20131007.0630

In an earlier post, I comment about an idea for a special session I want to propose to the folks at the South Central Modern Language Association (SCMLA) for inclusion in the conference next year (which will take place in Austin, Texas, as is likely to make my family and my in-laws happy).  I suppose some clarification may be in order for those who are not regular attendees--or, as one conference panel chair noted, "repeat offenders."

SCMLA hosts three kinds of sessions--small, topical gatherings of scholars within the broader context of the conference--regular, allied, and special.  The regular sessions are standing disciplinary divisions, focusing generally on language, nation, time, and genre.  That is to say that they reflect common groupings of texts and contexts within the broad disciplines of language studies, mirroring divisions among and within academic departments at colleges and universities.  Allied sessions are sponsored by other scholarly groups that have substantial representation among the members of SCMLA; they tend to cut across disciplinary boundaries in favor of political alignments (not in the sense of the US party structure, but instead focusing on issues within the profession and larger cultural arguments).

Special sessions are individual offerings on specific topics of interest.  They must be proposed annually, and they are not always accepted as regular and allied sessions are; instead, the program committee decides what will and will not be included on any individual year.  They are special in the sense that they do not fit with the commonly recognized patterns of study at SCMLA--they either act across disciplinary boundaries in ways unlike those represented in allied sessions or they treat individual topics more strictly and narrowly than can be adequately detailed among the regular sessions.

I have had good luck with getting special sessions pushed through in the past; 2010, 2011, and 2012 each saw me put together a panel and get it accepted.  Some of the topics have been...interesting, as those familiar with my CV can attest.  And I hope to enjoy more success with the panel I will propose, Them's Fightin' Words: Explicit and Implicit Combat Methodologies.  A description, derived from the short version I will be sending to SCMLA, appears below:

The will to fight is embedded in human nature and so in human languages and literatures.  Many of the most widely-read works in any language have much to say about the ways in which people work to injure and destroy each other's properties and bodies.  Even many texts which perhaps do not count as "literary" treat the matter; most systems of martial arts have guidebooks written by advanced and expert practitioners of those arts, and militaries throughout the world publish manuals to assist in training people better how to kill.  Because so much effort is spent in describing and teaching fighting in the written word and other media, it seems appropriate to examine such depictions to uncover what they say about their writers, their readers, and the world in which they all exist.  This panel seeks to examine overt, and explicate covert, textual discussions of how best to fight; abstracts of papers for possible inclusion in the session are welcome.  They should be no more than 300 words and should be sent to geoffrey.b.elliott@gmail.com before the end of the business day on 14 February 2014.

If you or someone you know has ideas that would fit the panel, please send them along to me.  I'd love to see what comes in.