Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Northwest Undergraduate Conference on Literature (Jan deadline)

Porter Raper

The University of Portland hosts a yearly undergraduate literature conference, and the HARTS Council would like to encourage PCC students to submit their work. The conference is mostly focused on analytical essays from literature courses, but they also accept submissions for original poetry and personal essays. The conference is in March, and the submission deadline is January 16, 2018 (please see the link below).

Faculty: please consider suggesting to students who produce exceptional work to submit. A faculty sponsor is required.

Students: if you’ve written a strong critical essay for a literature class, or if you have written poems/personal essays, talk with your professor about the possibility of them sponsoring you.

From the conference website:

Conference Theme

Our conference theme seeks to employ both elements of Burke’s metaphor: the context in which a critical conversation has taken place and the current discussions about the issue in question. By becoming aware of what has been said can we as critics hope to enter the conversation and have an impact on its direction? Our conference provides a forum for just these sorts of conversations, as we invite students to present their ideas about literature in the form of analytical and research papers, and then facilitate discussions of these papers in small-group settings. Finally, our keynote speech aims to interject another critical perspective to help foster conversations even after the conference ends.

Submissions

Scholarly papers should engage contemporary literary criticism as they grapple with a work of literature, an author, a literary problem. Analytical and interpretive papers should be carefully argued, as comprehensive as possible in their treatment of a text or texts, and aware of the influence on their views of the contemporary cultural context. The conference is particularly interested in encouraging students to investigate how the mix of contemporary literary criticism and contemporary student readers can provide insights into potentially age-old questions surrounding literary works.

While the primary emphasis of NUCL is on critical writing, we also invite student poets and essayists to submit 1 essay, or a suite of 5-7 poems. Those chosen will read their work in a few sessions reserved for original poetry and essays. Submitted student poetry and essays should reflect reading experience in contemporary poetry and creative non-fiction.

• Argumentative Scholarly papers on American, British, or World Literature
• Analytical/ interpretive papers that present a well-supported argument aware of the influence on it of the contemporary cultural context
• Original poems
• Original personal essays
• Presentation of a special research project (completed and presented with an attending faculty sponsor)

For more information, contact Porter Raper, Cascade English Instructor at praper@pcc.edu.