CfP: "Where are the Wonder Girls? Heroines and Persistence in Campus Novels" MLA Session
Enormous reading pleasure can be derived from Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys
but where are the wonder girls? Where are American (campus) novels
about gallivanting women academics and writers based in academia,
getting into trouble, having multiple lovers in different countries,
shoplifting, dancing naked in the rain (the list is suggestive, not
exhaustive)? Yet novels which are comic, feel-good, and sporting happy
endings? There is a discernible tendency to cast as protagonists of
campus novels and artist novels unhappy and unlucky women, tormented
victims rather than fierce individuals with agency.
I’m
seeking papers on representations of women academics and writers in
contemporary US campus literature depicting women’s efforts to survive
as artists. I’m interested in e.g. how an artist heroine navigates the
nexus between and the lacunae of intellectuality, creativity, and
sexuality, juggling different
roles the society has burdened her with, while battling various
obstacles, exterior and interior and, if she doesn’t have an inherited
income and a house of her own, being torn between the need
to create and the need to live, caught in a double-bind between art and
life, succeeding and/or failing as a woman or as an artist. I’m primarily interested in portrayals of active women artists who are protagonists not mere characters.
Please submit a 250-word abstract and brief biography to marta.lysik@uwr.edu.pl by March 15, 2020.