Category: CFPs

 University of York, 1-2 July 2016

Prof Simon Jarvis (Cambridge)

Dr Natalie Pollard (Exeter)

poeticmeasures@gmail.com

https://poeticmeasures.wordpress.com/ 

How do we measure poetry? The words ‘measure’ and ‘meter’, with their shared etymological origin in the Greek metron, have a long history of being used synonymously. When William Carlos Williams wrote that ‘[t]he key to modern poetry is measure, which must reflect the flux of modern life’, however, he proposed ‘measure’ as an alternative to the metrical foot in response to ‘the flux of modern life’ that demanded measures of more fluid and unstable permutations.

The ‘formless spawning fury’ of ‘this filthy modern tide’ compels W.B. Yeats in his poem ‘The Statues’ to search alternative measures from other art forms. Describing ‘the lineaments of a plummet-measured face’, the poem aligns itself formally with solidity and precision of sculpture, and rearticulates measurement in terms of spatial, rather than temporal, co-ordinates. Giorgio Agamben, for one, measured the ‘lineaments’ of a poem’s form by the tension between the line break and the sentence to define the lyric poem, a tension Jorie Graham described as ‘the pull from the end, the suction towards closure, and the voice trying (quite desperately in spots) to find forms of delay, digression, side-motions which are not entirely dependent for their effectiveness on that sense-of-the-ending, that stark desire’. These ‘side-motions’ of a poem’s lineation resist the linearity of the sentence, using ‘forms of delay’ not to heighten suspense, but to bypass conventional expectations of closure.

Although Eliot, in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, may have claimed that poetry can only be ‘measured’ against the ‘standards of the past’, his contention has to accommodate increasingly diverse and contested versions of both the past and the present. We thus welcome papers analysing the disparate measures modern poetry takes in a period of accelerated change, but also in a period symptomizing pervasive continuities in structures of privilege: papers investigating how we might count out poetry, but also how ‘measured language’ and its different uses might make poetry count.

Areas of investigation may include, but are not limited to:

• form and genre
• scale in poetry
• brevity and length
• poetic sequences

• units of measurement in poetry
• form, proportion and balance
• the immeasurable and/or non-measurable in poetry
• beginnings and ends
• poetry and other art forms: music, visual arts and/or craft; ekphrasis
• poetry and architecture
• poetry and mathematics
• modernism and canon formation; periodization

Please send 300-word abstracts for 20-minute papers or panel proposals by 1^st February 2016 topoeticmeasures@gmail.com, and a separate biography of no more than 100 words. The biography should be written in the third person. Please attach the biography and abstract as two separate Word documents.

Poetic Measures Poster

Poetic Measures CFP

8^th and 9^th September 2016

An Interdisciplinary Conference at the Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation

Co-organised by Gul Dag and Sandra Mills

University of Hull

Discourses concerning the concept of (dis)connection are especially prevalent in contemporary society. The relationship between the mind and the body – whether fractured or in flux – feeds into notions of identity, the self, and the ‘other’. Contemporary scholarship focusing upon borders, transformations and creations considers the manifold ways in which the body can be (re)organised and (dis)assembled.  

The notion of (dis)connection and the fragility of form is of central focus within a range of studies and genres. From the uncanniness of being in gothic and horror studies to the cerebral and corporeal fragmentation prevalent in science and speculative fictions, narratives on the fractured self continue to raise questions about the fundamentals of the lived experience.      

Plenary Speakers

Dr Catherine Spooner, Reader in Literature and Culture at Lancaster University

Asylum Chic, or, What to Wear to the Lunatics’ Ball

Dr James Aston, Subject Leader for Screen at the University of Hull

“These movies have brought me many problems”: Performance and the Traumatised Self within Hardcore Horror

Dawn Woolley, Artist and Lecturer in Photography at Anglia Ruskin University

The Selfie: Still Life or Nature Morte?

This conference aims to engage with contemporary academic debate relating to the theme of (Dis)Connected Forms, and will explore how these discourses manifest in narratives on the fractured self.

Possible questions for consideration:   

• What does it mean to be (dis)connected, fractured, transformed, metamorphosed?
• How are identities formed, managed, processed, controlled?
• Are corporeal boundaries distinct, or fluid and open to alteration?
• How is the self narrated/categorised?
• How are beings created, crafted, constructed?
• When/how can the ‘other’ be achieved? 
• What threat does an ‘other’ pose?
• Can the human be defined in relation to the cyborg, the lifeless, and the animal?
• How does/will technology alter the body?

Possible focuses might include (but are not limited to):

• (Dis)Embodiment
• Identity
• Human, cyborg, lifeless, animal
• Transformation
• Metamorphosis
• Crisis of self
• The ‘other’
• Borders and boundaries
• (Re)creations
• The living and the dead
• Deviance
• Disguise
• Revision/alteration

Papers are invited that address these questions in relation to fictional and non-fictional narratives. Submissions which encourage an interdisciplinary outlook will be welcomed. These could include, but are not limited to: literature; cultural studies; the sciences; the social sciences; historical perspectives; theatrical, musical and visual narratives; (auto)biography; personal reflections and creative pieces.

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words for a twenty minute paper along with a brief biographical note of no more than 100 words todisconnectedforms@gmail.com. The deadline for abstract submission is 3^rdApril 2016.

For any enquiries please contact Gul Dag and Sandra Mills atdisconnectedforms@gmail.com. For further information please see the website at disconnectedforms.wordpress.com and follow @DisConnectForms on Twitter.

Recovery; Revival; Rediscovery; Resistance; Retrenchment; Reclamation; Rebellion; Resignation; Rescue; Revolution…

A One-day Conference at the University of Hull

June 24th. 2016 Dr. Jane Thomas and Sue Kennedy

Department of English

Keynote speakers: Professor Mary Joannou, Anglia Ruskin University

Professor Gill Plain, University of St Andrews

The period of women’s literary history between 1930 and 1960 is beginning to receive the closer attention of literary scholars, feminists and cultural historians. It is a period characterised in many ways by the prefix ‘re’; emblematic of the persistent impulse for re-evaluation of women’s writing that occupies an uncertain, liminal place in relation to the canon.

Located in the ‘no-man’s land’ recently labelled ‘intermodernism’ by Kristin Bluemel and others, the work of women writers in the period between 1930 and 1960 has been too easily overlooked in assessments of large movements in literature. Situated after the Women’s Suffrage Movement, World War One, and high modernism, it remains distinct from the Auden generation, but precedes the appearance of the ‘kitchen sink’, the ‘sexual revolution’, and the ‘woman’s confessional novel’. The thirty-year time-span nonetheless encompasses the destabilisation of Europe, total war, recovery, reconstruction and reform. Whether and how such experiences influenced, implicitly or explicitly, the creative output of the woman writer is a key question for the conference.

We invite abstracts of up to 250 words, plus brief biography, for papers of no more than 20 minutes or panels of three associated papers which could include any of a broad range of related issues. Please refer to website for further ideas/details

website:   http://britishwomenwriters1930to1960.wordpress.com

email contact    britwomenwriters30to60@gmail.com

Please e-mail with any queries

Closing date for submissions: March 15th. 2016

July 6-8, 2016

To be held at

The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH)

Oxford University

“It is an idle question to ask whether his books will be read a century hence: if they were all burnt as the grandest of Suttees on his funeral-pile, it would only be like cutting down an oak after its acorns have sown a forest. For there is hardly a superior or active mind of this generation that has not been modified by Carlyle’s writings; there has hardly been an English book written for the last ten or twelve years that would not have been different if Carlyle had not lived.” 

George Eliot, “Thomas Carlyle” (1855)

Several generations read the works of Thomas Carlyle with surprise, awe, inspiration, fervor, excitement, and occasionally anger—and they went on to shape the rest of the 19^th century and much of the 20^th century with the words and prophecies of Carlyle embedded in their politics, philosophy, art, literature, history, and ideals for a better world.

Some of these impacts would have pleased Carlyle; others would have greatly surprised him, and a few, perhaps, would have dismayed him.  But for good and ill, Carlyle left an impact that in some ways is hard to see because it is so deeply pervasive.

This conference aims to retrieve that hidden Carlyle, and to recognize how he served, and continues to serve, as a bedrock of far-ranging ideals for several generations of readers and admirers.

For this conference, we invite proposals that explore the rich diversity of where Carlyle lies hidden in the vision and hopes of eminent Victorians, Edwardians, and Modernists throughout England, Scotland, Ireland, Europe, and across the ocean in America and beyond.  Because Jane Welsh Carlyle had a similar effect on the readers of her letters, both in her lifetime and afterwards, we also invite proposals that address her continuing influence as well.

We especially welcome papers that delineate how the reception of Carlyle’s works shaped critical movements in politics, art, historiography, literature, including (among many):

Socialism

Communism

Muscular Christianity

The Gospel of Work

Pre-Raphaelite Art

The New Biography

Modernism

Young Ireland/Irish Nationalism

Transcendentalism

We also welcome papers that explore individual figures from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and their relation to the writings of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle.  A short list of significant figures influenced by the Carlyles includes:

Charles Dickens

John Stuart Mill

Karl Marx and Frederic Engels

Benjamin Disraeli

George Eliot

Erasmus and Charles Darwin

James Anthony Froude

Leslie Stephen

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Robert Browning

Elizabeth Barrett-Browning

William Morris

John Ruskin

Lady Jane “Speranza” Wilde

Oscar Wilde

W.E.B. DuBois

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Margaret Fuller

Henry David Thoreau

Friedrich Nietzsche

Virginia Woolf

James Joyce

Conference website:  http://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/cfp-recovering-hidden-carlyle

Proposals of no more than 500 words, along with short CV, should be sent by February 15, 2016 to:

Marylu Hill (Villanova University):  marylu.hill@villanova.edu

and

Paul E. Kerry (Oxford/BYU): paul.kerry@ccc.ox.ac.uk

‘The Robert Graves Society is pleased to announce that the Thirteenth International Robert Graves Conference will be held at St John’s College, Oxford, from 7 September to 10 September 2016. The theme of the conference will be ‘Robert Graves and the First World War’.

On the 20 July 1916, just four days before his 21st birthday, Robert Graves was seriously injured and left for dead during action in the Battle of the Somme. His Colonel wrote to Graves’s parents that their son was very gallant, and had died of wounds. However, despite a night’s neglect Graves was discovered the next day still alive in an old German Dressing station near Mametz Wood. On 5 August the Times was able to report that Graves, officially reported died of wounds, wished to inform his friends of his recovery. That Graves’s naturally mythological imagination saw this as a kind of rebirth should come as no surprise, and it afforded him an opportunity to draw on his experiences to become one of the best-known chroniclers of the war in his memoir Good-bye to All That (1929), and in a handful of regularly anthologised poems that survived the process of Graves’s own editing out of his early poetry. But Graves’s engagement with the war goes far beyond these important and popularly-known texts, and it was to remain a subject of conscious and unconscious preoccupation for much of the rest of his long life. The war’s transformative effects on Graves, his contemporaries, and subsequent generations is much under scrutiny in these centenary years, and this conference in the anniversary year of the Battle of the Somme looks to use Robert Graves as a way to further our understanding of the Great War in context.

The conference will include academic papers and readings by contemporary writers. Keynote speakers and participants to include Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Professor Tim Kendall, Patrick McGuinness, William Graves, and Professor Fran Brearton.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Proposals are invited for papers (20-30 minutes) on relevant topics relating to Graves and/or his contemporaries. These could include but are not limited to:
·         Rethinking the literary canon of the First World War;
·         literary networks and the war;
·         the war and literary ‘isms’ (such as Georgianism; modernism);
·         Graves and First World War writing;
·         Graves’s poetry of the war and about war;
·         the First World War, memory and memoir;
·         Graves and military history;
·         Graves, Wales, and the Royal Welch Fusiliers;
·         Graves and Europe;
·         the war and mythology;
·         legacies of the war in Graves’s writing;
·         the war and subsequent conflict;
·         music and the war;
·         the war and medicine;
·         the war and gender / sexuality.

Critical responses to recent works on Graves, papers on research in progress, on recently discovered archival material of interest to Graves scholars, on digital collections or on exhibitions of Graves’s work, and on the war in relation to Graves’s contemporaries, are also welcome.
Please send an abstract (max. 250 words) by 30 April 2016 to the conference organiser:

Dr Charles Mundye, FEA
Head of Academic Development
Department of Humanities
Faculty of Development and Society
Sheffield Hallam University
City Campus
Howard Street
Sheffield S1 1WB
E: c.mundye@shu.ac.uk

PARTICIPANTS
The conference is open to all. It will be of interest to academics, teachers, research students, and anyone else who is interested in the life and writings of Robert Graves and his circle. The series of Robert Graves conferences have built up a reputation for their scholarly excellence and their friendly dialogue among participants from a wide variety of back-grounds, both lay and academic, and the Graves family itself.

To register an interest in attending the conference as a non-speaker, please e-mail Patrick Villa: pjvilla@aol.com.

Testimony evokes first and foremost legal connotations and images of the courtroom. In this context testimony is bound by strict procedural conventions and the act of testifying in a courtroom can incur actual legal consequences. Outside of the courtroom, however, life-writing (in its broadest sense) can serve as a form of testimony which, while not necessarily causing specific legal ramifications, presents a life’s experience for judgment by the public. This relationship between an idea of testimony and the practice of life-writing is twofold: on the one hand, authors of life-writing may have certain testimonial or confessional intentions and use writing as a way of bearing witness. Readers, on the other hand, may interpret various forms of life-writing as testimony even if the author’s intentions about recording their experience are unknown. The act of interpreting or employing life-writing as testimony thus demands ethical scrutiny from readers as well as scholars using such materials.

This conference aims to explore the notion of testimony as an idea that pervades the practice, reception and interpretation of life-writing across time periods, academic disciplines and literatures. We are interested in testimony as a broad concept, and hope to investigate its scope and impact as an interpretive lens through which the breadth of life-writing can be viewed. Not only does testimony bear witness to the lives of individuals, it takes on a life (and even an afterlife) of its own as it is read and reinterpreted throughout history.

Confirmed Keynotes: Professor Paul Strohm (Columbia University), Professor Roger Woods (Nottingham University).

Papers are invited from all scholars (including postgraduate students) across the fields of (comparative) literature, history, philosophy, art, cultural studies, religious studies, curation and conservation of archival material, memory studies, and film studies. Topics could include but are not limited to:

• The ethics of producing, reading and interpreting life-writing as a form of testimony
• Stylistic, rhetorical and aesthetic dimensions of life-writing
• The relationship between authors and readers of life-writing
• Truth and subjectivity
• The afterlife of testimony
• Images as testimony
• Culture as testimony, eg. published diaries of Holocaust survivors
• Persuasion and manipulation of and within life-writing sources
• Instrumentalisation of life-writing for political purposes
• Life-writing as (historical) evidence and the act of bearing witness
• Life-writing and the law
• Reappropriation and adaptation of life-writing in popular culture
• History and the individual
• Challenges and conditions of writing lives

The conference will be hosted at Queen Mary University of London (Arts Two lecture theatre) on 5 and 6 May 2016, the registration fee will be £35,-/£20,- (non-concession/concession).

Please submit a short abstract (c. 300 words) and a short bio (c. 100 words) to Lotte Fikkers and Melissa Schuh at lifeoftestimony@gmail.com by Sunday 17 January 2016. Notification of acceptance will be given by 8 February 2016.