Category: CFPs

The Country House in Britain, 1914-2014

Newcastle University, Friday 6th – Sunday 8th June 2014

http://www.countryhouseconference.wordpress.com

Keynote Speakers: Deborah Cartmell, Christine Geraghty, Ellie Jones and Alison Light

Call for Papers: From Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) to Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child (2011), the country house has had a strong presence in British culture of the past decade. This is the culmination of a century’s interest in the spaces and places of the country house, an interest that burgeoned following the break-up of the great estates around the First World War. In texts ranging from P. G. Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle Saga to Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazlet Chronicles, and in television series such as ITV’s Brideshead Revsited (1981) and Downton Abbey (2010), British culture continues to return to the country house setting in both popular and high culture. Since the rise of the British heritage film in the 1980s and the proliferation of Austen adaptations in the 1990s the country house has played an equally important role in British cinema and continues to gain currency as a national icon. This preoccupation with the country house is fuelled by institutions such as the National Trust and English Heritage, as well as through documentary programmes such as BBC1’s The Edwardian Country House (2002), Channel 4’s Country House Rescue (2008) and Julian Fellowes’s Great Houses on ITV (2013). Often overshadowed by the country house in other centuries such as the seventeenth-century country house poem or the nineteenth-century country house novel, studies of the twentieth and twenty-first century country house are scarce.

This three-day interdisciplinary conference will trace the representation of the country house in British literature and film between 1914 and 2014. The conference will explore how space, class and gender operate in the wealth of filmic and literary texts which have been concerned with the country house throughout the last century, as well as considering how it functions in documentaries, historical monographs and reality television. We invite 300-word abstracts (for 20-minute papers) on any topic relating to the country house; possible topics might include, but are by no means restricted to:

· Historical Fictions

· The Downton Effect

· The Modernist Country House

· The Country House Abroad

· The Middlebrow and Prize Culture

· Costumes and Design

· Cycles of Pride and Prejudice

· Adaptation

· Murder in the Country House

· Haunted Homes and the Gothic

· The Wartime Country House

· Period Drama

· Servants and Servitude

· Class and the National Trust

· Toy Soldiers and the Dolls House

· Romance Fiction

Abstracts should be submitted via email to countryhouseconf@ncl.ac.uk by 1 November 2013; successful applicants will be notified by 2014. Send any queries to the above email.

Conference Organisers: Faye Keegan and Barbara Williams

Supported by the Newcastle University Gender Research Group

20th Century Women’s Writing and the Capital(s) of Recuperation

ACLA Annual Conference March 20-23rd, 2014 at New York University

“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” Muriel Rukeyser’s often-cited sentiment unfortunately resonates as strongly today as it did in 1968. In this seminar, we hope to split open and illuminate alternate modes of access to the worlds of capital in order to rethink its human, cultural and political investments in twentieth century women’s literature. While capitals elicit fantasies of a cosmopolitan ethos predicated upon inclusivity and community, we want to trouble this narrative’s simplicity by questioning why women writers of the twentieth century more often than not lacked the cultural purchase to navigate cosmopolitan capitals around the world. We ask how this exclusion was renegotiated and represented in disparate texts. Instead of engaging in debates that can only ever aspire to equality, we want to understand more clearly how exclusion constitutes capital, and, more importantly, how women writers renegotiate and capitalize upon this exclusion.

We hope this line of questioning will invite papers about underexplored women’s literature and underrepresented women writers so that we might also reflect upon the enterprise of recuperation. Can we recuperate previously lost, buried, and out of print texts by women writers of the twentieth century without assimilating differences into a literary history that privileges white, heteronormative patriarchy? How do conditions of literary production and material, social, and cultural contexts inform our understanding of these texts’ vitality? Ultimately, what are we capitalizing upon when we recuperate women writers?

To submit an abstract, please visit the conference website and choose “propose a paper” or click here. You will be prompted to choose a seminar title when you submit your abstract. Be sure to choose “20th Century Women’s Writing and the Capital(s) of Recuperation.”

Abstract Deadline: November 1, 2013

Feel free to email me (sarahcornish@gmail.com or sarah.cornish@unco.edu) or Peter Murray (pmurray24@fordham.edu) with any questions.

“Detouring Tradition’s Capital”

Organizers: Peter Lurie (University of Richmond), Tyler Williams (State University of New York at Buffalo)

Despite its conservative emphasis on stability, “tradition” has been conceptually uprooted by twentieth and twenty-first century literature and theory. Recent critical attention to tradition has begun to demonstrate its fragile foundations, politically and metaphysically, by suggesting that the unequivocal solidity traditionalism seeks in a nostalgic past ultimately relies on the unpredictable future into which each inheritor carries tradition’s legacy. Such structural unmooring at the heart of tradition, its constitutive exposure to differentiation and its genealogical precariousness, thus accounts for the possibility of comparatism and translation, as well as appropriation, re-contextualization, revisionism, homage, and betrayal. Tradition’s capital, in other words, only ever seemingly secured, is always displaced elsewhere as “other” to itself.

Contributors are encouraged to consider any of the following questions:
•What constitutes tradition’s survival and/or maintenance?
•How are traditions understood via their faithful and/or unfaithful inheritors?
•What politics are involved in the transnational or transcultural migration of traditions away from predominate capital hubs?
•How do subjects or individuals defined as “eccentric” to traditionally-inclusive groups (enforced along regulatory lines of race, gender, family, sexuality, native languages, region, the state, capital centers, etc.) both constitute and undermine tradition’s stability?
•How does literature transgress, undermine, or produce tradition’s hegemonic structure?
•How do cultural or literary efforts to maintain (or transform) tradition point up limits to tradition’s claims of veracity—as well as those of the literary itself?
•What other media or discourses (aesthetic, scientific, political) inform literature’s relation to tradition?

SEMINAR KEYWORDS: Tradition, inheritance, difference, modernism, crisis, subaltern, diaspora, transnationalism, region, cosmopolitanism, post-colonialism, third-/developing-world, queer, translation, interdisciplinarity.

To submit a proposal, visit the conference website (http://acla.org/acla2014/propose-a-paper/ )then click on “Submit a paper proposal.” Select our seminar title — “Detouring Tradition’s Capital” — from the drop-down menu and include your professional information and paper description. Feel free to contact me (plurie@richmond.edu) or the other seminar organizer, Tyler Williams (tmw26@buffalo.edu), with any questions.

Capital(s) of Avant-Garde Theater

Seminar Organizer(s):

Martin Harries (University of California, Irvine), Christian Gerzso
(Pacific Lutheran University)

Avant-garde theater and performance demand a comparative framework. This
seminar seeks to gather a wide range of work on avant-garde and
experimental theater and drama across national and linguistic borders.
Papers focusing on the historical avant-garde as well as on more recent
and contemporary avant-gardes are welcome, as are discussions of the
historical roots of avant-garde practice in the nineteenth century or
earlier periods.

Papers related to the conference theme are especially welcome. The
theater has been closely linked to capital(s): geographic, political,
and economic. But what is the relationship of avant-garde and
experimental theater and drama in particular to these varieties of
capital? How does avant-garde theater de-stabilize or rearticulate the
relationship of theater production and consumption to centers of
financial, political, and cultural hegemony, especially with the claims
of avant-garde and experimental drama to anti-nationalism,
internationalism, cosmopolitanism, and/or anti-capitalist localism? How
does avant-garde drama resist ever-expanding networks of finance and
communication, and how do these, in turn, enable its production and
transmission? What new kinds of spectacle and publics do avant-garde and
experimental drama create through these new means and how do they
challenge or reinforce national, linguistic, and media boundaries?
Conversely, how does avant-garde drama represent the mediation of these
competing capitals? Is the theatrical stage still a privileged site for
representations of these vexed encounters in modernity?

________________________________

The ACLA will be in New York City, March 20-23, 2014:

acla.org/acla2014/

The procedure for proposing a paper is described here:

http://acla.org/acla2014/propose-a-paper/

The ACLA deadline for paper proposals is November 1st.

Members of BAMS are cordially invited by the Ezra Pound Society to participate in its session organised for the Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900 in Louisville. The session considers Pound’s poetry in connection to his cultural and political activities, as well as his relationships to other writers in that turbulent decade.

Please send your 300-word abstract to convenors Roxana Preda and Justin Kishbaugh at ezrapoundsociety@mlist.is.ed.ac.uk

OMG XVIII – Durrell & Place: Translation, Migration, Location

Vancouver, BC | 14-17 May 2014

OMG XVIII – Durrell & Place: Translation, Migration, Location

Following on the Durrell 2012 centenary celebration in London hosted by the British Library and Goodenough College, the 18th biannual conference of the International Lawrence Durrell Society will take place in Vancouver, British Columbia, at Fairleigh Dickinson University.

Papers and panels on all aspects of Durrell’s works or those of his milieu are welcome. Paper and panel proposals related to “place” are particularly encouraged. Relevant themes may include Durrell’s position as a writer during the collapse of the British Empire, the politics of place in his various foreign residences (Argentina, Yugoslavia, Cyprus, Egypt, etc.), the spatial turn or cultural field in criticism, shifting national boundaries in his works and across his life, or the various translations across languages and locations in Durrell’s work.

In addition to paper and panel proposals, the conference will include seminars for the first time. Seminar papers will be shared prior to the conference, and seminars themselves will be dedicated to discussion and the development of a particular critical theme. Seminar themes related to Durrell’s position in literary studies, the classroom, or in relation to other literary movements are encouraged.

DETAILS & DEADLINES

The conference organizers welcome the submission of short abstracts (250 words) with a short biography (50 words) for proposed PAPERS or COMPLETE PANELS by 30 November 2013. Proposals for complete panels should include an abstract for the panel as a whole with the names, titles, and biographies of each presenter.

For the first time, the ILDS will include seminars in the conference. Seminars will meet for 3 hours and include a maximum of 6 participants whose papers will be read by the group prior to the conference—seminar leaders will guide the discussion of each paper and the overall seminar theme. Proposals from seminar leaders should be submitted by 31 October 2013, and accepted seminars will be listed by 15 November 2013 for registration. Seminars that consider Durrell’s works in relation to his contemporaries or milieu are particularly welcome, as are professional seminars focused on pedagogy, curricula, or the discipline.

All submissions should be sent electronically through the online forms:

OMG XVIII – Durrell & Place: Translation, Migration, Location

British Waters and Beyond:

The cultural significance of the sea since 1800

Call for papers

Royal West of England Academy, Queen’s Road, Bristol

Monday May 12th, 2014

Coinciding with a major exhibition – Power of the Sea (April 5 – July 6th) – the Royal West of England Academy is hosting an interdisciplinary one-day symposium in partnership with Oxford Brookes University and Leeds Metropolitan University.

Power of the Sea explores the aesthetic sensibilities of the sea, celebrating its qualities through observed, naturally occurring phenomena, as well as drawing upon the rich cultural legacy of narratives, metaphors and allegories with which it is associated. Work by contemporary artists will be shown alongside that of 19th and 20thc century British painters (including Turner, Constable, John Brett and Paul Nash), a fertile period of artistic expression embracing Romanticism, naturalism and abstraction.

Since the beginning of the 19th century, the sea has been an important focus for painters and writers who relished the challenge of working directly from nature, often in inhospitable conditions. Some have made scientific studies of the movements of the waves; others have concentrated on the human costs of storms at sea, either in their direct effects on the shipwrecked or in their impact on those left behind on shore. Such work has gained a new urgency in recent years with concerns about climate change and rising sea levels.

This symposium aims to expand on the themes of the exhibition encompassing the wider context of the seas around the British Isles. While the centre of gravity will remain the visual arts, and the arts of Britain in particular, we welcome papers that will consider the conceptualisation of the sea and the ocean from an interdisciplinary perspective.

This symposium seeks to create dialogue between practising artists, curators, writers, academics and students from disciplines including visual arts, cultural theory, geography, history and literature.

Proposals for papers are invited on the following broad themes but not limited to these:
•The sea as metaphor and cradle for the imagination: cultural representations by artists, writers and musicians
•Maritime communities: past, present and future
•Gendering/sexing the sea
•From coast to coast: the sea as a place rather than a space; its power to link communities and to transform social relations
•Trade and empire: the politics of the sea, travel, migration, slavery and nomadism
•The science of the sea: renewable energy and climate change; ecology and erosion

Proposals: 250 word abstracts for 20 minute papers, by December 31st 2013

Proposals should be emailed to janette2.kerr@uwe.ac.uk

For further information please contact:

Joel Edwards, RWA Learning and Resources manager: joel.edwards@rwa.org.uk or

Dr Robert Burroughs, School of Cultural Studies and Humanities, Leeds Metropolitan University: r.m.burroughs@leedsmet.ac.uk

Royal West of England Academy, Queen’s Road, Clifton, Bristol BS8 1PX

Modernism and the Moral Life

A Symposium

Manchester, 30 May 2014

No engagement with modernist works can fail to be struck be their ethical intensity. Often considered solely in terms of a radical break with aesthetic norms and existing socio-cultural institutions and relationships, modernism also demonstrates a marked preoccupation with questions of how to live, the nature of the good, the status of the subject and the social bond, and the relation between ethics, aesthetics and politics. While recent years have seen a renewed interest in the relationship between modernism and ethics, much of the work in this field has tended to (i) conceive of ethics simply in terms of an openness to ‘otherness’, or (ii) suggest that modernism signals an ‘overcoming’ of the ethical as such. While important work has been carried out from these perspectives, this conference invites participants to radically rethink the ways in which it is possible to understand the relation between modernism and the moral life. We invite papers that investigate the multiple ways in which the struggle to lead a human life is undertaken and articulated within modernist cultural production. At the same time, we are interested in the ethical and political investments—whether declared or presupposed—of modernism’s ongoing critical reception. Of particular interest, therefore, are papers which reflect upon their own historical moment and connections with current political, economic and ecological debates.

The conference is designed as an opportunity for rigorous interdisciplinary exchange between the spheres of critical theory, cultural studies, philosophy, politics, literature, sociology, history, theology, the visual arts, architecture and music. We invite proposals for papers from scholars whose work looks to analyse the connections between aesthetics, ethics and politics in any and all of these fields. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

– the relation between style, form and ethics in modernist cultural production
– the extent to which ‘life’ entails or excludes the ‘moral’ in modernist thought
– theory and/as ethics
– ethics and langauge
– modernism and revolution
– utopia
– gender, ethics and critique
– modernism, vision and ethics
– violence and war
– after ‘otherness’
– the limits of liberal humanist approaches to literature and ethics
– perfectionism, authenticity, sincerity, bullshit, narcissism, hedonism, elitism, virtue, duty, commitment, loss of sensitivity, happiness, loneliness, anxiety, inequality, humanism and anti-humanism in the discourses of modernism

Proposals for twenty-minute papers should be directed to the convenors, Ben Ware and Iain Bailey, at morallife@gmx.co.uk, by 10 January 2014. Participants will be notified by 20 January.