American Literature Post-1945 panel at PAMLA 2025 (Pacific Modern Language Association Conference)
San Francisco, CA
Organization: Pacific Modern Language Association
Event: Pacific Modern Language Association Conference
We invite proposals dealing with American Literature from 1945 to the present. The category of “literature” includes imaginative works (fiction, poetry, drama) but also essays, memoirs, or creative nonfiction. Texts that are written by American-identifying authors, writers in the US, or that address American life are all welcome.
Please apply using this link: https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/19465
While we are open to papers that fit this wide umbrella, we especially welcome proposals related to the conference theme, “Palimpsests: Memory and Oblivion." The postwar period offers a rich body of writing to consider relative to the theme, as a growing component of canonical and more marginalized writers challenged mainstream American narratives about the country’s past, and others used literature to resurrect or revisit forgotten components of national history. Additionally, American writers engage with questions of memory and forgetting on the global stage, and we invite papers analyzing these representations. We are also interested in papers exploring transience and remembrance on a personal scale.
Topics of interest include, but aren't limited to
· Literary recoveries of lost histories or depictions of erasure/forgetting
· The layering of micro- and macro-scales in representations of memory and loss
· The function of memory and loss in the creation of identity
· Evolutions in literary portrayals of memory and forgetting
· Forms of literary palimpsests (polyvocality, temporal play)
· Archives and archiving’s limits (or literature as archive)
· The marketing of public memory/the appeal of oblivion
· Memory and forgetting across media/genres
· Literary schools/literary history/literary canons as sites of memory/forgetting
Contact Jeffrey Gonzalez (gonzalezje@montclair.edu) with questions. PAMLA is a fully in-person conference, and presenters need to be registered members of PAMLA.
https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/19465
Jeffrey Gonzalez
