The Society for the Study of Southern Literature issues a call for papers for two sessions at the 2008 American Literature Association Conference in San Francisco. The conference will be held May 22-25, 2008, at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco in Embarcadero Center. Proposed sessions are described below. Please email abstracts and either a cover letter or 2-page CV by January 20, 2008, to Tara Powell at tfpowell@gmail.com, or send hard copies to Tara Powell at the USC Institute for Southern Studies; University of South Carolina at Columbia, Gambrell Hall 107; Columbia, SC 29208.

Emailed submissions preferred. For further information about these sessions or SSSL, contact Tara Powell, or for information about the conference, please consult the ALA website at www.americanliterature.org.

Session 1: Expatriate Literature of the American South.

The southerner who leaves the South to pursue his or her literary career is one of the major tropes of southern writing, dating back to slave narratives and Edgar Allan Poe and continuing into the present with the work of such writers as Percival Everett, Gail Godwin, and others--some of whom don't seem to look back to the South at all for their art. Well-established, too, is the tradition of writers and scholars from other places trying to "tell about the South" after their visits or relocations.
What does it mean, then, for literature to be "southern," if it neither has to be written about the South nor in the South nor even necessarily by a southerner?

Possible paper topics might include: studies of individual authors and works, thematic considerations of southerners writing in the North or northerners writing the South, expatriate southern writing broadly defined that does not engage the dichotomy of North and South, examinations of "regional" or "southern" as useful terms, or ways that films and the film industry complicate this question in their representations of southernness.

Session 2: Southern Poetry and the Narrative Impulse

Dave Smith has asserted there is no contemporary "southern poetry" as such; Jim Applewhite argues southern poetry is distinguished by a paralyzing feeling of emotional submersion; Fred Chappell suggests southern poems exemplify the power inherent in the "lens of particular place." Though southern anthologies generally contain substantially less poetry than prose, the South abounds with literary journals, is home to several fine poetry series, and has produced many of the century's finest poetic voices. Storytelling, the oral tradition, and the narrative impulse are often described as hallmarks of southern fiction. Is this true of southern poetry as well? Recent collections by Fred Chappell, Andrew Hudgins, Sonia Sanchez, Natasha Trethaway, and others, suggest it might. Possible paper topics include:
discussions of particular poetic talents, "southernness" in the field of poetry and poetry studies, narrative (or lack thereof) in poets associated with the South, and regional work in relation to undercurrents in twentieth-century American poetry generally.