Enfilade

For next year’s MLA conference, which takes ‘Visibility’ as its presidential theme:

Improvisation and Citation: Experimentation and Creativity in the Arts
18th-Century French Forum at the Modern Language Association Convention, New Orleans, 9–12 January 2025

Proposals due by 18 March 2024

This panel, covering topics of or related to eighteenth-century French or Francophone culture, invites submissions that explore the role of improvisation and citation as techniques in aesthetic creation, focusing on their adaptation from music to other art forms such as literature, theatre, and visual arts. We are particularly interested in interdisciplinary topics, including but not limited to: portrayals of musical performances in literary and theatrical works, and the use of improvisational and citational methods in literary forms. Additionally, we seek analyses of art criticism that employ the improvisational vocabulary of music. Another area of interest is also the representation of improvisation in various arts: we aim to examine which type of artists are portrayed as possessing the innate ability to improvise, and how literary works reinterpret and repurpose the motifs associated with the improvisational prowess of artists. Please send abstract submissions to scott.m.sanders@dartmouth.edu by Monday, 18 March 2024.