Call For Papers : - Crime Fiction, Global Mapping and Grand Narratives

 

American Comparative Literature Association Meeting 2021

Fully virtual, 8-11 April 2021

Are you interested in participating in our seminar?

Crime Fiction, Global Mapping and Grand Narratives

This seminar examines the capacities of long-form serial crime narratives – fiction, reportage, streaming TV drama, and film– to map and interrogate a range of complex sociopolitical problems on a global scale: environmental catastrophe, racialized police violence, urban breakdown, militarization and war, drug and human trafficking, refugee crises, corporate malfesance, the ongoing consequences of racism, homophobia, misogyny, and the inequalities of global capitalism. We welcome papers exploring these expansive, open-ended, ensemble forms and narratives. Why the grand scale and scope of these crime stories? To what degree do serial crime narratives or TV dramas help render visible, obscure or aestheticize transnational conflicts and disorders? How may their seriality also preclude endings that solve these seemingly intractable problems? How have other genres appropriated elements of crime narratives? We encourage contributions exploring the relationship between parts and the whole (‘synecdoche’), where characters and storylines in crime narratives might be implicated in “that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole” (Jameson, 1992). Welcoming papers from many parts of the globe, we hope to build on the diverse discussions pursued at ACLA: Worlding Crime Fiction: From the National to the Global (ACLA 2017), Crime Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and Non-Violent Crime (2018), and Crime Fiction and Global Spaces (ACLA 2019).

The format supports 3-4 papers per session at an allotted time each day over two or three days. Everyone is expected to listen to everyone else’s contributions.

Link to ACLA listing here

The call for papers will run October 1^st through October 31^st. Please note that all seminar organizers will then need to accept or reject papers proposed to their seminars by November 9th. The ACLA selection committee will complete its review of all submitted seminars by November 24th, 2020 and will provide you with a response shortly after that date.

Any informal questions or enquiries to: Patrick Deer (pd46@nyu.edu) or Andrew Pepper (a.pepper@qub.ac.uk)