Skip to main content

"The Landscape of Rome's Literature"
Seminar at the annual conference of the Association of Literary, Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW)
Oct. 3-6, 2019

The College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA
http://alscw.org/events/annual-conference/alscw-2019-conference/

This call for papers is for the seminar "The Landscape of Rome's Literature," one of many seminars that will occur during the ALSCW 2019 annual conference.

The Landscape of Rome’s Literature
Moderator: Aaron Seider, Associate Professor of Classics, The College of the Holy Cross
In the stories of Rome’s beginnings along the Tiber’s bank; of its fields stained by the blood of civil war; and of its battles beyond empire’s edges, Roman authors turned to the landscape to reflect on their society and their writing. What can close readings of Livy’s early Rome, Vergil’s Italian settings, or Tacitus’ British battles, for instance, reveal about the relationship between language and landscape in Roman literature? This seminar offers a forum for exploring a range of questions related to the literary construction of landscapes, with a particular interest in what the Romans’ written landscapes communicate about their identity and their work as authors. We invite papers that address these questions from any perspective, with a range of potential topics including the intersection between landscape and areas such as emotion, memory, genre, time, or aesthetics; the relationship between the natural and built environment; metaphorical uses of the landscape; and literary receptions of the classical landscape.

The seminar will last about two hours and consist of 6-8 participants. Participants exchange drafts of their papers 2-4 weeks before the seminar, and, at the seminar itself, each participant offers a 5-7 minute summary of their paper and this is followed by 20-30 minutes of discussion.

Anyone who is interested in presenting should submit a proposal of 300 words and a C.V. by email to Lee Oser at <leeoser@holycross.edu> and Ernest Suarez at <Suarez@cua.edu> on or before June 1, 2019. While membership in ALSCW is not required to submit a proposal, it is required for participation in the conference. Please feel free to email Aaron Seider <aseider@holycross.edu> with any questions about the seminar.

---

(Photo: "Handwritten" by A. Birkan, licensed under CC BY 2.0)