CFP - From Gotham to Camazotz: Madeleine L'Engle at 100 and New York City

Call for Papers for MLA Panel
From Gotham to Camazotz: Madeleine L'Engle at 100 and New York City

The year 2018 marks the centenary of the birth of Madeleine L'Engle, author of the classic work of children's literature, A Wrinkle in Time.

This auspicious occasion is augmented by the fact that L'Engle was born in New York City, the site of the MLA conference in 2018.

This non-guaranteed panel session will engage with both of these issues.

It will examine the past place, current status, and future significance of L'Engle and her work in the year when she would have turned 100. During this process, it will pay special attention to the relationship that L'Engle simultaneously had and didn¹t have with the city of her birth.

In so doing, this panel will trace L'Engle's geographic trajectory from Gotham, where she was born, to Camazotz, the planetary metropolis from A Wrinkle in Time for which she is most well known and on which her legacy largely rests.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• The portrayal of the city in L'Engle's work
• L'Engle as a New Yorker
• The importance of place, setting, and regionalism in L'Engle's work
• A Wrinkle in Time as a commentary on urban spaces and modern metropolitan life
• L'Engle's period as a writer-in-residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City: its impact, influence, and importance
• The mythology associated with the Big Apple in L'Engle's writing
• The Young Unicorns and The Severed Wasp as New York novels
• L'Engle's work as a rejection of the metropolis and a turn to the pastoral
• Dr. Alex Murry's tesseract research and The Manhattan Project
• The depiction of New York City in L'Engle's novels, especially the Austin Family series
• Characters Adam Eddington, Camilla Dickinson, Katherine Forrester Vigneras from the Austin Family series as New Yorkers
• Geography, topography, and mapping in L'Engle's writing

Send 500-word paper proposals by March 1, 2017 to Michelle Ann Abate, abate.30@osu.edu.