CFP: Resilience through Genre Meshing and Remixing, NeMLA Convention, March 23-26, 2023

Resilience through Genre Remixing and Meshing in Post-1945 Literature and Film

Co-chairs: Liliana Naydan (Pennsylvania State University) and Melissa Strong (Community College of Philadelphia)

54th NeMLA Annual Convention

March 23-26, 2023, Niagara Falls, NY

In Contemporary Drift (2017), Theodore Martin suggests that genres “explain how aesthetic and cultural categories become recognizable as well as reproducible in a given moment, and they demonstrate how the conventions and expectations that make up those categories are sedimented over time” (6). But how might genres develop resilience through flexibility as opposed to sedimentation of the kind that Martin describes? How do authors challenge the notion of genre as fixed by putting different genres into dynamic conversation with historical moments? Moreover, how might the resilience of genres emerge out of rethinking their limits, as Eduardo Navas does in Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling (2012)? Emerging out of Navas’s argument that artistic practices of appropriation in the first half of the twentieth century were “assimilated to then be recycled as part of the postmodern condition in the second half,” this session invites presentations that explore the politics of remixing and meshing genres in post-1945 literature and film (133). Proposals might consider the ways in which remix has become a form of discourse, as Navas argues it has. They likewise might examine remix’s potential for creating the new out of the old and what possibilities emerge for reworking, reimagining, and reinvigorating genre. Please submit proposals to Melissa Strong and Liliana Naydan.

Abstracts due September 30.  Submit proposals here: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/19894