Category: Uncategorized

Forming the Future, 2–3 Sept 2019, University of Plymouth

Confirmed speakers: Amy J. Elias (Tennessee, Knoxville); Daniel Innerarity (Ikerbasque); Sandra Kemp (Lancaster/Imperial)

Thinking about the future often focuses on its ‘content’: what might happen. Similarly, thinking about ‘future studies’ often concentrates on its goals, concepts and methods. But what about the forms in which the future comes couched? How does the medium in which the future is presented – its genres, structures, conventions – shape or influence what the future might include? What forms do representations of the future currently take in different disciplines and fields of practice – from fiction to non-fiction, the visual to the textual, science to politics – and to what effect? Can we make our representations of the future more efficacious, with a view to the current world situation? And what might different fields learn from each other, or how might they combine, in order to do this?

This interdisciplinary conference sets out to investigate these and related questions, and to trigger dialogue within and across different areas in which the future is being ‘formed’. 

Starting points may include, but are not restricted to:

·      forms old and new (e.g. fiction, report, manifesto, visual media, software …)

·      fact/fiction, realistic/unrealistic, mind/heart …

·      a future without apocalypse? continuity/break?

·      updating key terms (e.g. hope, optimism, pessimism, utopia, horizons …) 

·      instrumentality/openness, prognostication/becoming, fixed/alterable

·      the problems of scale (e.g. individual/collective, local/global, multiplicity/unity …)

·      interdisciplinary practice, thinking, potential

·      history <> future

Please send proposals for 20 minute papers or presentations to david.sergeant@plymouth.ac.uk Proposals will be welcomed from researchers across the humanities, social sciences and STEM disciplines, as well as from those working outside the university sector.

Deadline for proposals: 1 May 2019.

Two £150 bursaries are available for those without institutional funding or equivalent; please describe in your proposal how you qualify. The full call for papers, along with further information, is available on the conference webpage: https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/whats-on/forming-the-future

Canon? Practice? Commodity? The past, present and future of the literary anthology

A major International Conference, 14–15 June 2019

Queen Mary, University of London, Department of Comparative Literature, School of Languages, Linguistics and Film

Confirmed keynote speakers

Prof. Martin Puchner, Harvard University

Prof. Karen Kilcup, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Prof. Tom Mole, The University of Edinburgh

The power of the anthology as an instrument of knowledge production has long been recognised, and, since the 1980s, the genre has been problematised and contested both within specific instantiations and in scholarly research which takes the anthology as its subject. The anthology as such, however, has yet to be fully theorised, and this conference aims to move toward a more comprehensive conceptualisation of its forms, functions and cultural dynamics.

Whilst there has been much theorisation of the archive and the canon, for example in the work of Derrida, Foucault, and Guillory, the relationship of the anthology to these concepts still needs to be explored. Is the anthology a conceptual framework that defines its own truth criteria (Foucault 1972)? Is anthologising a hermeneutical tradition, carried out by those who have ‘the power to interpret the archives’ (Derrida 1995:10)? Are all anthologies ‘judgements with canonical force’ circumscribed by an institutional location (Guillory 1993: 29)? Or are the ‘so-called canon wars of the 1980s and 1990s’ a thing of the past (Baym 2012: xxvii)?

As well as probing what these ideas can tell us about the anthology, and vice versa, we also need to consider new approaches. At a time when there is increasing pressure on the Humanities to account for itself, this conference seeks to intervene in the broader discourse of literary studies. If anthologising is an activity which defines and validates the categories that are the object of the humanist gaze, can and/or should it be viewed as an act of composition, an instructive exemplar of the processes Latour outlines as common to the humanities and sciences (Latour 2010)? Along these lines, can the anthology be read as an example of curation, of the kind Felski recommends as a primary activity for the humanities today (Felski 2014)?

The anthology is still very much a live issue on the broader cultural scene, reflected in recent political debates about representation and inclusion, not least the boycott prompted by the exclusion of women writers from the 2017 Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets and the furore over Helen Vendler’s critique of the ‘Multicultural inclusiveness’ of Rita Dove’s 2011 Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. This renewed attention to anthologising speaks of the urgent need for a more thoroughgoing reflection, the stakes of which are being increasingly raised in the context of ever more global methods of distribution.

A re-evaluation of the anthology is particularly pressing in the light of a number of significant developments in literary studies and the literary field more broadly. As a codex technology, the anthology is coming under pressure from the extension of digitization and the growing accessibility of literary texts online. Because ready availability can also be experienced as overwhelming proliferation, it is not yet clear whether this pressure will destroy, reinvigorate and/or reconfigure the genre. Online platforms present interesting challenges and possibilities for the future of anthologising.

Moreover, advances in Digital Humanities techniques have created a new set of affordances which particularly suit the study of the anthology, presenting as it does both a vast potential dataset amenable to statistical analysis and visualisation and a highly visible paratextual apparatus circumscribed by a narrow set of formal conventions. These technologies mean that the anthology is more available as a significant object for our attention, whether close or distant.

Finally, the surge in the commercialisation of education and the spread of large providers of education services and products with global ambitions has implications for the anthology in its impact on the selection and dissemination of literary texts for the university module or school curriculum. The expansion of service providers who are also publishers, the increasing emphasis on the education market and on students as consumers, and the necessity to follow economies of scale, will inevitably shape the anthologies to come.

We welcome contributions in the form of 90-minute panel proposals or individual submissions for 20-minute papers from scholars at all stages of their careers who have work to present on anthologies or on the anthology genre, historical or current, in any language, and from any national context or geographical region.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

The archive (Foucault, Derrida)

• Knowledge and power
• Anthologies generating and controlling discourse
• Anthologising as colonisation
• Anthologies defining territories: time, space and ideas

The canon, inclusion and exclusion (Guillory)

• Canon formation
• Alternative anthologies
• Recovery anthologies
• Linguistic, national or geographically defined parameters
• Periodisation
• Genre
• The anthology and the literary movement

Print culture (Chartier; Genette)

• The history of anthologising – from the commonplace book to the online anthology
• Anthology in/as network
• Readership and publication
• The paratext

Value

• Legitimacy and reputation
• Pedagogy
• Taste formation

Anthologies now

• Anthologising as composition/curation
• Managing proliferation in the digital age
• The death of the codex anthology?
• The role of the anthology in the global education market
• Digital approaches to anthologies and other new methodologies
• Anthologies and translation
• Anthologies and globalisation: whose ‘world literature’?

How to submit

Abstracts for papers, whether for individual submissions or as panel proposals, should be no more than 250 words, each accompanied by a short (100-word) bio.

Deadline for proposals: 28 February 2019

All proposals should be sent to i.l.parkinson@qmul.ac.uk

Decisions on proposals will be communicated by 31 March.

Attendance and fees

The conference is open to anyone, in any discipline, working on anthologies.

Prices for the conference, including reduced rates for postgraduate students, and details of how to pay, will appear shortly.

Keynote Speakers
Kari Weil, Wesleyan University (US)
Derek Ryan, University of Kent (UK)

​‘I still do not think La Somnambule the perfect title – Night Beast would be better except for that debased meaning now put on that nice word beast.’ – Djuna Barnes to Emily Holmes Coleman

​‘Once again we are in a knot of species coshaping one another in layers of reciprocating complexity all the way down’ – Donna Haraway

​If modernism heralded a moment of socio-political, cultural and aesthetic transformation, it also instigated a refashioning of how we think about, encounter, and live with animals. Beasts abound in modernism. Virginia Woolf’s spaniel, T.S. Eliot’s cats, James Joyce’s earwig, D.H. Lawrence’s snake, Samuel Beckett’s lobster, and Djuna Barnes’s lioness all present prominent examples of where animals and animality are at the forefront of modernist innovation. At stake in such beastly figurations are not just matters of species relations, but questions of human animality and broader ideas of social relations, culture, sex, gender, capitalism, and religion. Modernism’s interest in the figure of the animal speaks to the immense changes in animal life in the early twentieth century, a period where the reverberations of Darwinian theory were being felt in the new life sciences, as well as emergent social theories that employed discourses of species, and developing technologies and markets that radically alerted everyday human-animal relations. It was also a period in which new theories of human responsibilities towards animals were also being articulated with Donald Watson coining the idea of veganism in 1944.

The recent “animal turn” in the humanities invites new ways of thinking about the beasts that we find in modernist culture. Moreover, animal studies arrives at a point at which modernist studies is already in the process of redefining what modernism means. Turning to modernism’s beasts not only promises fresh ways of understanding its multispecies foundations, but also points towards how modernist studies might intervene in contemporary debates around animal life. Building on the foundational work on animals and modernism by Carrie Rohman, Margot Norris, Kari Weil, Derek Ryan and others, Beastly Modernisms invites papers on animals and all aspects of modernist culture. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

•    Animal Life, Species and Speciesism
•    Beasts, Beastliness and Bestiality
•    The Creaturely
•    Unstable Signifiers
•    Animal Rights, Ethics and Politics
•    Anti-Vivisection Movements
•    Bestial Ontologies and Materialities
•    Queer Animals and Sexuality
•    Anthropocentrism and Anthropomorphism
•    Human Animality and Social Darwinism
•    Animal Commodification and Capitalism
•    Race, Class, Sex and Gender
•    Religion, Myth and Animism
•    Wildlife, Imperialism and Hunting
•    Pets, Companion Species and Domestic Animals
•    Biology, Ethology, Ecology and the Natural Sciences
•    Animal Performance, Circuses and Zoos
•    Animal Trauma, Violence and Warfare
•    Extinction and the Anthropocene
•    Livestock, Agriculture and Working Animals
•    Meat Production and the Animal Industry
•    Vegetarianism, Veganism and Eating Animals
•    Modernist Animal Philosophy
•    Humanism, Posthumanism and Transhumanism
•    Early- and Late- Modernist Animals

Papers
Individual papers should be no more than twenty minutes in length. Please send an abstract of 300 words and a brief biography to beastlymodernisms@gmail.com by 31 January 2019.

Panels 
We welcome proposals for panels or roundtables of 3 to 4 speakers. Please send an abstract of 500 words and speaker biographies to beastlymodernisms@gmail.com by 31 January 2019.

​Submissions are open to all researchers at every level of study. We particularly encourage submissions from postgraduate researchers.

https://beastlymodernisms.wixsite.com/home/call-for-papers

@BeastlyMods

Whether it’s Virginia Woolf crafting a playful biography of Elizabeth Barrett-Browning’s dog in Flush, Clarice Lispector pondering the metaphysics of chickens in ‘The Egg and the Chicken’, or Marianne Moore with her elegant swans and pigeons, modernism is quite the menagerie of poetic animals. As part of an interdisciplinary conference on Beastly Modernisms, hosted by the University of Glasgow in September 2019, we invite friends, colleagues and writers alike to submit their own creative take on a beastly modernist poetics.

In addition to two days of keynotes and panels, Beastly Modernisms will host a poetry evening at The Poetry Club on Thursday 12th September, 2019. This event will be open to the public, and presents an opportunity for exploring the critical resonance of modernist animal studies within a more informal, performance context. Alongside several commissioned poets, we are looking for writers of all backgrounds, academic or otherwise, to apply to perform at the event.

In line with the conference’s creative-critical knowledge exchange, responses may involve a direct engagement with animal-focused work within modernist aesthetics, a revisioning of modernist animality within the contemporary moment or something completely original, perhaps spawned by a relevant text from the past that catches your eye. We are looking for writing that devours and challenges, chases the margins, acts parasitically with its source material, questions the relationship between human and animal, pushes the scale and scope of ‘modernism’ and stimulates appetite for a beastlier modernist canon.

How to apply: 

Please send a maximum of three poems on the theme of ‘Beastly Modernisms’ to beastlymodernisms@gmail.com by 31 January 2019, alongside a 50-word author bio. You might also mention any context to your work and how it engages with particular modernist texts, although this is only suggested. Please be aware that reading slots are likely to be 5 minutes per poet, and slots will be very limited so do send us your best work! If you so wish on the night, you can bring your favourite existing animal modernisms poem to recite as part of your reading.

https://beastlymodernisms.wixsite.com/home/call-for-poems

@BeastlyMods

‘How does one go about getting an introduction to a fictional character?’
― Richard Bruce Nugent

CALL FOR PAPERS

The fourteenth annual conference of the British Society for Literature and Science will take place at Royal Holloway, University of London, from Thursday 4 April until Saturday 6 April 2019. Keynote speakers will include Professor Tim Armstrong (Royal Holloway) and Professor Angelique Richardson (Exeter).

The BSLS invites proposals for 20-minute papers, panels of three papers, or special roundtables on any subjects within the field of science, and literatures in the broadest sense, including theatre, film, and television. There is no special theme for this conference, but abstracts or panels exploring one of the following topics are especially welcome: (1) how the literatures of Africa, the Americas, Asia, or Australasia address, interact with, or respond to the discourses of science; (2) the digital humanities; (3) the writing, reading, and interpretation of human nature; (4) innovative or progressive models for uniting the sciences and the humanities.

In addition, we are hoping to put together sessions with looser, non-traditional formats, and would welcome proposals from any person or persons interested in making presentations of approximately ten minutes from notes rather than completed papers. The hope is that this format will encourage longer Q&A sessions with more discussion.

Please send an abstract (200 words) and short biographical note (50 words) to the conference organiser, Dr. Mike Wainwright, mike.wainwright@rhul.ac.uk, by no later than 18.00 GMT, Friday 7 December 2018. Include the abstract and biographical note in the body of the email.

All proposers of a paper or panel will receive notification of the results by the end of January 2019.

The conference fee will be waived for two graduate students in exchange for written reports on the conference, to be published in the BSLS Newsletter. If you are interested in being selected for one of these awards, please mention this when sending in your proposal. To qualify you will need to be registered for a postgraduate degree at the time of the conference.

Information concerning onsite accommodation and local hotels will be forthcoming.
Membership: conference delegates will need to register/renew as members of the BSLS (annual membership: £25 waged/ £10 unwaged).