CFP: Geographies of the Precarious In-Between: Navigating Spaces of Young
Adulthood and the Gothic
A non-guaranteed panel sponsored by the MLA Children’s and Young Adult Literature Forum
Extended: Now Due 22 Mar 2024
Please submit 250-word abstracts to Kiedra B. Taylor (kiedra.taylor@uconn.edu) and Paige Gray (blankpaige@gmail.com) by March 22.
Giselle Anatol, in her articulation of the postcolonial Gothic in young people’s fiction, considers the ways in which familiar living spaces become unfamiliar, and how this “represents both the epitome and the deformation—a
haunting, in essence—oftraditional notions of home, a place that is supposed to provide safety, security, contentment, and happiness (“Brown Girl Dreaming: A Ghost Story in the Postcolonial Gothic Tradition” 411).
Young adult literature, arguably, anchors itself in such “hauntings” as adolescent protagonists find themselves alienated from or challenged by the spectors of their younger selves and their former ideas of “home”; they exist in between not only childhood and adulthood, but also between autonomy and erasure, belonging and alterity.
The in-between is where the young adult resides—amid literal or metaphoric ghosts.
The subjective in-between, according Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition, is “no less real than the world of things,” as it can refer to narrative, representational, and psychic spaces as a means to human connectivity—how we see and define ourselves in relation to others.
Taking cue from Anatol and Arendt, this panel seeks to explore the intersections between the broadly conceived terms “young adult” and “gothic” in literature and consider how these “in-between” spaces function as sites of liberation for marginalized identities, but also as sites of precarity. We welcome proposals that engage with this relationship from an
array of perspectives. Projects could address:
- speculative YA fiction as a means to explore precarity and social inequity
- Ebony Elizabeth Thomas’s theory of the “dark fantastic” as a lens to re-examine traditional Gothic literature from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries centered on young adults
- collective memory and “hauntings”
- liminality and social justice for young adults
- defamiliarizations of domestic spaces
- defamiliarizations of natural spaces and the eco-Gothic