The Department of English Language and Literature, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in collaboration with the Hellenic Association of American Studies (HELAAS) invites you to participate in the international conference:

AFTER POSTMODERNISM: AMERICAN STUDIES IN THE 21ST CENTURY December 17-19, 2020

There is a shared sense among a large majority of historians, philosophers, critics and artists that we are now living in a new global moment:  our contemporary era may or may not have started with the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989; may or may not have established itself in the wake of the 9/11 attacks; but it is painfully clear that, in the new millennium, a new debate on the “postpostmodern” has opened up. If the Jamesonian taxonomy no longer has the same explanatory power, what is the new dominant cultural logic of post-postmodernism?  If, to quote Jameson again, postmodernism was a “radical break or coupure” with modernism, which is post-postmodernism’s cultural imaginary, its strategies and features? However early it may be to describe the nature of postpostmodernism, we can discern three loosely bounded interpenetrating strands: some scholars recognize a heightened degree of intensity and mutation of tendencies and techniques already present in postmodernism, others see a renewed engagement with history and a return to realism. Still, there are those thinkers who have observed a decisive break with the postmodern period and have struggled to mark its contours in the new socioeconomic order, a notable feature of which is the shift or questioning of the paradigm of the American global hegemony. Nevertheless, complicating the study of the cultural shifts that are underway in our current condition is the abundance of terms and tendencies that proclaim to be postmodernism’s successors.

The conference “After post-modernism: American Studies in the 21st century” takes as a point of departure the words of Ben Lerner’s narrator, that “the world [is] rearranging itself” (10.04) and invites both panels and papers that address fresh and original questions relevant to studying the post-postmodern condition. It seeks to investigate questions about changing literary patterns, innovative/shifting cultural practices, and new trends that have risen in the first two decades of the twenty-first century or, to put it simply, what comes after postmodernism.

Possible topics could cover

• The post-nationalist turn in American Studies
• American Literature and the posthuman turn
• Aspects of autofiction in contemporary art, literature and popular culture
• New literacies and American fiction
• New Media literacy and authorial practices
• Post-exceptionalis American fiction
• Deterritorialization and American migrant literature
• American literature and Ecoglobalist presences
• Post theory and the ‘novelizations’ of literary theory
• Writership/readership in the post-postmodern

Please send 300-word abstracts to Dr. Dora Tsimpouki (tsimpouki@enl.uoa.gr), along with a short (150-word) biographical note

Deadline for abstracts:  January 31, 2020.