2007 EGSC Fall Symposium

The English Graduate Student Council invites graduate and honors-level students to present original work at our annual symposium. This year's symposium is designed to encourage students to look beyond the more obvious choices available for consideration in order to discuss, define, and interpret the importance of secondary or supporting themes, theories, and characters within all fields of English. Suggested areas of study:

• Original fiction that examine the role of secondary characters in the lives of real or fictitious figures
• Approaches to constructing bit players
• Interrogation of new works constructed from the fragmentary or multiple points of view of minor characters in canonical works
• Exploration of factors and effects of dominant cultures or structures on marginalized peoples or explorations of diasporic literature that rewrites canonical texts
• Analysis of marginal characters in light of certain character types (e.g. the noble savage, the deceiver, the female nag)
• Treatment of secondary characters in specific works (e.g. minor characters who seem to steal thunder from the protagonist)
• The role of places and spaces (e.g. how rooms, parks, streets, homes become minor characters within a greater work) or other non-human/inanimate objects
• The narrator as a secondary character
• The works of authors who are themselves writing from a marginal position
• Exploration of factors and effects of dominant cultures or structures on silenced peoples
• Interrogation of literary or theoretical movements that attempt to give voice to those that are marginalized
• How various roles of the participants in a discourse community contribute to the creation and reception of text
• Exploration of theories and ideas that run against traditional composition theory.

Please submit a 300-word abstract by November 2, 2007 for consideration. The length of the papers should be 7 to 8 pages; participants will present for 12-15 minutes in moderated sessions at the symposium. The papers accepted to the Fall Symposium will be published in the spring in The Erudite, an EGSC publication.

Papers may be dropped off at the English Department office or emailed with an attachment to egscfeedback@yahoo.com.

Get print-friendly version of the call for papers here.