Call for papers

“Hawthorne and Food: A Tasty Affair”

As Monika Elbert has rightly pointed out, in both his public and private writings, Nathaniel Hawthorne made no mystery of his keen appreciation of food as a source of sensory gratification—in defiance of his Puritan heritage—and of his awareness of its socio-cultural significance. In his fiction, he also showed how food could be deployed as an effective narrative element to emphasize character traits, highlight incidents, and delineate the locale and time frame of a story. Among the numerous examples disseminated throughout his production, one could mention the alluring fragrance of unattainable victuals which makes the penniless Robin feel even more of a friendless stranger in “My Kinsman, Major Molineux”; or the relish with which Hawthorne describes the fruit, cakes and candy sold by “The Old Apple-Dealer”; or the voracious appetite with which Arthur Dimmesdale, in The Scarlet Letter, devours a large meal after his momentous encounter with Hester Prynne in the woods, a manifestation of the re-awakening of his long-stifled sensual nature and capacity for pleasure; or the allusion to slavery in The House of the Seven Gables through the deceptively comical scene of Ned Higgins making quick work of two gingerbread Jim Crows, and the obvious pleasure Hawthorne takes in listing the dishes served at the banquet awaiting (in vain) Judge Pyncheon; or the way in which Miles Coverdale, in TheBlithedale Romance, by finding fault with the water-gruel Zenobia prepares for him when he is recovering from a bad cold, is indirectly faulting her for not matching up to his idea of womanhood; or the way in which bad food in The French and Italian Notebooks functions as a signifier of loose morals in Italy from a strictly Anglo-Saxon and Protestant point of view, while in The Marble Faun the sublime sunshine wine made on Donatello’s Tuscan estate—which would lose all its wonderful qualities if sold on the market—speaks to Hawthorne’s revulsion against the corrupting influence of capitalism.

Proposals are invited for papers on Hawthorne’s representation, and literary and/or cultural use, of food in his tales, sketches, romances, travel piece, correspondence, and notebooks.
Possible topics include, but are by no means limited to:

– the pleasure of eating
– food as a status symbol
– the aesthetics of eating
– eating as a social function
– eating and class
– eating and national, regional, and local culture
– eating and gender roles
– eating and economy
– food imagery
– eating and race and ethnicity
– food and religion
– the Puritan attitude towards food
– vegetarianism
– eating disorders

Submit proposals for a 15-20 minute presentation and a brief professional biography to Leonardo Buonomo buonomo@units.it and Ariel Silver ariel.silver@svu.edu by 20 Jan. 

“The House of the Seven Gables in Ink, Wood, and Stone: A Roundtable Discussion”

The Nathaniel Hawthorne Society invites proposals for participation on a roundtable to complement the Society’s second annual lecture at the “House of the Seven Gables” in Salem, May 25 at 12 noon. (This years’ speaker, Robert Levine, will present “Haunted Houses: The House of the Seven Gables and Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”)  This ALA roundtable will feature curators from the “House of Seven Gables” and a variety of scholars in conversation about the book, the house, and the reception of both.  We invite proposals that address topics in material culture, the history of literary tourism and house museums, Hawthorne’s novel, and relations among them.   We hope to foster a lively cross-disciplinary discussion of the “House of Seven Gables” in Ink, Wood, and Stone.  

Submit proposals for a 10 minute presentation and a brief professional biography to Charles Baraw barawc1@southernct.edu and Ariel Silver ariel.silver@svu.edu by 20 Jan.

“The House of the Seven Gables in Ink, Wood, and Stone: A Roundtable Discussion”

The Nathaniel Hawthorne Society invites proposals for participation on a roundtable to complement the Society’s second annual lecture at the “House of the Seven Gables” in Salem, May 25 at 12 noon. (This years’ speaker, Robert Levine, will present “Haunted Houses: The House of the Seven Gables and Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”)  This ALA roundtable will feature curators from the “House of Seven Gables” and a variety of scholars in conversation about the book, the house, and the reception of both.  We invite proposals that address topics in material culture, the history of literary tourism and house museums, Hawthorne’s novel, and relations among them.   We hope to foster a lively cross-disciplinary discussion of the “House of Seven Gables” in Ink, Wood, and Stone.  

Submit proposals for a 10 minute presentation and a brief professional biography to Charles Baraw barawc1@southernct.edu and Ariel Silver ariel.silver@svu.edu by 20 Jan.

4th International Poe and Hawthorne Conference: Dis/embodiment

Paris, France

July 1-4, 2025

CALL FOR PAPERS

Keynote Speakers

Richard Kopley, Penn State-Dubois: “Tales of a Poe Biographer” 

Joel Pfister, Wesleyan University: “Why Read Hawthorne Now?”

We are pleased to invite paper and session proposals for the 4th International Poe and Hawthorne Conference on the theme Dis/embodiment. This academic event, to be held in Paris, France (July 1-4, 2025), is organized by the Poe Studies Association (PSA) and the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society (NHS) in partnership with Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Université Paris Cité, Sorbonne Université, Université Bretagne-Sud, and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). Previous co-sponsored international conferences of the PSA and NHS have been held in Oxford, England (2006), Florence, Italy (2012), and Kyoto, Japan (2018).

In her classic study The Corporeal Self: Allegories of the Body in Melville and Hawthorne (1981), Sharon Cameron uncovered the brutality of the allegorical enterprise in its “deflection from the physical or corporeal realm” (79). Allegorical reading, because it has characters “rather embody an idea than inhabit a body” (Carton 1982), largely misses the materiality of flesh, the pleasure or displeasure of senses, and the complex entanglements of letter, body and world that is the well-known province of nineteenth-century US literature. Recovering the messiness of bodies and their materiality has been an important injunction of nineteenth-century Americanist criticism in the last decades, asking us to move beyond the ontological rift between matter and spirit, and to embrace the oxymoronic resistance to the mind/body divide—in other words, to move beyond allegory, and even hermeneutics tout court, and devise ways of reading that destabilize our interpretative grounds. The topic of this conference, “dis/embodiment,” is an attempt to respond to this invitation, because the writings of Poe and Hawthorne, perhaps more than others, unsettle our senses and blur the limit between life and death, the corporeal and the non-corporeal, the body and the ghost, the human and the non-/post-human. In that sense, the slash in our title is less a marker of disjunction than an invitation to find new modes of articulation between bodies and what they are not, or not quite, or not any more.

Bodies matter, as we know, and Poe and Hawthorne’s texts register their materiality at a time when bodies had anything but an equal share in the body politic of the United States. For those who were denied political participation in the life of the nation because they were deemed to suffer from an excess of embodiment, for those who were seen as encumbered by a body that was too much marked, oversexualized, deformed, diseased, disabled­, only the prospect of disembodiment paradoxically figured the promise of (necro)citizenship (Castronovo 2001). But bodies are not only sites of subjugation; they are also sites of resistance to their discursive production by institutionalized forms of knowledge and control (medicine, religion, the law). As such, they become a locus of self-invention and identity affirmation. Dis/embodiment is therefore conducive to forms of re-embodiments, or alternative versions of what it means to inhabit one’s/a body.  The slash, here again, points to forms of liminality and thresholding in texts which indeed favor the ambiguous chiaroscuro of imagination over the light that chisels the contours of bodies as things, which prefer the arabesque design over the injunction of a straight line that creates categories. In Hawthorne and in Poe, bodies often turn grotesque, monstrous, on the verge of dissolution, or disincorporation, into ghosts, specters, zombies, or untimely cyborgs—yet always grounded in the materiality of the letter, or the book. For, if bodies are discursive spaces, if “all bodies are signs[,]. . . all signs are (signifying) bodies” (Nancy 2000). Dis/embodiment then also invites us to reconsider Poe and Hawthorne’s texts themselves, as well as their translations and later adaptations or afterlives, as unruly bodies, sentient pages that generate ambivalent readerly affects and, at times, “tawdry physical affrightments.”

We invite proposals for individual papers as well as full panels, roundtables, and more creative formats, on Poe, Hawthorne, or Poe and Hawthorne as they relate to the theme of dis/embodiment. While we welcome new readings of canonical oeuvres, we are also interested in proposals turning to texts that have received less critical attention. We also invite proposals that place the question of bodies in Poe and/or Hawthorne in conversation with other writers and literary, aesthetic, philosophical, political, and cultural traditions. We are particularly interested in proposals that seek to explore their relation to French contexts, including how French writers, critics, philosophers, artists, and filmmakers have drawn on their writings, or translated them into French. From Baudelaire and Mallarmé, to Marie Bonaparte, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, to Claude Richard, Henri Justin, and Paulin Ismard, Poe has often been on the mind of French readers. We hope that this conference will offer the opportunity to revisit the French side of Poe, as well as to recover “the French face” of Hawthorne, from his “Second Empire critics” (Anesko and Brooks) to more recent engagements. We also welcome proposals that seek to position the question of bodies in Poe and/or Hawthorne beyond a transatlantic setting and within larger historical and geographical networks and traditions.

Individual paper proposals should be no more than 250 words and include speaker affiliation and a 100-word biographical statement. Panel or round-table proposals, which may be up to 1,500 words, should include a panel rationale, organizer and speaker names, affiliations and biographical statements, as well as paper titles and abstracts. 

Please submit your proposals to dis.embodiment2025@gmail.comby 15 September 2024. Confirmations of accepted proposals will be sent out by mid-November 2024.

All participants must be members of either the Poe Studies Association or the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society prior to the conference.