CFP: AMERICAN LITERATURE ASSOCIATION - CHILDREN'S LITERATURE SOCIETY
MAY 26-29, 2011
Boston, MA
The Children’s Literature Society of the ALA seeks abstracts for two panels on children’s literature for the American Literature Association Conference to be held May 26-29, 2011, at The Westin Copley Place in Boston, MA.
Panel 1:
Images, Imagination and Children’s Literature: Graphic Novels and Picture Books through History.
This panel explores the expression of the American imagination through illustrated literature for youth. This interpretation of images and the text that mediates them will deepen our understanding of how the American imagination exists in children’s literary tradition. Papers in this panel investigate uniquely American attributes in graphic novels, picture books and other forms of illustrated literature. Papers may also investigate how defining characteristics of American illustrated literature for youth have influenced or been influenced by literary culture. Papers about influential illustrators are also of interest, as are papers that offer an historical or interpretative overview of the topic.
Please send panel proposals or paper abstracts (250-500 words) by December 30, 2010 to Linda Salem lsalem@mail.sdsu.edu
Please include academic rank and affiliation and AV requests
Hard copies can also be sent to
Linda Salem
Library
San Diego State University
5500 Campanile Drive
San Diego, CA 92182-8050
Panel 2: The Digital Worlds of Children’s Literature: From Video Games to the iPad
When Steve Jobs presented the iPad, combining the e-book format with multimedia capabilities, “books” and “reading” were alleged to have changed. But this “change” had already been occurring in the world of children’s new media adaptations and formats The seamless relationship of young people and new media has, in fact, led the MIT Comparative Media Studies website to call the generation entering the 21st century, “generation.com”; and, as New Media critic James Paul Gee affirms, they are the “natives” in this brave new digital world.
Innovation is at the heart of children’s literature. It has a rich tradition of opening new areas both in form and content, and it has been on the cutting edge of the digital revolution. This revolution has been transforming the way we are telling stories and how we read, changing our understanding of authorship, and creating new genres as it influences older ones.
This panel explores the rich, wide-ranging, and multidimensional digital worlds of children’s and young adult literature. This includes new narrative strategies evolving out of video games, children’s literature and educational websites; poetry—the creation of a digital poetics; creative non-fiction and fiction emerging from fan-fic sites and blogging; and new forms of story and picture, text and image, that are arising from new technologies like the iPad, Kindle, and Tablet.
What do these changes, transformations, and new forms tell us about reading—given that in addition to fan-fic sites and blogging, many of the new technologies allow the “reader” to become an “author” of the original text? How are these new forms changing narrative, poetry, and other genres? What shapes are story and poem taking in this new digitalized space?
Please send panel proposals or paper abstracts (250-500 words) by December 30, 2010 to Dorothy G. Clark: Dorothy.g.clark@csun.edu
Please include academic rank and affiliation and AV requests
Hard copies can also be sent to
Dorothy G. Clark
Dept. of English
California State University, Northridge
18111 Nordhoff St.
Northridge, CA 91330-8248
Conference details may be found at the American Literature Association web
site:
http://www.calstatela.edu/academic/english/ala2/index.html
American Literature Association Home
http://www.calstatela.edu/
Dorothy G. Clark, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of English
Subject Matter Option Advisor
California State University, Northridge
(818) 677-7225
