What We Keep and Why:
Booker Prize Winners and the Making of Classics and Canons
Call for Papers
This conference will take up the questions posed by Ankhi Mukherjee in "'What Is a Classic?': International Literary Criticism and the Classic Question." Who decides what works become classics and how they fit into literary or other cultural canons? In a multiplicity of canon formations, do the collections of some communties enjoy greater prestige than others? Do Booker Prize winning books by authors such as TS Eliot, VS Naipaul, JM Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie deserve recognition as classic works? What does Crossover Dreams by Leon Ichaso reveal about modes of cultural recognition and acceptance? These and other questions will be taken up at this conference, which will take place 23-30 March 2011. Papers for the conference should take up one of these questions or some other aspect of the relationship between Mukherjee's article and the books under discussion. One page (250 word) abstracts in Modern Language Association (MLA) style are due by 9 March 2011.