Category: Events

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 19^th and 20^th 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 15^th, 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.

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.