K-SAA @ MLA 2019: CFP “Masks of Anarchy Now”

The Keats-Shelley Association of America invites abstracts for “Masks of Anarchy Now,” at MLA 2019, January 3-6 in Chicago, IL.  During the age of Trump, we arguably find ourselves in another time of Peterloos, rife with repeated incidents of racial, political, sexual, ecological, media violence—both state-supported or otherwise systemic. Such events certainly instigate awareness of the varied shapes of oppression as well as possible responses to them. But they also, like Peterloo, have the potential to disrupt current forms of government, capitalism, and being, and ultimately pave the way for new forms of insurgent, transformative living—literary, activist, political, intellectual. The anxieties, traumas, shames of our time—and the possibility of our becoming inured to diurnal hostility—invite us to ask how we have been complicit in such damage at all levels and what resistances are possible. To put this more bluntly, “what next?”—or perhaps more pointedly, “what next for literary scholars?”  Our panel asks speakers to consider what Romantic texts—networked as they are with politics, social movements, and intellectual force—offer to us now? What kinds of resistance to or complicity with local and global sexual, racial, economic, environmental violence, including but not limited to climate disaster, capitalist imperialism, sexual harassment and assault, ableism, and racial injustice? How do literary texts offer new modes of thinking and being? How do they reconfigure epistemologies, ontologies, global histories, and languages that underwrite our reality? What forms of action, force, power, history, and being do these texts propose?  Preference given to papers on the Shelley and Keats circle—widely understood—as well as their deep Regency contexts. Please send queries, 500-word abstracts, and brief bios to ksinger@mtholyoke.edu by March 15th.