Call for Essay Proposals for Volume on Teaching Representations of the First World War

Essay proposals are invited for a volume in the MLA’s Options for Teaching series entitled Teaching Representations of the First World War, to be edited by Debra Rae Cohen and Douglas Higbee. Timed to coincide with the centenary of the conflict, the volume will serve as a wide-ranging and up-to-date resource for instructors teaching literature and other arts and media associated with the war. The opening section will offer four longer essays that explore key critical paradigms associated with the study of the war and its representations, including changing definitions of war, new understandings derived from global historiography, the relation of the war to modernism, and myths of rupture and continuity. The second section will underscore the importance of teaching the war in a global context, offering approaches to a wide range of national and transnational perspectives on war representations. The third section will offer contextualizations of war representations across a variety of subfields, such as medicine, media, and queer studies, while the fourth will discuss teaching the war through various literary, artistic, and popular genres. The fifth section will address the pedagogical challenges of introducing these materials in a variety of courses and institutional contexts, and a final section will discuss various resources—online, archival, and institutional—available for instructors.

If you are interested in contributing an essay to one of these sections (essays will average about 3,000 words), please send a 1–2 page abstract and a brief CV to Debra Rae Cohen (cohendr@mailbox.sc.edu) and Douglas Higbee (douglash@usca.edu) by 1 December 2012. Hard-copy proposals can be mailed to Douglas Higbee, English Department, 471 University Parkway, University of South Carolina, Aiken, SC 29801. The editors would be happy to entertain preliminary inquiries in advance of the deadline and to send a list of possible topics by e-mail.