Call for Papers: MLA

Call for Papers: NEMLA to be held March 26-February 1 in Boston

Please share this message with other Doris Lessing scholars.

Proposals for papers looking back over Doris Lessing’s entire career, 
assessing now her contribution to world literature and to the anglophone 
tradition are invited by Judith Johnston <johnston@rider.edu> for Feb 
26-Mar 1, 2009, in Boston, the Northeast Modern Language Association 
Conference. Deadline for proposals: September 8, 2008. After being 
accepted for the panel, speakers must join NEMLA to be included on the 
program. For NEMLA information: http://www.nemla.org/convention/index.html

Here is the formal call for papers or proposals:

“Awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in literature, Doris Lessing chose to give 
her lecture not about her own career but about the future of world 
literature. She describes a world in which African students beg for 
books and English students, surrounded by books, ignore them. It is time 
to re-evaluate Lessing's contribution to literature, to re-assess how 
her individual talent has redefined the anglophone literary tradition, 
and to examine what relations exist between Lessing and world 
literature. In NEMLA's history, many panelists have spoken on Doris 
Lessing's writing, tracing the sharp changes from novel to novel, and 
these NEMLA papers have reflected the considerable changes in literary 
criticism over the past 40 years. Papers for this panel will be selected 
from among those submitted, and the chair will seek contemporary 
critical approaches.


Looking back over Lessing's entire career, after the Nobel Prize, how do 
we now assess her contribution? How has her individual talent redefined 
the anglophone tradition? What relations exist between Lessing and world 
literatures? Her Nobel Prize lecture evaluates the future of world 
literature with considerable pessimism, yet concludes optimistically: "I 
think it is that girl, and the women who were talking about books and an 
education when they had not eaten for three days, that may yet define 
us." Lessing re-centers literary history on the African woman as subject.”