Brandeis Novel Symposium CFP 2023: Percial Everett’s Erasure 

Friday October 20, 2023, Brandeis University Mandel Center for the Humanities

The seventh annual Brandeis Novel Symposium invites proposals for papers that think with and about Percival Everett’s Erasure. Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California, Percival Everett is the author of more than 30 books including most recently the Booker Prize shortlisted The Trees. Erasure (2001) is a satire of the American publishing industry and the pressures placed on African-American writers. 

The Brandeis Novel symposium welcomes papers that focus closely on Erasure as well as explorations of the broader theoretical, conceptual, socio-historical, and formal issues it raises. We welcome papers that use Erasure to illuminate topics including: satire, genre, embedded narratives, market forces, literary anger, race, class, authenticity, representation, the philosophical novel, comedy, experimental fiction, postmodernism, metafiction. We also welcome papers that situate Erasure within the arc of Everett’s career and/or discuss the novel’s relationship to other works including Richard Wright’s Native Son, Sapphire’s Push, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. 

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words by June 30, 2023 to plotz@brandeis.edu. Submissions will receive responses by July 15, 2023. Programs for previous years of the Brandeis Novel Symposium can be found here:  2022 2021 2020 2019 2018 2017. Some further information including registration links will also shortly be available at the 2023 website.