The Cornell English Department's Graduate Student Spring Conference is currently accepting abstracts for its fifth annual conference on literary, cultural, and theoretical notions of "taking exception". We are seeking papers of no more than 15 to 20 minutes addressing issues such as the construction and interpretation of exceptional subject positions (including race, gender, ability and sexuality), exceptional literary and cultural forms, and the politics / poetics of resistance.

Paper topics may include, but are by no means limited to:
-American Exceptionalism
-sites of resistance
-states of exception
-exceptional / extraordinary bodies
-exceptional sex
-gendering / queering exceptionality
-no exception: the law and juridical spaces
-making exceptions: hegemony and power structures
-the exception that proves the rule: notions of normativity
-the exceptional nation and exceptions to the nation: nationalisms, ideologies, resistances, migrations, diasporas, transnationalities, globalizations
-oppositions to the rule: feminisms, minority studies, postcoloniality, disability studies, queer studies, etc.
-temporal exceptions: challenges to literary and theoretical periodizations
-exceptions to genre: challenges to formal constraints, emergence and collapse of genres (prose poetry, remixing media), the popular and high culture
-questions of marginality and canonicity; writing from the margins
-borders/borderlands as spaces of exception
-filmic strategies of exception and representation; the exceptional spectator
-aesthetics as a site of exception

Deadline for Abstracts: Friday, January 20, 2006.

About our keynote speaker: Jeffrey Santa Ana is Assistant Professor of English at Dartmouth College. He has research and teaching interests in Asian American literature and film, mixed-race studies, transnationalism and globalization, and theories of the emotions. He's published articles on multiraciality in global consumer culture and gender and sexuality in Asian American literature. His current work is a manuscript entitled "Feeling Multiracial: Emotions, Politics, and Mixed Race in the American Global Imaginary." His book examines the ways in which representations of mixed-race people in commercial culture, film, and American ethnic literature express anxieties of human experience under globalization.

We are committed to encompassing a spectrum of methodologies and mediums, and are seeking not only scholarly papers, but also original fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction submissions. Abstracts or extracts should be no more than 300 words and must be received no later than Friday, January 20, 2006. Please send e-mail submissions to: ascgrad-mailbox_at_cornell.edu or send by regular mail to: Toni Jaudon, Department of English, 250 Goldwin Smith, Cornell University, Ithaca NY, 14853-3201.