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CFP: Reading and Writing the World: Perception and Identity in the Era of Climate Change, 5–6 April 2019, Montpellier

Reading and Writing the World: Perception and Identity in the Era of Climate Change
An International Conference organised by EMMA (Etudes Montpelliéraines du Monde Anglophone) in collaboration with CECILLE (Centre d’Etudes en Civilisations, Langues et Lettres Étrangères)

5–6 April 2019
Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France
Site Saint Charles

Keynote speakers:
Thomas Dutoit, Université de Lille 3, France (confirmed)
Sarah Wood, University of Kent, UK (to be confirmed)

Convened by doctoral students: Laura Lainvae (EMMA) Sarah Jonckheere (CECILLE)

The current climate crisis is an ongoing chaotic disturbance that defies teleology, mastery, and control. For the first time in human and planetary history, a species has made an impact so profound and traumatic upon its environment that it has rewritten the earth. The Anthropocene as a scene of eruptions and fractures, of shifting grounds and shaking structures, of de-centering and opening, could, as such, be read as solicitation to set in motion a change in identity: in order to find solutions, our thinking about Earth as well as about our place in it should change. “Politics in the wake of the ecological thought must begin with the Copernican ‘humiliations’ – coming closer to the actual dirt beneath out feet, the actuality of Earth”, Timothy Morton suggests, evoking a shift in perception and hierarchy. Such shifts could be investigated through modernist and postmodernist literary grounds, through various modes of writing that challenge our anthropocentric modes of thinking, decentralizing man, and wondering about the agenda and authority of other beings. As Thomas Dutoit writes about Alice Munro: “Munro’s favourite is the ‘kame, or kame moraine,’ the description of which, in earthly and cartographical shapes, stresses the fact that if ‘geography’ (earth-writing or writing-earth) is the attempt, by man, to write, to describe, to map, the earth, ‘geography,’ by the inverse genitive, is also the earth’s writing, the traces that the earth itself inscribes. This ‘geo-grapher’ — the earth — is a never-stopping arranger, in degree more an earth-writer, a géo-littéraire, than even Alice Munro, even if, in kind, they are molecularly the same.”

This conference will attempt to trace and analyze modes of reading and writing that are not based on human mastery and exceptionalism, but rather make room for different possible viewpoints, while also questioning our identity as well as the objectivity and limits of human perception.[1] The conference is built around the necessity to adopt a different way of reading and writing that shakes the foundations of our thinking about Earth and its various inhabitants, and forces us to see anew a landscape whose very form has been defamiliarised by the forces that traverse it. Such reading and writing might have to come to terms with what Timothy Morton calls “the symbiotic real” – the interconnectedness between species. Sarah Wood, in “Without Mastery: Reading and Other Forces” recognizes such thinking in poetry. She writes: “Browning’s feminine Music does not serve the self in its closeness to itself. We have to go beyond ourselves, to dream and read, to hear her singing.” Today, going beyond ourselves requires learning to reread ourselves and our current environment to understand our vulnerability while assuming responsibility for the endangered planet and non-human species. From encounters with diverse forms of non-human otherness (the planet, animals, forests, …) and one’s otherness within, would emerge an ethics of alterity.

We welcome papers for 20-minute presentations in English on writing and reading (not limited to literature or to humanities only) the Earth/the world/ worlds. Some questions that could be discussed include, but are not limited to:

  • Writing and reading the Earth/the world/worlds in literatures, histories, and arts
  • Undoing the “I”/eye in the climate change era: shifting perceptions of the self from anthropocentrism and narcissism to humility, vulnerability, and empathy
  • The Earth as the other. How do we invent, and are invented by, that other through reading and writing? How is la terre (Earth) irreducible to alter[re]ity?
  • Ecocinema: shifting focus/ changing perceptions
  • Affect theory and climate change
  • Terraformings: writing and reading the Earth in science-fiction
  • Deconstruction and ecocritcism
  • The Earth and law: decentering human rights
  • Ethics of care and climate change
  • Climate change and invisibility: how to read/understand/protect what we cannot see
  • Non-humans in the humanities: hospitality or hostility?
  • Scientist’s gaze
  • Animals studying humans
  • Ecofeminisms
  • Anachronism and spacing: time and space as being out of joint / Geological time and space in fiction
  • Posthumanism and the environment: the posthuman as the post-humus, what comes after the Earth and must take care of the earth

Proposals of about 300 words together with a short biographical note (50 words) should be sent to Sarah Jonckheere (s.jonck@hotmail.fr) and Laura Lainväe (lauralainvae@gmail.com) by November 1st, 2018.

[1] “To constitute an ideal object is to put it at the permanent disposition of a pure gaze,” (78) Derrida writes. The current global climate crisis challenges the very idea of the possibility of a pure gaze. According to one of the most noticeable ecological thinkers of the 21th century, Timothy Clark: “The Earth is not ‘one’ in the sense of an entity we can see, understand or read as a whole. No matter how far away or ‘high up’ it is perceived or imagined, or in what different contexts – of cosmology or physics it is always something we remain ‘inside’ and cannot genuinely perceive from elsewhere. It is a transcendental of human existence, and its final determinations are undecidable. The image of the whole Earth opens upon ‘abyssal dimensions to which we can never suitably bear witness’ (David Wood).”

 

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CFP: Critical Journal of the Katherine Mansfield Society

Tinakori: Critical Journal of the Katherine Mansfield Society

Call for Papers: Issue 3

Tinakori: The Critical Journal of the Katherine Mansfield Society (ISSN 2514-6106) invites submissions for its forthcoming issue. We welcome scholars conducting research on any aspects of Mansfield’s life or work to submit their papers to Tinakori: The Critical Journal of the Katherine Mansfield Society (formerly the Katherine Mansfield Society Online Essay Series, ISSN 2397-9046).

Please send submissions of completed essays to the Online Series Editor, Illya Nokhrin at kms@katherinemansfieldsociety.org with ‘Tinakori CFP’ in the subject line by 30 SEPTEMBER 2018. Submissions to the forthcoming issue will be double peer-reviewed prior to acceptance.

We ask that essays follow the society’s Style Guide, which is accessible at the following URL:
http://katherinemansfieldsociety.org/style-guide/

Should you have any queries, please do not hesitate to contact Illya Nokhrin at
kms@katherinemansfieldsociety.org.

To view the KMS Online Series, please go to our website:
http://www.katherinemansfieldsociety.org/online-series/

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CFP: Short Fiction as Humble Fiction, 17–19 October 2019, Montpellier

Short Fiction as Humble Fiction
An international conference organised by EMMA (Etudes Montpelliéraines du Monde Anglophone) with ENSFR (European Network for Short Fiction Research),

17-18-19 October 2019

Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier3, France

Keynote speakers
Elke D’hoker, K.U. Leuven, Belgium
Ann-Marie Einhaus, Northumbria University, UK

Short Fiction as Humble Fiction
The title of this conference may sound like a provocative statement. It may suggest a definition of the genre as a minor one, as has too often been the case in the history of the short story. Yet the conference has another purpose altogether. We would like to shift the perspective and claim short fiction not exactly as a minor genre, but as a humble one. As such, what can short fiction do that the novel cannot? What can it better convey?

We suggest to use the concept of the ‘humble’ as a critical tool that may help reframe and redefine short fiction, a notoriously elusive genre. How do short story writers deal with humble subjects – humble beings (the poor, the marginal, the outcasts, the disabled, etc.) and the non-human (animals, plants, objects), the ordinary, the everyday, the domestic, the mundane, the prosaic? How do they draw attention to what tends to be disregarded, neglected or socially invisible (Le Blanc) and how do they play with attention and inattention (Gardiner)? How do they contribute to an ethics and a politics of consideration (Pelluchon)? What rhetorical and stylistic devices do they use? What happens when they broach humble topics with humble tools, a bare, minimal style, for instance? How does the humble form of the short story – its brevity – fit humble topics? Does it paradoxically enhance them? Does the conjunction of the two give the short story a minor status or can it be empowering? In other words, should the humble be regarded as a synonym of ‘minor’ or as a quality and a capability (Nussbaum)?

Asking such questions will open a rich debate. How does the humble nature of short fiction connect with the epiphany, the moment of being, the event? If along with Camille Dumoulié we consider that the ethical dimension of short fiction stems from its being ‘a genre of the event’, could a humble genre also be considered an ethical genre? If there is an ethics of short fiction as a humble genre, where can it be located? Since the term ‘humble’, from the Latin humilis, ‘low, lowly,’ itself from humus ‘ground’’ – is often used as a euphemism for ‘the poor’, we can consider its representation of humble characters (as in Joyce’s Dubliners or Eudora Welty’s short stories) as well as the way this genre handles the theme of poverty, of extreme hardship and constructed deprivation (as in Dalit short fiction) or its representations of and reflections on the earth and all that relates to the environment. The theme of the humble is also manifest in its very inclusiveness and openness to the reader, or in the very precarious nature of the genre, in its openness to other genres. Dealing with short fiction as a humble genre will thus lead contributors to take into account its interactions with humble arts and media: the art of engraving, sketching or photography used in the illustrations of the volumes or magazines in which many modernist short stories were initially published; the radio that broadcast so many short stories, sometimes read by the short story writers themselves, as occurred on BBC4 with, for instance, Frank O’Connor; the web today, with flash fiction online, micro fiction or video performances of short fiction. How do these various art forms and media shape each other and how do these interactions construct short fiction as a humble genre? In other words, how does the motif of the humble morph into an ‘experiential category’ (Locatelli) or a poetics of the humble?

Reframing the humble as an aesthetic category will help reread short fiction and better capture its elusive contours, focusing either on well-known short fiction by famous writers that will be approached from a different angle or retrieving some unfairly neglected texts from oblivion, as, for example, Ann-Marie Einhaus, has started doing in her work on The Short Story and the First World War. Or again, Elke D’hoker’s current work on short fiction and popular magazines.

This conference means to cross national borders and disciplinary boundaries, especially those separating literature and the visual arts or literature and philosophy. The questions asked can be broached through short fiction in English by writers of various nationalities over the 19th and 20th centuries until nowadays. The suggested acceptations of the term ‘humble’ are not limitative but indicative.

Proposals of about 300 words together with a short biographical note (50 words) should be sent to Christine Reynier (christine.reynier@univ-montp3.fr) and Jean-Michel Ganteau (jean-michel.ganteau@univ-montp3.fr) by January 15th, 2019.

A selection of peer-reviewed articles will be published in The Journal of the Short Story in English and Short Fiction in Theory & Practice.

 

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CFP: ‘Literature, Law and Psychoanalysis, 1890–1950’

Call For Papers: ‘Literature, Law and Psychoanalysis, 1890–1950’

University of Sheffield, 11–13 April 2019

Organiser: Katherine Ebury
Katherine Ebury is Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature at the University of Sheffield. Her research interests include life-writing, modernism, psychoanalysis and law and literature. Her first monograph, Modernism and Cosmology, appeared in 2014, and she is the co-editor of Joyce’s Non-Fiction Writings: Outside His Jurisfiction (Palgrave, 2018). Her articles have appeared in journals such as Irish Studies Review, Joyce Studies Annual and Society and Animals. She has just commenced an AHRC-funded project on the death penalty, literature and psychoanalysis from 1900-1950, which is running from 2018-2020.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

Ravit Reichman
Ravit Reichman is Associate Professor of English at Brown University, where she works at the intersection of literature, law, and psychoanalysis. Her first book, The Affective Life of Law: Legal Modernism and the Literary Imagination (Stanford, 2009) examines law and literature in the context of the world wars. She is currently working on a study of property’s cultural and psychological life, Lost Properties of the Twentieth Century, which offers a genealogy of the propertied imagination, beginning with more conventional notions of property and ending in ideas of property restitution as a vehicle for justice. Her articles on affect and law, colonial jurisprudence, capital punishment, and counterfactual life, as well as on writers like Albert Camus, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce, have been published in a range of journals and volumes. She has been a Fulbright Scholar, a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and a Howard Foundation Fellow.

Lizzie Seal
Lizzie Seal is Reader in Criminology at University of Sussex. Her monograph Capital Punishment in Twentieth-Century Britain: Audience, Justice, Memory is a cultural history of the death penalty focusing on its place in everyday life. It explores topics including capital punishment as entertainment, popular abolitionist campaigns, the impact and significance of high profile miscarriages of justice and their significance in the post-abolition era and argues capital punishment had a contested and ambivalent place in British culture. Her current project, ‘Race, Racialisation and the Death Penalty in England and Wales, 1900-65’ is funded by the Leverhulme Trust (RPG-2016-352). This is interdisciplinary and draws on both history and criminology to explore the overrepresentation of Black and other minority ethnic (BME) people among those executed in twentieth-century England and Wales. Through examining all cases of BME people sentenced to death, we examine how prosecutions for murder were in practice made racist through analysing the significance of racist stereotypes and racialised interpretations of defendants’ behaviour. In addition to highlighting racism in the criminal justice system, we research the everyday lives of BME people sentenced to death in the twentieth century. Lizzie is the author of Women, Murder and Femininity: Gender Representations of Women Who Kill (Palgrave, 2010) and, with Maggie O’Neill, Transgressive Imaginations: Crime, Deviance and Culture (Palgrave, 2012), as well as several journal articles.

Victoria Stewart
Victoria Stewart is Reader in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Leicester. She has published widely on twentieth and twenty-first century writing and has a particular interest in the representation of the Second World War, including the Holocaust, in both fiction and autobiography. Her book Women’s Autobiography: War and Trauma (Palgrave, 2003) considered the work of writers including Vera Brittain, Virginia Woolf and Anne Frank from the perspective of trauma theory. Narratives of Memory: British Writing of the 1940s (Palgrave, 2006) examined a range of novels and short fiction from this decade, focusing in particular on their depiction of the processes of memory. The Second World War in Contemporary British Fiction: Secret Histories (Edinburgh University Press, 2011) explored the use of secrecy as both a trope and a narrative device in recent fictional treatments of the war. Her latest book, Crime Writing in Interwar Britain: Fact and Fiction in the Golden Age (Cambridge University Press, 2017), examines the relationship between true-crime narratives and detective fiction in the mid-twentieth century. Victoria’s new project, ‘Crimes and War Crimes’, considers the effect of existing discourse about crime and criminality on the representation and understanding of war crimes in 1940s and 1950s Britain.

Call For Papers
The twentieth-century was a period of worldwide literary experiment, of scientific developments and of worldwide conflict. These changes demanded a rethinking not merely of psychological subjectivity, but also of what it meant to be subject to the law and to punishment. This two-day conference aims to explore relationships between literature, law and psychoanalysis during the period 1890-1950, allowing productive mixing of canonical and popular literature and also encouraging interdisciplinary conversations between different fields of study.

The period examined by the conference included: developments in Freudian psychoanalysis and its branching in other directions; the founding of criminology; continuing campaigns and reforms around the death penalty; landmark modernist publications; the ‘Golden Age’ of detective fiction; and multiple sensational trials (Wilde, Crippen, Casement, Leopold and Loeb, to name but a few). Freud’s followers, like Theodor Reik and Hans Sachs, would publish work on criminal law and the death penalty; psychoanalysts were sought after as expert witnesses; novelists like Elizabeth Bowen would serve on a Royal Commission investigating capital punishment; while Gladys Mitchell invented the character of Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley as a literary detective-psychoanalyst.

We therefore hope to consider areas including literature’s connection with historical debates around crime and punishment; literature and authors on trial and/or on the ‘psychiatrist’s couch’; and literature’s effect on debates about human rights. The event is linked to and partly supported by an AHRC project on literature, psychoanalysis and the death penalty, but the aim of this conference is much wider. Interdisciplinary approaches, especially from fields such as psychoanalysis, philosophy, law or the visual arts, are particularly encouraged. We also welcome papers on international legal systems and texts. All responses are welcome and the scope of our interdisciplinary interests is flexible, with room in the planned programme for strands of work that might be more or less literary.

Possible topics might include:

  • psychoanalysis in the real or literary courtroom;
  • literary form and the insanity defence;
  • canonical authors as readers of crime fiction and vice versa;
  • censorship cases;
  • the influence of famous legal cases on literary productions or on psychoanalytic theory;
  • influences of criminology and criminal psychology on literature;
  • representations of new execution methods (for example, the gas chamber and the electric chair);
  • portrayals of restorative versus retributive justice;
  • literary responses to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights;
  • relationships between modernism and Critical Legal Studies (CLS).

Please send 250 word paper proposals or 300 word proposals for fully formed panels to k.ebury@sheffield.ac.uk by 28 November 2018.

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CFP ‘The rest is silence’, Symposium of Sound, Durham University, 3–4 September 2018

Call for Papers

‘The rest is silence’
Symposium of Sound
Durham University
3–4 September 2018

Keynote speakers and performers:
Professor Helen Abbott, Department of Modern Languages, University of Birmingham
Dr Edward Allen, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge
Aurélia Lassaque, bilingual poet and singer in French and Occitan

The Symposium of Sound is a free, two-day conference supported by Northern Bridge Doctoral Training Partnership. We invite abstracts for papers of twenty minutes in length on the theme of ‘sound’: its creation, imitation, and its relationship with language. Proposals may range across fields of study, with interdisciplinary approaches particularly welcome in areas such as literature, music, performance and creative practice, modern languages, and linguistics. Topics may include but are not limited to:

Utterance, verbal and non-verbal
Metre, rhythm, and rhyme
Timbre and voicing
Pitch and tone
Echo and imitation
Song and lyric in performance and on the page
Phonetics and phonology
Soundscapes and sounds in place
Orality and aurality
Dialect and vernacularity
Gossip, rumour and bruit
Noise
Sound media (including radio and film)
Repetition
Silence and the absence of sound

Please send abstracts of 250-300 words and a short biography to symposiumofsound2018@gmail.com by 14th June 2018.

You can find further information on our conference website.

Keep up to date with the latest conference news by following us on Twitter on @sound_symposium and liking us on Facebook.

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CFP, Music in Radio Drama, ‘Word and Music Studies’ series

Call for Papers

Music in Radio Drama

Edited by Pim Verhulst (University of Antwerp) and Jarmila Mildorf (University of Paderborn)

Radio drama has been around since the development of the medium in the 1920s, roughly coinciding with the birth of film. Unlike that culturally dominant visual medium, however, the acoustic art form of the radio play has received much less critical attention. In addition to voice and sound effects, one important aural feature that characterizes the radio play is music. In contrast to the field of film narratology, where the narrative functions of music have long been mapped and studied, radio drama still awaits such a systematic approach regarding the interconnections between word and music, especially in the absence of visual stimuli. The present volume aims to be a first step in that direction, bringing together scholars from the disciplines of radio drama and modernism, audio- and transmedial narratology, as well as music and sound studies. In doing so, the purpose of this collection is to offer a broad cross-section of national literatures and broadcasting traditions, building on existing research while reassessing the role of music as a (non-)narrative element in radio plays. Contributions may focus on one or multiple authors and works, but also on composers, sound engineers, producers, directors or broadcasting services and networks, from the 1920s to the present day. In addition to case studies or comparative analyses, we also invite contributions on more theoretical, conceptual and methodological issues. Papers could engage with, but need not be limited to, the following questions:

– What different functions can music play in radio drama relative to the spoken word?

– Does music fulfil a different role in radio drama than it does in film, television or theatre?

– Which radio dramatists were particularly innovative in their use of word and music?

– Are there examples of authors who use language in a musical way?

– What frameworks can be used to study music and its impact on the listener in radio drama?

– How are listeners cognitively involved or immersed in a radio play that features music?

– Do philosophical insights into music and its (non-)narrativity apply to radio drama?

– How has music in radio drama historically evolved in broadcasting?

– What challenges does music present for the publication of radio plays?

 

Practical details

Papers are certainly not limited to radio drama in English but will have to provide translations for non-English radio plays. The language of the volume will be English. We explicitly ask that all work be original, so proposals for contributions that have been previously published elsewhere, in whatever form, cannot be considered.

Selected submissions will be included in a proposal for the ‘Word and Music Studies’ series published by Brill (general series editors: Walter Bernhart, Michael Halliwell, Lawrence Kramer, Steven Paul Scher and Werner Wolf). Publication will depend on the outcome of the peer review process.

Please send a 400-500 word abstract, with a title and brief bio (affiliation, career and recent publications) to pim.verhulst@uantwerpen.be by 30 June 2018. Finalized contributions will be expected by 14 December 2018, for an estimated publication in late 2019 or early 2020.

For more information, see the website of the International Association for Word and Music Studies or the Word and Music Studies series page on the Brill website.

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CFP, James Joyce Quarterly Special Issue: Joyce and the Non-Human

James Joyce Quarterly Special Issue Call for Papers:

Joyce and the Non-Human

The idea for this issue began with a panel for the Toronto Joyce Symposium on “Our Funnaminal World,” which later turned into the theme for this year’s Zurich James Joyce Workshop (“Joycean Animals”). The topic came about as a result of our growing interest in animal studies and the nonhuman, specifically with reference to an increasingly technologically driven society. This theoretical context is one that intersects nicely with other theories — ecocriticism, Marxism, queer studies, gender studies, technology studies, postcolonialism, posthumanism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction — but it also transcends these frameworks, in that it is specifically relevant to 21st-century issues. The lens of the nonhuman provides new insights into well-trodden pastures such as Bloom’s cat, Garryowen, and cattle, in addition to bestiality, animality, and the beastly. We anticipate the special issue consolidating and building on recent work in Joyce Studies, including Brazeau’s and Gladwin’s Eco-Joyce: The Environmental Imagination of James Joyce (2014), Lacivita’s The Ecology of Finnegans Wake (2015), and the special issue of the JJQ on Joyce and Physiology (2009); in addition to recent developments in literary theory, such as, Grusin’s The Nonhuman Turn (2015), and the works of Deleuze, Derrida, Haraway, Bennett, and Hayles (to name a few). We believe the ‘nonhuman turn’ is an especially appropriate methodology for the Joyce community (linking as it does animal studies, the posthuman and ecocriticism), allowing us to examine some neglected and unique aspects of Joyce’s oeuvre. The nonhuman turn provides a framework in which his interests in the potential sentience of rivers, machinery, and insects might speak to each other.

In furtherance of the increased importance of animal studies and the nonhuman turn, this issue seeks to place Joyce’s works alongside these developments in a conceptualization that prioritizes both aspects of this theoretical paradigm. We welcome papers related to all aspects of animals and animality — from fleas to behemoth; worms to gulls; beast to beastly — across the range of Joyce’s works. We particularly encourage papers that position animal studies/the nonhuman alongside ecocriticism, Marxism, queer studies, gender studies, technology studies, postcolonialism, posthumanism, psychoanalysis, or deconstruction.

Please send bios and abstracts of no more than 300 words to Katherine Ebury (k.ebury@sheffield.ac.uk) and Michelle Witen (michelle.witen@unibas.ch) by June 30, 2018.

Please find below our strict planned time scale for the issue – it goes without saying, but do only send us an abstract if this schedule looks doable for you.

May – June 2018        Open call for papers for issue (abstracts due June 30)

January 15, 2019       First submission of articles to editors

March 15, 2019          Editors return first round of submissions to contributors

May 15, 2019             Resubmission of articles to editors

May 31, 2019             Editors submit finalized issue to JJQ for Peer Review Process

August 30, 2019        Second round of revisions in response to editorial peer review

October 15, 2019       Final version of journal issue sent to JJQ (depending on peer review results)

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CFP, Recycling Woolf, 27–29 June 2019, Nancy

An international conference organised by IDEA (Université de Lorraine), with the collaboration of : Institut des Textes et de Manuscrits Modernes, The Italian Virginia Woolf Society, Société d’Etudes Woolfiennes

27–29 June 2019, Université de Lorraine, Nancy, France

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

Prof. Brenda Silver (Dartmouth College, USA)

Jean-Pierre Criqui (Centre Pompidou, France)

Invited artists:

Kabe Wilson

Anne-James Chaton

Has Virginia Woolf become, just like Shakespeare, one of those literary icons that pervade popular culture, alongside Marilyn Monroe or Lady Di? Monographs such as Brenda Silver’s Virginia Woolf Icon or recent fictional productions such as Anne-James Chaton’s surprising novel Elle regarde passer les gens (adapted for the stage under the title Icônes) seem to suggest so.

Woolf’s transformation into an icon, object, and by-product leads us to acknowledge the shift in her status as a writer: she no longer embodies just a national writer, but transcends geographical borders and has become a figure from a little-known past that people imagine and reimagine without necessarily reading her works. In this process of iconisation, the authorial figure is recycled and begins new lives in new referential spaces, as it is appropriated by popular culture, marketed and commercialised. The contemporary biofictions that use the figure of Virginia Woolf and turn her into a character are a perfect example of this practice. Participants could start by discussing the notion of recycling an authorial figure, by defining and analysing its features, and establishing whether it is a culturally grounded notion, that is to say whether it varies according to the cultural environments in which it takes place. Participants could further point out the specificity of recycling the figure of Virginia Woolf, compared to other literary figures who have undergone the same process of iconisation, or, on the contrary, who have not been assimilated by popular culture.

The process of recycling an authorial figure not only alters his or her cultural status but inevitably impacts his or her oeuvre and the way we read it. On the one hand, it raises questions about how these transformations modify the reception of an author’s work. In what ways does such a revision of the status of the author imply a fresh rereading of his or her œuvre? On the other hand, it questions the manner in which an author’s oeuvre is appropriated. Does the notion of recycling apply to an author’s work just as it applies to authors themselves as cultural products? And if so, how is it different from rewriting, adaptation or transposition? Could we therefore apply the notion of recycling to Woolf’s oeuvre? And how does high culture react to the fact that Woolf is being recycled in today’s popular culture? Participants are invited to address the contemporary transformations of Woolf’s oeuvre within their specific epistemological contexts.

The notion of recycling is intrinsically linked to our contemporaneity, but also to Woolf’s practice in her own time of dealing with various discarded literary scraps. As a journalist and an essay writer, Woolf was interested in the “waste” of literature, in “minor” writers left out from the literary canon, or in “Bad Writers”, as the title of one of her essays attests. Could we thus envisage Woolf as a recycler?

Here are a few indicative potential approaches that could be considered:

– How can we theoretically define literary recycling? What gestures, logic, intertextual and hypertextual practices does the notion of recycling involve (as compared to rewriting, adaptation and transposition)?

Does recycling cover forms of reusing and misusing that are typically contemporary?

Is recycling only a cultural notion or could it also become a useful tool for critical theory?

Is there a particularity to the recycling of Woolf’s oeuvre compared to that of other modernists or other iconic literary figures?

– How is Woolf’s oeuvre recycled on the stage and on the screen today?

How is Woolf’s authorial figure resurrected, renewed, re-imagined, used or represented in biographies, biofictions and biopics?

What are the cultural and literary stakes of recycling the figure of the author?

How is the author’s oeuvre also transformed in the process of authorial recycling?

– Could recycling (of Woolf’s authorial figure and her oeuvre) result in creating cultural and media by-products?

Does the process of transforming Woolf into a cultural icon involve perpetuating stereotypes or recycling her myth over and over in the contemporary imagination? From this perspective, is recycling a matter of popular culture or “cultural vulgarity”?

In a globalised cultural context, is the Woolfian oeuvre and her authorial figure doomed to be recycled?

– What characterises and motivates Woolf’s gesture of recycling literary “waste” and authors rejected from the literary canon?

How can this gesture allow critics to define, specify or displace the notion of literary recycling?

– Finally, the participants could approach the notion of recycling Woolf’s oeuvre from a genetic and editorial perspective and question the production and reproduction of her work. Do her preparatory notes and drafts also pertain to the logic of recycling? How does Woolf recycle her own avant-texte? Why, when, and how do publishing houses, with their specific editorial policies and marketing strategies, decide to recycle outdated editions and reissue new editions of Woolf’s work? Are these initiatives guided by commercial impulses or sound scholarly initiatives, and do they reflect the readers’ needs?

Participants are free to generate and answer their own set of questions related to the notion of recycling and Woolf’s work.

Please submit 300-word proposals for a 20-minute presentation to Monica Latham, Caroline Marie and Anne-Laure Rigeade at recycling.woolf2019@gmail.comProposals for panels are also welcome.

Deadline: November 30th 2018

 

Scientific committee:

Frédérique Amselle (Université de Valenciennes, France)

Catherine Bernard (Université Paris 7, France)

Anne Besnault (Université de Rouen, France)

Elisa Bolchi (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Italy)

Nathalie Collé (Université de Lorraine, France)

Daniel Ferrer (ITEM/ENS Paris, France)

Christine Froula (Northwestern University, USA)

Monica Latham (Université de Lorraine, France)

Bethany Layne (De Monfort University, UK)

Caroline Marie (Université Paris 8, France)

Anne-Laure Rigeade (Sciences Po Reims, France)

Brenda Silver (Dartmouth College, USA)

Anna Snaith (King’s College London, UK)

Sara Sullam (Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy)

Organising committee:

Monica Latham (Université de Lorraine, France)

Caroline Marie (Université Paris 8, France)

Anne-Laure Rigeade (CNRS/ ITEM, France)

 

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CFP Narrative Democracy in 20th- and 21st-Century British Literature and Visual Arts, Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, 18–19 October

SEAC 2018 conference, Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, 18–19 October 2018

This conference will consider the aesthetic and literary significance of the concept of narrative democracy. Many recent works have examined the interactions between art and democracy, be it the way the latter sheds light on the fictitious component of politics, or its pivotal role in Jacques Rancière’s régime esthétique and the structural similarities between its littérarité and the disruptive agenda of democracy. In Modernism and Democracy, Rachel Potter looks at the cultural context of democracy so as to suggest innovative critical frameworks to assess the ideological and political links between democracy and literature. Nelly Wolf’s seminal work in Le Roman de la démocratie distinguishes between “la démocratie du roman” and “la démocratie de roman” (42), and argues that the links between democracy and the novel form pertain to modernity: the novel, as the “egalitarian genre” (23), reorders the world and language itself (47), reinvents realism and becomes democratic when blurring the lines between individual and collective choices (75).

In the wake of Paul Ricœur’s notion of “narrative identity”, and Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s arguments in Multitude, Pierre Rosanvallon has coined the phrase “narrative democracy” in order to better understand the political and sociological contradiction of democracy as “a society of individuals”. In our new era based on “an individualism of singularity” (Rosanvallon 21), individual experiences matter more than ever and lead to new “democratic expectations” (22). This is when narration comes forth so as to validate individual experiences and build up new forms of commonality thereon. Narrating one’s singularity renews democracy. In the last pages of Le Parlement des invisibles, Rosanvallon explores the democratic function of literature, as one individual medium among others, in reinventing a plurality of voices and experiences (50)—another cogent premise to this conference.

We will analyse the concept of narrative democracy around three main axes: what are its formal and aesthetic potentialities and meanings? Can it turn into an innovative critical tool? (How) Is it tailored for the study of 20th– and 21st-century British literature and visual arts? Should it be the case, it may for instance be worth returning to the initial meanings and aesthetic implications of democracy. In Styles, Marielle Macé offers a fresh perspective on the semantic but also theoretical connections of the word with the ideas of conflict, contact, visibility, uncertainty, anxiety and plurality. Thomas Docherty’s Aesthetic Democracy analyses how democracy is both founded and conditioned by aesthetics: “it is in art and in aesthetics that we find a privileged site or a paradigm of the very potentiality of selfhood that establishes this democratic condition” (xviii). How does individualism collide with the democratic challenges but also limitations? How does the literary form perform these ambiguities of democracy?

Other recent theoretical concepts may be investigated, such as Anthony Giddens’s “pure relationship” as “the promise of democracy”, Judith Butler’s ethics of cohabitation and coalition, Cynthia Fleury’s emphasis on subjectivation, Michaël Fœssel’s philosophical interrogation of contemporary democracy, and Pierre Zaoui’s work on discretion as “the most accomplished form of democracy”. Rancière’s writings on democracy as both politics and aesthetics will undoubtedly be another fruitful starting point.

To study democracy as an essentially textual and symbolic creation in a British context, participants may for instance develop new perspectives on naturalist novelists and their work on the ordinary; on the supposedly apolitical and antidemocratic modernist novel; on the democratising process perhaps at work in the anger of the 1950s novel; on postmodernist playfulness as challenging democratic aesthetics; on the humanist celebration of the individual in contemporary fiction as a democratic enterprise. In the wake of Richard Dellamora’s study of democracy in the Victorian novel, Janice Ho’s work in Nation and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century British Novel offers many insightful such examples (particularly on Forster, Woolf and Bowen) which could help us question narrative democracy. Others can be found in Against Democracy, in which Simon During writes that democracy in Howards End emerges through its formal and narrative “resistance to interpretation” (120). In Virginia Woolf’s Ethics of the Short Story, Christine Reynier investigates the democratic quality of the short story in its conversation with other narrative forms (133). Her claim that “conversation is a democratic form, a political as well as an ethical and aesthetic space” (89) will help us analyse the short story as a specific form of narrative democracy. For those working on photography, film or TV series, it will be worth remembering Auden’s assertion that “[photography] is the democratic art”, as well as Badiou’s conviction that cinema is the most democratic form of art. Finally, we could explore seminal British essays on democracy (Lawrence, Eliot, Forster, for instance) and their relevance when working on aesthetic and narrative forms of democracy.

In the wake of the latest SEAC conferences, and more particularly of the 2016 conference “Bare Lives: Dispossession and Exposure” (Ganteau 142), the 2018 annual conference will look at “Narrative Democracy in 20th– and 21st-Century British Literature and Visual Arts”. The conference will be convened by the research team CAS (EA 801) and the members of its programme “Constructing the individual and the collective” and of the research group ARTLab (Atelier de Recherche Toulousain sur la Littérature et les Arts Britanniques) working on “Stratégies de l’intime: objets, enjeux, politiques”.

Proposals will be examined by a scientific committee.

A selection of contributions will be published in the peer-reviewed online journal Études britanniques contemporaines (http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/).

SEAC website: http://www.laseac.fr

CAS website: http://cas.univ-tlse2.fr

Scientific committee: Isabelle Keller-Privat, Sylvie Maurel, Laurent Mellet.

Organising committee: Laura Benoit, Anasthasia Castelbou, Laurent Mellet, Jean-François Tuffier.

Abstracts (300 words + short biographical note) should be sent to Laurent Mellet (lau.mellet@gmail.com) by May 31, 2018.

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CFP: deadline extended, Literature, Education and the Sciences of the Mind in Britain and America, 1850–1950, 17–18 July

Literature, Education and the Sciences of the Mind in Britain and America, 1850-1950

NEW deadline for submissions:
April 2, 2018

17–18 July, 2018 – University of Kent
Keynote Speakers: Professor Helen Small, Pembroke College, University of Oxford
Professor Priscilla Wald, Duke University

This conference aims to stimulate a wide-ranging discussion about the interactions between British and American literature, education, and the sciences of the mind between 1850-1950. We welcome paper and panel proposals on any aspect of British or American literature, education and/or the sciences of the mind broadly construed.This conference is part of Dr Sara Lyons’ (PI), Dr Michael Collins’ (Co-I) and Dr Fran Bigman’s (Research Associate) AHRC-funded project, Literary Culture, Meritocracy, and the Assessment of Intelligence in Britain and America, 1880–1920. The project is an investigation of how British and American novelists understood and represented intellectual ability in the period, with a particular focus on how they responded to the rise of intelligence testing and the associated concepts of I.Q. and meritocracy. For additional information, please visit our website: https://research.kent.ac.uk/literaryculture/​

Possible topics include literature and:

• Teaching and Being Taught; pedagogical theory and practice
• Representations of Places of Learning
• Examinations, grades, scholarships, qualifications
• Inequality, Discrimination, and Exclusion in Education
• Academic Success and Failure
• Literacy and Illiteracy
• Intellectuals, Experts, Professionalism
• Autodidacticism, Informal Education
• Varieties of education: aesthetic, classical, moral, religious, scientific, technical
• Learning Styles and Types of Intelligence
• Intellectual ability and disability

As well as literature and:

• Professionalisation/ Institutionalisation of Psychology
• Social Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Psychometrics and personality testing
• Physiology and psychology
• Psychological Schools and Controversies
• Psychology and Philosophy
• Experimental Psychology
• Psychiatry
• Sexology
• Parapsychology
• Eugenics
• Language and Cognition

Please submit an individual proposal of no more than 350 words or an outline for a 3 paper panel proposal to sciencesofthemindconference@gmail.com by 2 April 2018. Papers will be limited to 20 minutes. Please include your name, a short bio, and email address in your proposal.