Category: Postgraduate

The call for papers is now open for the sixth annual Espirit conference to be held at  IULM (International University of Languages and Media), Milan, 28-30 June.

About the conference

Conflict is at the core of periodical publishing. Disputes constructed and played out on the periodical stage have been periodical themselves, recurring, though under different names and formats, in different periods from the eighteenth-century to the present day.  There is often an inherently militant aspect to the promulgation of ideologies in the periodical press. However, the spectacularization of conflict accompanying recent events – the in/out rhetoric of Brexit reporting and the representation of some policies on immigration, for instance – has made this key feature of the periodical press particularly visible and urgent. The 2017 ESPRit Conference seeks to explore from interdisciplinary perspectives (literary, linguistic, historical, political, sociological, etc.) how the periodical press mediates and remediates conflicts, including how verbal and visual devices on the periodicals’ pages enact conflict. ESPRit encourages proposals that speak both within and across local, regional and national boundaries and especially those that are able to offer a comparative perspective. We also encourage proposals that examine the full range of periodical culture, that is, all types of periodical publication, including newspapers and specialist magazines, and all aspects of the periodical as an object of study, including design and backroom production.

Proposals are invited that deal with, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• Staging conflicts: mediating political, cultural, aesthetic, social, moral disputes
• Visual rhetoric of conflict: e.g., use of black and white, contrasting colours, positive and negative pictures, captions, vectors in the page layout, etc.
• The grammar of conflict: e.g., use in different periods of verbal rhetoric such as refutation, climax/anticlimax, irony, dos and don’ts, etc.
• The performance of conflict in periodicals: manifestos, monographic issues, provocations and replies.
• Dictating socio-cultural agendas: factions and fashions.
• Cultural values and generational conflict.
• Militancy, mediation and re-mediation.
• Translation as a symptom of cultural conflict.
• Conflict as affect and/or entertainment.
• The business or commerce of conflict
• Possibilities and limits of dialogic rhetoric in periodicals.
• Views, not news? The seduction of ideas and the role of public opinion, with particular reference to the representation of or reporting on legal cases, referendums and opinion polls.

How to submit

Please send proposals for 20-minute papers (max 250 words), panels of three or four papers, round tables, one-hour workshops or other suitable sessions, together with a short CV (max. one page), to 2017esprit@gmail.com. The deadline for proposals is 31^st January 2017.

The call for papers is now open for the 2017 International Flann O’Brien Conference, to be held in Salzburg, July 17-21, 2017.

Submissions for papers and panels are invited by 1 February, 2017.

About the conference

The International Flann O’Brien Society is proud to announce Acting Out: The IV International Flann O’Brien Conference, an international conference on the theme of performance, theatricality, and illusion in Flann O’Brien’s writing, hosted by the Department of English Studies at Salzburg University, 17-21 July 2017.

In recent years O’Brien’s writing has been foregrounded as an integral site for testing the rise of new modernist studies, as it troubles critical commonplaces about modernism itself by virtue of its ephemerality and parochial energies. Recent publications of out-of-print English and Irish-language columns, short stories, non-fiction, dramatic works for the stage, and teleplays for Raidió Teilifís Éireann have not only made O’Brien’s broader canon accessible to a new generation of scholars, but have also highlighted its importance to an understanding of modernism which ‘has grown more capacious, turning its attention to previously neglected forms’ (Rónán McDonald and Julian Murphet).

Germane to these critical projects is the recurring concern with performance, theatricality, and illusion in O’Brien’s prose, columns, plays, and TV scripts. In establishing his (highly ironised) aesthetic manifesto in At Swim-Two-Birds, the student narrator notes that ‘the novel was inferior to the play inasmuch as it lacked the outward accidents of illusion, frequently inducing the reader to be outwitted in a shabby fashion and caused to experience a real concern for the fortunes of illusory characters.’ If, as Richard Schechner claims, ‘performances mark identities, bend time, reshape and adorn the body, and tell stories’, then few writers better demonstrate this shaping influence and potential of the performative and the fake.

This dynamic of O’Brien’s work has become all the more visible with the marked rise of creative adaptations of his writing for the stage and beyond. Building on the precedent of pioneering O’Brien performers such as Jimmy O’Dea, David Kelly, and Eamon Morrissey, recent years have seen numerous creative engagements with O’Brien’s work for the stage (Blue Raincoat’s adaptations of O’Brien’s major novels, Arthur Riordan’s Improbable Frequency and Slattery’s Sago Saga, Ergo Phizmiz’s electronic-1920s-Vaudeville adaptation of The Third Policeman, Stephen Rea’s musical dramatic reading of same), film (Kurt Palm’s In Schwimmen-Zwei-Vögel, Park Films’John Duffy’s Brother and The Martyr’s Crown) and the visual arts (John McCloskey’s graphic novel of An Béal Bocht, David O’Kane’s stunning O’Brien artworks). As well as demonstrating the significant weight O’Brien’s writing continues to carry in the present cultural moment, these adaptations emphasise its sustained creative dimensions and dramatic energies.

With these issues in mind, the conference aims to address the contours and concealments of performance in Flann O’Brien’s work as it relates to issues of identity, genre, pseudonymity, adaptation, and creative reception. Salzburg is the home of numerous internationally renowned and prestigious theatrical institutions and events, providing the perfect setting to this symposium, which will take place at the outset of the 2017 Salzburger Festspiele (Salzburg Music and Drama Festival).

The call for papers is now open for Ted Hughes & Place, to be held at the University of Huddersfield, July 15-16, 2017.

Abstracts are requested by December 31, 2016.

About the symposium

‘Place’ is key to understanding the work of Ted Hughes. The key geographical locations of Hughes’s life — Mytholmroyd, Mexborough, Cambridge, Boston, Devon, Ireland, and London (by no means an exhaustive list) — each contributed to the formation of the poet and have left indelible marks in his oeuvre. Recent critical and biographical studies have opened up new topographical trajectories into Hughes’s work, expanding the field and challenging received narratives and interpretations.

However, ‘place’ can also be understood more widely. Hughes seems often to be regarded as one of English poetry’s ‘outsiders’, a poet too singular and maverick to be easily placed within the canon and within the context of modern and contemporary English verse. Accordingly, Hughes’s relationships with his poetic predecessors, peers, and literary ‘movements’ — modernism, the Movement, or American, Eastern European and other international poets and artists, for example — are perhaps insufficiently explored, as is the extent of his own influence on poets and artists during his lifetime and after his death.

A third understanding of ‘place’ might be social and cultural: issues related to class and politics, and how these are reflected in Hughes’s work and its reception in the different stages of his life and career.

This two-day symposium will explore these different aspects of place in the writings of Ted Hughes, and in doing so help to develop a deeper understanding of the contexts of Hughes’s life and work.

Keynote speakers

Professor Terry Gifford (Bath Spa University)

Emeritus Professor Neil Roberts (University of Sheffield)

Dr Mark Wormald (Pembroke College, University of Cambridge)

Submissions

Proposals might address, but need not be limited by, the following topics:

• the locations of Hughes’s life and work
• Hughes and geography / topography / landscape
• Hughes and the environment
• Hughes and the canon
• Hughes’s influences
• Hughes’s influence
• Hughes and post-war poetry
• Hughes and the Movement
• Hughes and modernism
• Hughes and postmodernism
• Hughes and world literatures
• Hughes and society
• Hughes and politics
• Hughes and class

How to submit

Please send proposals of 250 words with a short biographical note to James Underwood (j.s.underwood@hud.ac.uk) by 31 December 2016.

Speakers will be notified in January 2017.

The call for papers is now open for Virginia Woolf and the World of Books, to be held at the University of Reading, June 29 – July 2, 2017.

Abstracts are requested by February 1, 2017.

About the conference