studies Association, The Australasian Children’s Literature Association, The  Australasian Modernist Studies Network.