Calls for Papers

American Literature Association, San Francisco, CA, May 22-25, 2008 (2 panels)

Don DeLillo’s Falling Man: Windows on the World (01/28/08)

The Don DeLillo Society announces a call for papers for a panel focusing on Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, convening May 22-25, 2008 at the American Literature Association conference in San Francisco, CA.

Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, published just last May, attracts readerly attention and critical reflection for multiple compelling reasons.  This panel will ask how this novel participates in larger conversations about American literature, culture, and history both within DeLillo’s work and between his work and that of other contemporary writers.  As the latest novel by our perhaps most established, well known, and critically renowned contemporary American author, Falling Man invites us to consider it in relation to the nearly forty years of DeLillo’s fiction that precede it.  Appearing in a literary moment in which late-twentieth-century postmodernism stands in uncertain, inadequately investigated relationship to literature of the emerging twenty-first century, the novel allows us to interrogate ways in which truly contemporary fiction differs from its postmodern predecessors while remaining invested in fundamental aspects of the postmodern.  Most specifically, taking the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center as its starting point, the novel allows us to consider the effects of this traumatic experience on our individual psyches and collective culture, our relationships and means of conducting them, our past and future histories, our ideas about historicizing, and the ability or inability of literature and language properly to document, understand, and heal from such traumatic experience.

Proposals for papers on any aspect of the novel as it relates to other relevant works are welcome.  However, suggested possible topics include considering Falling Man in relation to the following themes, whether in work by DeLillo (novels, plays, short fiction, essays, interviews) or by other authors:

• notions of history and historicizing
• images of the family, spousal and parental relationships, gender or masculinity
• the relationship between language and meaning
• the productivity or impotence of narrative; the role of narrative in recording, making, and/or healing from history
• the loci of emotion and meaningfulness, or meaninglessness of affect
• terrorism and its relationship to American culture and history
• DeLillo’s oeuvre as a whole: can we argue for a change in sensibility and/or novelistic approach, in content and/or form, between DeLillo’s high postmodernist works like The Names,  White Noise, and Mao II, and later works like The Body Artist, Cosmopolis, and Falling Man?
• other works of fiction regarding the September 11th attacks, such as Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, McEwan’s Saturday, McInerney’s The Good Life, Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers, etc.
• changing notions of the postmodern; moving away from or reinscribing notions and techniques of postmodern and poststructural literature; twenty-first century literature as a continuation of and/or break from late twentieth-century fiction; continued anti-humanism and /or attempts to define a new kind of humanism in contemporary literature

Please email, in a Word attachment, a 250-word abstract of your paper with a descriptive title, a brief bio, and contact information to Mary Holland at hollandm@newpaltz.edu by January 28, 2008.  Earlier submissions are encouraged.

Sponsored by the Don DeLillo Society. 

Don DeLillo's Falling Man (01/28/08)  
 
The Don DeLillo Society is soliciting papers to be presented at the 2008 American Literature Association Conference on the subject of DeLillo’s most recent novel, 2007’s Falling Man. The panel will explore various points of entry into this most elusive and understated of DeLillo’s novels. Possible paper topics include but are not limited to:

• Trauma and temporality
• Ritual and identity
• Collective memory and personal memory
• Communication and silence
• Artist and terrorist
• Language and memory
• The city and the body
• Maleness and femaleness
• Anxiety and intimacy
• Freedom and submission
• Ideology and the human
• Faith and despair
• Familiarity and otherness
• Falling Man’s place in DeLillo’s oeuvre
• Comparison of Falling Man and other post-9/11 novels (ie, Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Beigbeder’s Windows on the World, Tristram’s After)

By January 28, 2008, please send 250-300 word abstracts, along with full contact information, to Randy Laist at rlaist2000@yahoo.com.

Sponsored by the Don DeLillo Society. 

Call for Topics for future Don DeLillo Society panels.

To all Don DeLillo Society members: Have you an idea for a panel at a conference? Would you be interested in organizing the panel? If your answer to either of these questions is "yes," post your idea to the listserv (available to members only) or send it to us: Mark Osteen (Pres.), Marni Gauthier (Secretary), Philip Nel (Webmaster), Jesse Kavadlo (Treasurer), Matt King (Listserv Manager), John Esther (Newsletter Editor).

Conference Sessions & Meetings

Sponsored by the Don DeLillo Society. 

New and Forthcoming Publications

New:

DeLillo, Don. Falling Man. New York: Scribner, 2007.

Forthcoming:

Duvall, John, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo. Cambridge UP, summer 2008.