6th Annual CAAS American Studies Workshop:
Representations of Age and Ageing in American Culture
(Zadar, Croatia, 15-16 June 2018)
º Organizers: Hrvatsko udruženje za američke studije/Croatian Association for American Studies (CAAS) and Odjel za anglistiku Sveučilišta u Zadru/ Department of English, University of Zadar.
º Deadline for the submission of proposals is March 31, 2018.
º Notification of acceptance will be sent out by April 15, 2018.
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CfP: Representations of Age and Ageing in American Culture
Croatian Association for American Studies (CAAS) announces a Call for Papers for the 6th Annual Workshop in American Studies to be held in Zadar, Croatia, 15-16 June 2018.
This year’s topic of the CAAS American Studies workshop focuses on representations of age and ageing in American society and culture. Acknowledging trends such as the “massification of old age,” “longevity revolution” (Butler), and the changing demographics of the Western societies, we ask the presenters to address a plethora of issues that encapsulate our society’s attitudes to age, to ageing, to ages of man, to bodily and mental changes pertaining to different ages, and to cultural assumptions and misconceptions attending to different ages (young, middle, old). How do the humanities and social sciences, and literary and cultural texts in particular, address the transformations—mental, social, bodily, health/medical, cognitive, emotional, economic—accompanying the processes of senescence? How do the race, class, and gender factors, separately or in conjunction, inflect the process of ageing? Welcoming comparatist approaches to the set topic, we hope to receive inquiries and research into cultural specificities of age and ageing in different societies. We conceive of the topic in broad interdisciplinary terms, working at the intersection of American studies, ageing studies, medical humanities, literary gerontology, the corporeal turn, studies of affect and emotions, and the like, and thus invite proposals touching on any of these fields. In short, we pose the underlying question: how is “age identity constructed in literature and in society, for both young and old” (Maierhofer)?
We are delighted to announce that our guest speaker is Prof. Dr. Roberta Maierhofer (University of Graz), a renowned ageing studies and American studies scholar.
More particular concerns should address the following broadly devised topics, among others:
- American cultural attitudes to age and ageing
- Ageing, individualism, interdependence in American culture
- Age and ageing in a historical perspective
- Gendered narratives of age and ageing
- Race and age/ ageing
- Class-based narratives of age and ageing
- Ageing and (re)distribution of resources
- Age/ ageing and consumer culture, leisure and cultural industries
- Age-appropriate/ age-related emotions?
- Ageing and creativity (Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Don DeLillo…)
- The genre of pathography (illness memoirs/ autobiography) and the medicalization of the ageing body
- Age-centered literary genres: the Bildungsroman, the sentimental novel, the domestic novel, memoirs…
Deadline for the submission of proposals is March 31, 2018.
Notification of acceptance will be sent out by April 15, 2018.
Please send your proposals of no more than 300 words, and a short bio, by March 31, 2018 to all of the following addresses: jsesnic@ffzg.hr; mlukic@unizd.hr; scvek@ffzg.hr . Please note that each presentation is allotted 15 minutes of talk time, followed by discussion.
Registration and payment deadline: May 30, 2018.
Workshop fee: 300 HRK (40 euros)
Workshop fee for non-waged participants (students, postdocs, etc.): 150 HRK (20 euros)
For CAAS and AASSEE members, their annual membership fee is the equivalent of the workshop fee.
For additional information, please check the CAAS web site regularly at: http://www.huams.hr/ .
The Organizing Committee
