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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.

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.

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 30^th 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)

 

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 20^th– and 21^st-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 20^th– and 21^st-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.