June: Gertrude Stein and her Audience
(Deadline: May 1)

"The thing that is fundamental about plays," writes Stein in her essay, "Plays," "is that the scene as depicted on the stage is more often than not one might say it is almost always in syncopated time in relation to the emotion of anybody in the audience." Submissions are invited that investigate Stein's relationship to her audience/"readience": How citational/ performative is this relationship? How/ Does Stein address audience at all? (How) Do we understand Stein's writing as performative? How do we perform reading Stein? How does reading Stein perform us?

This issue will encompass a forum on the teaching of Stein's work in the undergraduate classroom, for which all sorts of submissions (narratives, lesson plans, pedagogical strategies, reading questions, etc.) are being sought.

September: Gertrude Stein and the Question(ing) of Politics
(Deadline: August 1)

In her writing Stein often distinguishes between americans and Americans, between french and French, or germans and Germans. While some critics maintain that Stein was a pacifist, one researcher recently uncovered in the Stein-archive a celebratory piece about Petain's Vichy-government. Submissions are invited that address questions of Stein and nationhood and Stein and politics, such as: What are the implications of Stein's assigning such distinctive (trans)national labels in the context of her (and our) understanding of gender, ethnicity, or sexuality? How have other modernist and postmodernist scribes commented on Stein's (re)vision of nationhood? Is it possible, at all, to read Stein as a political artist?

December: Gertrude, Alice and their Seasons
(Deadline: November 1)

Stein's understanding of time and /as geography has been widely explored, but not the use, representation, and significance of seasons and seasonal events, or Jewish religious events, in Stein's and Toklas' writing. We know much about Stein's love for the bright summer sun, about her winter and summer residences, and we know what Alice used to cook at certain times in the year, but the body of criticism and art on these issues is rather small.

Time-Sense welcomes conference-listings, panel abstracts, and inquiries for book reviews.

For submission format, please refer to the submission guidelines or write to the editor at shstreuber@ucdavis.edu.