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Montréal – News and Updates on Our Annual Conference this June!

Published on April 30, 2012 in Headline and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Book Your Hotel — Conference Rates End Soon

We’ve secured group rates at two participating hotels, both within a 5-minute walk of the conference venue – Centre Mont-Royal. We encourage you to make arrangements regarding your hotel stay as soon as possible, as space is limited and rates will increase after our rates expire (May 13 at Le St-Martin and May 30 at the Best Western). For more information, visit the Accommodations webpage.

Registration

If you have not registered for the 2012 Humanities Conference in Montréal, please visit the Humanities Conference website to register or email support@thehumanities.com. The deadline to register for In-Person Presentations is 31 May 2012. In-Person Presenter Registrations completed after this date are not guaranteed to appear in the printed program available at the conference. Click here to register now or for more information.

Introducing Our New Sessions

We are pleased to introduce our newly themed sessions at this year’s Humanities Conference in Montréal! Traditionally, paper presentations have been scheduled into individual 30-minute sessions, with corresponding papers scheduled before and after, but without interaction. In order to foster greater interaction and more meaningful feedback at this year’s conference, we’ve grouped papers into 70-minute and 90-minute themed sessions with two to three other presenters. Papers are grouped by similar topics and perspectives, enhancing discussion and collaboration. Find out more about our conference sessions….

Book Launch — Join Us to Celebrate Our Newest Title from The Humanities Series

Please join us for the launch of R. Baxter Miller’s recently published book, On the Ruins of Modernity: New Chicago Renaissance from Wright to Fair. Professor Baxter Miller will speak about his work on the first day of the conference in a plenary presentation entitled “New Chicago Renaissance, Modernity, and the Humanities.” A garden session and book signing will follow. Learn more.

Prepare for Your Trip

For more information on the conference venue, city maps, transportation and our 2012 Humanities Conference Delegate Pack, please visit our Location webpage. Also, you may sign-up for special conference events, browse other presenters’ sessions, read about our featured Plenary Speakers, and ‘meet’ our 2012 Graduate Scholar Recipients.

We look forward to seeing you at the 2012 Humanities Conference, 14-16 June 2012 in Montréal, Canada!

The New Directions in the Humanities Family of Journals

Published on April 30, 2012 in Headline, Journal and Newsletter. 0 Comments

In recent years, The International Journal of the Humanities has become larger, too large in fact as the amount of top-quality material we are receiving has grown. This has occurred even though we have continued to tighten our already-rigorous acceptance procedures.

As a consequence, we have decided to divide the journal into a number of thematically focused journals, plus a highlights journal which contains reprints of top-ranked and invited articles from plenary speakers at the Humanities Conference.

This development will have a number of advantages to authors and readers. The journals will be of a more ‘normal’ size. Individual papers will be published electronically and as a single-article paper offprint as soon as they are ready, followed by the full issue of each journal on regular, scheduled publication dates four times per year both electronically and in print. The journals will be more accessible and coherent, as more closely aligned articles will now be better grouped. For these reasons, the new journals are likely to gain enhanced recognition in journal indexes and citation counts.

In the area addressed by the New Direction in the Humanities knowledge community, these will be the journals into which articles will be published:

  • The International Journal of Humanities Education
  • The International Journal of Literary Humanities
  • The International Journal of Critical Cultural Studies
  • The International Journal of Communication and Linguistic Studies
  • The International Journal of Civic, Political, and Community Studies

Each of these thematically focused journals will be clearly linked to the highlights journal with the following subtitle, ‘A section of The International Journal of the Humanities’.

Authors can request which of the thematic journals they would prefer for the publication of their article, should it receive a favorable review and a reviewer recommendation to publish. Alternatively, when the author does not opt to make a selection, the Common Ground editorial team will curate each paper into the appropriate thematic journal.

Authors will not submit directly to the highlights journal. This journal will consist only of reprints of articles from the thematic journals. This will not be a second publication of the article, and the subtitle of the highlights journal will clearly indicate that this journal only consists of reprints of highlights of general interest from the thematic journals.

Participants at the Humanities Conference and members of the New Directions in the Humanities Open Institute are provided subscription access to all journals in this family of journals for the 12-month period associated with their conference registration or Institute membership dues.

This is an exciting development for the New Directions in the Humanities knowledge community, one which we believe will greatly benefit both authors and readers.

Fifty Years On: The Triumph of the Penguin Modern Poets

Published on April 30, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From William Wooten at The Times Literary Supplement…

Contemporary poetry began in 1962 – in April to be precise – with the publication of A. Alvarez’s Penguin anthology The New Poetry, the first two volumes of the Penguin Modern Poets series, and the first number of Ian Hamilton’s little magazine, the Review. As with the beginning of sexual intercourse, dated by Philip Larkin’s “Annus Mirabilis” to the following year, the fact that April 1962 fell between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP was significant. On the one hand, sales of D. H. Lawrence’s book had greatly enriched Penguin Books, which allowed the recently appointed chief editor, Tony Godwin, to pursue ambitious new projects; on the other, the Fab Four had yet to ensure that the new and relevant would be more culturally synonymous with Pop than with Lawrentian intensities and critical seriousness.

In “Beyond the Gentility Principle”, his introductory essay to The New Poetry, A. Alvarez was not short of either: Lawrence stands as the “only English writer . . . able to face the most uncompromising forces at work in our time”, a writer who had “almost nothing to do with middle-class gentility” and whose example validates the verse of the young Ted Hughes. Lawrence also means F. R. Leavis, invoked at the opening and close of “Beyond the Gentility Principle”, whose criticism helped shape The New Poetry’s contributors, editor and readership alike. Which is not to say that Alvarez’s ideas had not moved on a good way from those of the Leavisites pur sang. More…

Hamlet in the Arab world

Published on April 22, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Jane Jakeman at The Times Literary Supplement…

Is there a “right” view of Hamlet? The very question presupposes he is a personage or a historical entity, rather than a created dramatic character. Margaret Litvin’s absorbing study examines this confected persona as it has appeared in the Arab world, especially as it emerged reborn from the fervent matrix of modern Egyptian politics. She supplies a fascinating account of the translations which came at first to Arabic through French versions, which were often heavily cut and bowdlerized. In Dumas’s influential version, the character of Fortinbras was omitted, and the opening scene on the battlements was completely cut. English literary influences were later arrivals, and interpreted locally with anti-colonial implications (Muhammad Hamdi’s 1912 edition of Julius Caesar described the author as “William Shakespeare, the democratic English poet and playwright”). If Arab audiences viewed Hamlet as a heroic figure, it was at first mainly as a fighter against colonial tyranny, engaged in a struggle against the usurper. This was the role that leaders such as Nasser originally adopted: only later in their political careers did they themselves become the tyrants, the “Claudius” figures against whom the younger generation had to act. More…

On the Ruins of Modernity: New Chicago Renaissance from Wright to Fair

Published on April 8, 2012 in Book and Newsletter. 0 Comments

On the Ruins of Modernity: New Chicago Renaissance from Wright to Fair by R. Baxter Miller is now available as part of  The Humanities series.

Within a rich cultural and political context, Miller proposes that as the centuries turned and the nation became more diverse, the great Chicago Renaissances—especially the literary and cultural ones—never really ended. The nation’s cities simply became more richly complexioned and culturally nuanced. Hence, the great Popular and Cultural Fronts of the thirties resurfaced as the innovative Black Arts Movement of the late sixties and early seventies. By the last third of the Twentieth Century, Chicago epitomized a dynamism among several of the most gifted African American writers in the nation’s history. In addition to Gwendolyn Brooks and Richard Wright, these figures included Lorraine Hansberry, and, yes, the nearly forgotten Ronald L. Fair. As a whole, the four recentered the locus of literary artistry in the United States. Though the great trace of African American literary imagination had nearly always led through the Harlem Renaissance of 1920s New York, a new trajectory took a decisive turn toward the Great Lakes. It has taken until the early decades of the 21st century to realize that the cultural map of the last hundred years had already changed. This book, a startling epiphany of post-modern American culture, will appeal to a wide range of readers interested in national politics and history as well as bold innovations in literary form.

R. Baxter Miller (Ph.D., Brown University) wrote The Art and Imagination of Langston Hughes (1989; paperback 2006), which won the American Book Award in 1991, and edited the internationally acclaimed Black American Literature and Humanism (1981). One of five co-editors and co-authors to have published Call and Response: the Riverside Edition of African American Literature (1998, 2003), he specializes in the study of poetics across the centuries. His most important essays are extensively revised and published as Artistry of Memory (2008). Of his ten volumes, the critical edition Black American Poets between Worlds, 1940-1960 (1986) was an academic bestseller, and The Southern Trace in Black Critical Theory (1991), a critical study, helped establish the new series of the Xavier Review Press. The commissioned editor of Langston Hughes: the Short Stories (2002), Miller has completed Critical Insights: Langston Hughes, a new edition scheduled to appear in 2012. He has earned both the Langston Hughes Award and the Ford-Turpin honor for the stewardship of an African American critical legacy.

On the Ruins of Modernity: New Chicago Renaissance from Wright to Fair

Published on March 8, 2012 in Book, Headline and Newsletter. 0 Comments

On the Ruins of Modernity: New Chicago Renaissance from Wright to Fair by R. Baxter Miller is now available as part of  The Humanities series.

Within a rich cultural and political context, Miller proposes that as the centuries turned and the nation became more diverse, the great Chicago Renaissances—especially the literary and cultural ones—never really ended. The nation’s cities simply became more richly complexioned and culturally nuanced. Hence, the great Popular and Cultural Fronts of the thirties resurfaced as the innovative Black Arts Movement of the late sixties and early seventies. By the last third of the Twentieth Century, Chicago epitomized a dynamism among several of the most gifted African American writers in the nation’s history. In addition to Gwendolyn Brooks and Richard Wright, these figures included Lorraine Hansberry, and, yes, the nearly forgotten Ronald L. Fair. As a whole, the four recentered the locus of literary artistry in the United States. Though the great trace of African American literary imagination had nearly always led through the Harlem Renaissance of 1920s New York, a new trajectory took a decisive turn toward the Great Lakes. It has taken until the early decades of the 21st century to realize that the cultural map of the last hundred years had already changed. This book, a startling epiphany of post-modern American culture, will appeal to a wide range of readers interested in national politics and history as well as bold innovations in literary form.

R. Baxter Miller (Ph.D., Brown University) wrote The Art and Imagination of Langston Hughes (1989; paperback 2006), which won the American Book Award in 1991, and edited the internationally acclaimed Black American Literature and Humanism (1981). One of five co-editors and co-authors to have published Call and Response: the Riverside Edition of African American Literature (1998, 2003), he specializes in the study of poetics across the centuries. His most important essays are extensively revised and published as Artistry of Memory (2008). Of his ten volumes, the critical edition Black American Poets between Worlds, 1940-1960 (1986) was an academic bestseller, and The Southern Trace in Black Critical Theory (1991), a critical study, helped establish the new series of the Xavier Review Press. The commissioned editor of Langston Hughes: the Short Stories (2002), Miller has completed Critical Insights: Langston Hughes, a new edition scheduled to appear in 2012. He has earned both the Langston Hughes Award and the Ford-Turpin honor for the stewardship of an African American critical legacy.

In the Details: ‘The Lifespan of a Fact,’ by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal

Published on February 26, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Jennifer B. McDonald in the New York Times Sunday Book Review:

 This book review would be so much easier to write were we to play by John D’Agata’s rules. So let’s try it. (1) This is not a book review; it’s an essay. (2) I’m not a critic; I’m an artist. (3) Nothing I say can be used against me by the subjects of this essay, nor may anyone hold me to account re facts, truth or any contract I have supposedly entered into with you, the reader. There are to be no objections. There are to be no letters of complaint. For you are about to have — are you ready? — a “genuine experience with art.”

Such a declaration is liberating to an author, as McDonald then says. But an author unfettered by facts or one free from the distinction fact-fiction is someone to watch closely. When reading a work by an author who adjusts facts to whim or “artistic” judgment a reader would do well to keep one hand on his mental wallet and a sharp eye out for philosophical pickpockets.

For the full review…

Finalists for the International Award for Excellence

Published on February 21, 2012 in Journal and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Congratulations to all of the finalists for the International Award for Excellence in the area of new directions in the humanities:

Humanities Journal, Volume 9, Issue 6 now available

Published on February 20, 2012 in Journal and Newsletter. 0 Comments

humanities_frontThe sixth issue of Volume 9 of The International Journal of the Humanities has now been published.

Volume 9, Issue 6 contains:

Continue reading ‘Humanities Journal, Volume 9, Issue 6 now available’

Humanities Journal, Volume 9, Issue 5 now available

Published on February 7, 2012 in Journal and Newsletter. 0 Comments

humanities_frontThe fifth issue of Volume 9 of The International Journal of the Humanities has now been published.

Volume 9, Issue 5 contains:

Continue reading ‘Humanities Journal, Volume 9, Issue 5 now available’