Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture Conference
Louisville, KY (February 21 - 23, 2008)

The Philip Roth Society will sponsor a panel at the 2008 University of Louisville's Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture Conference.
 
The Twentieth-Century Literature Conference, now in its thirty-sixth year, is an annual international conference notable for the breadth of interests that it represents and for the combination of critical and creative work that it features. For more information on the conference visit its Web site, http://www.louisville.edu/a-s/cml/xxconf/.
 

Please submit your abstract and a brief biography by November 9 at http://www.acla.org/submit/. Successful applicants will be notified by November 16.

For additional information contact Daniel Medin <dlmedin@stanford.edu> or visit the conference site at http://www.acla.org/acla2008/.

The Philip Roth Society is looking for papers to be presented at the 2008 American Literature Association Conference on the topic of Roth and the visual arts.  The panel could cover the wide range of ways in which various visual arts and artists inform Roth's writing and recur throughout. Suggested topics and selected examples include:

• References and allusions - Famous "real-life" artworks, painters, sculptors in Roth's fiction: library & domestic architecture Gauguin in Goodbye, Columbus; Athenian Roman architecture, Acco ruins, and Borglum statue in Portnoy's Complaint; El Greco and Velázquez in Ghost Writer; Tintoretto & Jim Henson in Sabbath's Theater.
• Characters - Fictional visual artists: Uncle Asher in Letting Go, Roy's art school in When She Was Good, Mickey Sabbath, Everyman's late-life calling.
• Biography/influence - Artists associated with Roth: Guston, Kitaj.
• Packaging - Cover art: Otto Dix on Sabbath's Theater, Modigliani on The Dying Animal.
• The movies - Movie references and allusions: Heddy Lamar in Goodbye, Columbus, forties stars in Portnoy's Complaint, Alec Guinness in Operation Shylock, Deep Throat in American Pastoral.
• Movie adaptations of Roth: Goodbye, Columbus, Portnoy's Complaint, The Human Stain, The Dying Animal, The Ghost Writer (PBS series American Short Story adaptation)
• Roth's Style - Roth's pictorial style as in the distinction in The Human Stain between "the whole story" and "the whole picture."
• Landscapes - Trees & deer paddock in Goodbye, Columbus; VT leaf season, Israel, the wild west of Jersey in Portnoy's Complaint; Berkshires in The Ghost Writer & The Human Stain; ice-fishing pond in The Human Stain; "the Shore" and various cityscapes throughout Roth's work.

Please send all paper abstracts, along with full contact information, to:

James D. Bloom
Class of 1932 Research Professor
English & American Studies
Muhlenberg College
Allentown PA 18104-5586
TEL 484-664-3317/FAX 3633
bloom@muhlenberg.edu

All presenters on Roth Society-sponsored panels must be members of the Philip Roth Society by the time of the conference.