The James Joyce Italian Foundation is pleased to announce the 2009 James Joyce Graduate Conference. The Foundation welcomes graduate students and young scholars interested in Joyce, the man, the writer and his European literary and cultural context. The conference will be held at the Università Roma Tre, Italy, on February 2-3, 2009, Joyce‚s one hundred twentyseventh birthday and is being organised in collaboration with the James Joyce Reserach Centre, University College Dublin and the School of English, Trinity College Dublin.

Emerging Joyce scholars are invited to send proposals for a 20-minute contribution to be discussed at the one-day and a half conference on current trends in Joyce and modernist scholarship. The general theme of the conference is "James Joyce: Metamorphosis and Rewriting". Related topics include but are not limited to:

- Metamorphosis as a word, as a process and as rewriting
- Metamorphosis  from Ovid  to Joyce
- Metamorphosis  as  metaphor
- Textual Metamorphoses and genetic approaches to Joyce's texts
- Multigeneric rewritings: cinematic/theatrical/musical Joyce
- New /Traditional approaches to Joyce's works
- Irish/International Joyce
- Joyce in translation
- Joyceand Literary Connections
- Language in Joyce

Anne Fogarty (University College Dublin), Richard Brown (University of Leeds) and Sam Slote (Trinity College Dublin) will be among the special guest speakers.

Selected papers will be recommended for publication in JSI-Joyce Studies in Italy. The 2008 James Joyce Graduate Conference proceedings are currently being published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Good value accomodation will be available to all participants, and free accomodation will be offered to the selected speakers.

(posted 2 Aug '08)

Threads run through American literature. They come in all kinds: some have been acknowledged by the writers themselves, others have been identified by academia. The aim of this conference is to show that the link between a nineteenth-century novelist, Harriet Beecher-Stowe (1811-1896), and a twentieth-century, poet John Beecher (1904-1980), is not merely genealogical. The theme "forms and reform" is an invitation to trace thematic and formal continuities beyond generic and chronological boundaries and examine these authors' problematic inclusion in and exclusion from the canon with a view to eliciting fresh scholarly attention to their work.
In spite of the publication in 1980 of John Beecher's Collected Poems, his work was neglected for many years. But One More River To Cross, the new "Selected Poems" edited by Steven Ford Brown and brought out by NewSouth Books in 2003, has made available again for reappraisal the work of one in turn dismissed as no poet at all or celebrated as "an American hero." As for Harriet Beecher Stowe, the need to reread Uncle Tom's Cabin seems particularly acute in the wake of three recent publications (Gregg Crane's The Cambridge Introduction to The Nineteenth-Century Novel [2007], Sarah Robbins's The Cambridge Introduction to Harriet Beecher Stowe [2007] and The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Hollis Robbins [2007].) Both authors therefore bear some relevance to the present.
Among the features common to both writers and worth examining are:
- their obvious concern for slaves in the case of Harriet Beecher Stowe and for workingmen, particularly African-Americans, in the case of John Beecher. Such priorities account for an inclination to preach common to both authors. To various degrees, their works qualify as protest literature but are also informed by religion. Another tension worthy of exploration is that between sentiment and politics. Are these balancing acts successful? What is the political and religious relevance of Uncle Tom's Cabin in today's America? How religious do John Beecher's politics sound to those who call themselves the Progressives of the 21st century? Should 'the Beechers' be considered as ultimately engineering social stability rather than radical reform? Surely they were not Anti-moderns in Antoine Compagnon's understanding of the term-or were they?
- an apparent  disinterest in formal innovation or just a taste for well-tried literary forms. But was it really the case, or did they simply choose to take their pick among available middle-of-the-road contemporary forms as their priorities lay elsewhere? Besides, is preaching out of bounds in literature? Where exactly does the border run between rhetoric and literature? Can the preaching, progressive thread(s) in John Beecher's and Harriet Beecher-Stowe's writings be tied to other significant works of American literature?
- their being a part of the Southern heritage for different reasons, although their roots lay in the North. How does John Beecher's poetry tie into the some-say-non-existent Southern poetry tradition? What do Southern Studies have to say about the evolution of the assessment of Beecher-Stowe's work?  How do both writers' attempts at writing the Southern idiom look and sound today?
The purpose of this conference is to provide the opportunity for a joint reassessment of these two writers. Priority will be given to papers showing an interest in bringing out continuities in American literature.
Selected papers will be considered for publication.

(posted 8 Feb '08)

This conference, which is organised byUniversité Charles de Gaulle-Lille III  in association with Georgia State University, seeks to address the whole corpus of Yeats’s poetic and dramatic works, as well as his prose writings.

Yeats's impressive array of personae or masks combines with conscious manipulation of voice, ranging from the remote and dignified to the trivial and lowly. Variations on voice and mask are decisive modalities of Yeats's effort to recreate an oral tradition and thus contribute to the elaboration of Ireland's cultural identity. On the other hand, they also relate to his histrionic propensity for "remaking himself" simultaneously with his own creation. Whether collective or individual, "identity" is thus envisaged as plural and inchoate, as performance rather than essence.

Thus, this paradoxical ontology of "voice and mask" in turn calls attention to the element of theatricality at the heart of Yeatsian aesthetics, in dramatic and non-dramatic forms alike. It also invites analyses of the ways in which literature overlaps with, and sometimes seeks to absorb, other art forms, in particular music and the visual arts; central to Yeats's oeuvre, for instance, is the tension and constant alternation between stasis and kinetic energy.

Confirmed keynote speakers include Jacqueline Genet (Caen University), Warwick Gould (University of London) Nicholas Grene (Trinity College, Dublin), and Margaret Mills Harper (Georgia State University).

We invite contributions on the conference theme or on other Yeats-related areas. Proposals for 20-mn papers should be sent to Alexandra Poulain <poulain.al@orange.fr> by 3 October 2008.

Pr. Carle Bonnafous-Murat, Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris III
Pr. Margaret Mills-Harper, Georgia State University
Dr. Elizabeth Muller, Université de Nantes
Pr. Alexandra Poulain, Université Charles de Gaulle-Lille III

(posted 2 Aug '08)

30 January 1649 is one of the key dates in the history of British democracy but it is commemorated nowhere in Britain. It was the day when King Charles 1st was beheaded and the Commonwealth of Oliver Cromwell, the foundation of modern Parliamentary democracy, came into effective being. It was a revolutionary moment and it brought onto the historical stage people, ideas and movements that went well beyond anything that Cromwell and the senior leadership of the New Model Army had in mind. Brian Manning in his seminal book on 1649 notes that this was a year when popular mobilisations did not happen. There was no popular uprising to mark the Commonwealth, and no popular protest at the execution of the King. There was however an Army revolt at Burford, also celebrating its anniversary this year, which was brutally put down by Cromwell. 1649 was also the year when Cromwell landed in Dublin to initiate brutal episodes in Ireland.

This conference will look at the liberties and democratic practices ushered in by 1649 and at those who wanted to take them further.

Keynote speakers confirmed so far include Geoffrey Robertson (author, The Tyrannicide Brief), Geoff Kennedy (author, Diggers, Levellers and Agrarian Capitalism, forthcoming), John Rees (author, A Rebel's Guide to Milton, forthcoming) and Norah Carlin (author, The Causes of the English Civil War).

Papers will be considered on any aspect of the year and its legacy, but suggested topics that might be addressed include:

i) The origins of the decision to execute: in parliamentary discussions or outside parliament
ii) The relationship between execution and the civil war
iii) Discussion of whether the decision to execute King Charles was justified
iv) The connection between tyrannicide and the republican political movements or theory of the 1640s
v) The demands of the New Model Army, its relationship to parliament, and its part in the decision to execute
vi) The discussion of tyrannicide in Royalists or Parliamentarian literature after 1649
vii) The impact of the execution on movements such as the Levellers or Diggers, or on the religious movements of the time; their discussion of the execution, or its impact on their fortunes after 1649

For further information or to send abstracts of papers (up to 1,000 words) until 30 November 2008 contact the organisers at <conference2008@londonsocialisthistorians.org>.

(posted 15 Sep '08)

We invite all professionals or academics who work or have an interest in Languages for Specific Academic Purposes to submit an abstract at the 1st international Conference on Language for Specific Purposes, held on 7-8 February 2009 at the University of Crete. Practicing teachers of English, French or German are especially invited to participate.

• Needs analysis
• Top-down and Bottom-up Approaches
• Content-based learning
• Skills development
• Team-teaching (co-operating with content teachers)
• Input-based methodologies
• Consciousness raising activities
• Output-based methodologies
• Syllabus and Materials design
• Fostering Critical awareness
• The use of Technology
• Testing and Evaluation

We would appreciate it if you could send the abstract coupled with your resume to <english@chemistry.uoc.gr>. You will receive an e-mail confirming receipt. Abstracts will be selected and approved by the appointed academic committee on the basis of originality, clarity and relevance to the conference scope. All successful presenters will be informed on 15th September 2008 by email. Full papers will then be required by 30th November 2008.

(posted 4 Mar '08)

Gerard Steen (Amsterdam), Peter Stockwell (Nottingham), Beatrix Busse (Münster), Beate Hampe (Jena), Susanne Niemeier (Koblenz)

In recent cognitive research, there has been a shift from mental representation in individuals towards the interactional, testified by social cognitive neuroscience, machine learning, discourse analysis, and so on. Aiming at bringing together researchers who engage in the trans-disciplinary study of cognitive phenomena, this conference intends to investigate the bi-directionality, that is, the mutual heuristic applicability of diverse (and possibly complementary) research topics and methodologies in the cognitive sciences.

While the application of methods used in cognitive linguistics and psychology to literary texts, for instance, has enriched our interpretations of literature - e.g., Peter Stockwell's Cognitive Poetics (London and New York: Routledge, 2002) - how could cognitive phenomena reflected in literature help to uncover similar manifestations and refine their study in more traditional cognitive sciences such as linguistics and psychology? To what extent can techniques used in cognitive approaches to linguistic and literary analysis be beneficial to studies in language acquisition and teaching - and how does the latter affect the former? How do different mapping processes - for example, metaphors of embodiment in non-Western cultures – contribute to our understanding of seemingly universal metaphorical mappings? And how can applied cognitive linguistics benefit from potential parallels in cross-cultural mappings?

We would like to encourage the submission of papers from scholars working in the fields of linguistics, language acquisition and teaching, literary and cultural studies, anthropology, psychology, sociology, and others, that explore how cognitive approaches within these disciplines can enrich and illuminate one another.

Please send abstracts (as pdf-attachments) of no more than 300 words (excluding references) by 1 August 2008 to Wolfram Keller <kellerw@staff.uni-marburg.de>.

(posted 7 Jul '08)

Political issues have come back into contemporary literature for many years. One paradigmatic figure for this development in British fiction is Ian McEwan who has gained worldwide recognition with his more recent novels which have also been turned into major movies.

Whereas his early work is more concerned with the family and its perversions, there is a definite politicization after The Comfort of Strangers (1981). The years between McEwan's Venetian novel and The Cild in Time (1987) were by no means years of silence. Rather it was a period of gestation: he wrote the libretto for the oratorio Or Shall We Die? (1983) and the script for The Ploughman’s Lunch (1985) both taking up the then current debate about nuclear war and Thatcherism. McEwan saw these works as A Move Abroad (1989), because they led him away from the genre of the novel to which he then returned with the caustically political The Child in Time. Since then all his novels have had strong political undertones which are most drastically visualized in The Innocent (1990) where the division of Berlin is shown metaphorically in the dismemberment and cutting in half of the corpse of Otto. In Saturday (2005) the mass rally in London against the Iraq War on 15 February 2003 is the background against which the Perowne’s Bloomsday takes place. In Saturday just as much as in Black Dogs (1992) or McEwan’s Booker-prize-winning Amsterdam (1998) politics are shown in their complex relationship to art which is also celebrated in The Atonement (2001).

The conference has four sections which deal with different aspects of politics and art in Ian McEwan’s work as an example for more generally prevalent trends in contemporary British and European Literatures and cultures:

(posted 2 Jun '08)

Proposals are invited for 25-minute papers for the above conference, which is being held to discuss and celebrate the impact of Robert Burns on European Culture in the year of the 250th anniversary of the poet’s birth. The aims of the conference are to draw academic and general attention to Burns as a writer of European significance, and to recuperate our understanding of his stature in the context of widespread critical neglect of his poetry since 1945.
The main themes of the conference are: (i) the European reception of Burns; (ii) the effect his reception has had on images of Scotland; and (iii) the material performance of Burns in culture.
The title of the proposed paper, together with an abstract of 150 words, should be sent to Professor Murray Pittock <murray.g.pittock@manchester.ac.uk> by 30 April 2007, for the consideration of the conference organizers: Martin Procházka, Charles University, Prague, and Murray Pittock, University of Manchester.

(posted 26 Feb '07)

Between the Celtic tribe of the Iron Age - the Cantiaci - and the twenty-first-century inhabitants of Canterbury, three millenia stand during which the city has enjoyed unparalleled fame, particularly since it became the religious heart of the country in 597 AD. While ambling through the streets of modern Canterbuy, one is able to - if careful enough to do so - get the feel of the medieval city. There must be reasons for that enduring impact of the past and it might be because of the overwhelming wealth of people who have left their mark as well as events of momentous importance that took place there.

Those two Days of Study around the overall theme of "Canterbury: a medieval city" will allow both the contributors and the attendants to apprehend the magnitude of the history of the place, and to make clear the reasons why Canterbury has become the magnet it is nowadays for people from all over the world, the "mecca for tourists" as it is advertised on some websites.

While illustrious figures will be dealt with, such as Saint Augustine, Thomas Becket, and Geoffrey Chaucer, who account for the renown of the place and have indeed helped to shape the national identity, everyone should also be able to catch a glimpse of less notorious personalities and facts that have also worked to give Canterbury its deeply ingrained identity, people like priors of Canterbury, as well as the many different ways according to which the place functioned.

Contributions - both in French and English - concerning any facet of medieval life in Canterbury are most welcome. After the Conference, they will be published in one volume in either language.

It is possible to submit your suggestions for papers (a title and a few descriptive lines) until 30 November 2008, and/or to ask for any specific information: Catherine Royer-Hemet <catherine.hemet.royer@gmail.com>.

(posted 22 Sep '08)

The French national research association for English for Specific Purposes (GERAS) will hold its 30th annual Conference on the subject of "From non-specialised to specialised: routes towards specialised English" at the University of Rennes 1. The discussion begun in 2008 concerning the unity and diversity of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) will be pursued; the distinctive approach in 2009 will examine one of the fields of discipline's defining phenomena: the progression from non-specialised English to specialisation. Suggestions for contributions may approach this question from various angles along all four research strands: Applied Linguistics and Discourse Analysis, Culture, Didactics and Technology. Submissions should be sent by 15 Decemberr, 2008 to <sophie.belan@univ-rennes1.fr>.

Please visit the conference website http://geras2009.univ-rennes1.fr for further information on the event as well as the Call for Papers.

(posted 13 Sep '08, updated 12 Nov '08)

This one-day conference is part of a larger project that aims to examine the circulation of texts in English- and French-speaking areas. After a first conference in 2008 devoted to literary transfers in the 19th century, this second study day will focus on the circulation of novels and plays between France, Britain and North America in the 20th/21st centuries. We invite scholars interested in the subject to look at the way international publishing conglomerates, but also paradoxically, independent publishers, influence the selection of texts that are available in the various areas under study. How were /are these texts transferred, adapted to a new area, and received ? The diverse material forms of plays-they can be read aloud, staged, printed-raise specific questions which participants are encouraged to address .

Ineke Bockting <ineke.bockting@neuf.fr>
Claire Parfait <claire.parfait@univ-paris13.fr>
Agathe Torti <agathe.torti@yahoo.fr>

(posted 29 Sep '08)

An interdisciplinary international conference: literature / linguistics / history of ideas, organized by EA 741 (Etudes des pays anglophones), Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier III, France.
Can we speak of 'linguistic invention' as we speak of scientific invention? Having inherited the language we use, there seems to be such a thing as constraints to inventiveness. Taking up Lévi-Strauss's dichotomy, is not the linguistic inventor more a 'bricoleur' of language than an 'engineer'?

If we can talk (not uncontroversially) of scientific 'progress', the evolution of language has often been perceived as following a path towards deterioration. Hence the numerous linguistic projects which aimed at checking the 'corruption' of language or at making it as rational and univocal as possible, as the only way to make sure human thoughts would be clear (the philosophical and universal languages from the17th to the 19th century for instance) or logical (from Leibniz to the formal languages of the 20th century). In its attempt to make language more consensual, the 'politically correct' phenomenon of the 20th century could be said to be in line with this attempt at reinventing language. Inventive linguistics thus seems to be linked to some form of political or social utopia. But has language the power to change things? Is the alteration of/on language always positive? Where is the frontier between reform and manipulation? Yet language seems to follow an unpredictable and uncontrollable path of its own. The international English language of the 21st century for example seems to move further and further away from its original standard model in the use non-native English speakers make of it around the world: degraded copy or re-invention?

However linguistic resourcefulness seems to be the prerogative of literature. According to Deleuze, the literary work of art is always written in some foreign, other language which makes 'scientific' grammar stutter, thereby ensuring the constant regeneration of language. Literature sometimes makes its creations more visible: we only need to think of More's Utopia which launched the genre of verbal creation, of Joyce's linguistic bomb, Tolkien's invented languages, or more generally of the 'linguistic-fiction' of the 20th and 21st centuries. The question then needs to be raised as to the limits of inventiveness: how far can it go without forgetting that language is above all supposed to be shared? What are the goals and effects/affects of linguistic creation? What are its privileged rhetorical arms?

We seem to have driven a wedge between 'inventive' and 'scientific' linguistics. Should they really be thought in terms of opposition?

- lexical coinage
- invented languages (universal characters, lingua humana, glossolalia, etc...)
- political correctness – linguistic norms – 'non-standard' English
- fantastic linguistics, 'linguistic-fiction' (imaginary travel / exploratory stories / science-fiction)
- constraints as inventiveness
- language / ideology / utopia / dystopia

(posted 31 Mar '08)

The theme of otherness and identity has often been studied from the point of view of conflict or opposition, very often with a tragic tone. Yet the powers of joy can oppose the powers of horror. The goal here is to see our relationship with others differently and, in particular, to turn our attention to the dimension of pleasure which is indissociably linked to this relationship:  you play with or against other people, you take pleasure from/against/with other people, you can experience joy without other people, thanks to other people or at their expense. These three notions can be used to explore all the fields of our research into the politics, societies and discourses of the English-speaking world.

The history of the English-speaking countries is not only the result of the interplay of political influences and strategies which are all a means to gain or maintain power, it also reflects the pleasure that can be drawn from the conquest and domination of other people's territories, in the epic construction of spaces in which different forms of power -  linguistic, political, economic power and the power of the media - are exercised with jubilant pleasure. The study of these historical and cultural interplays and mechanisms also encourages philosophical reflection on the post-modern or on the possible reign of chance, the arbitrary, the unstable and the unpredictable which disperses the subject in society games (board games) and games with words. The research theme we are proposing here can also give rise to thinking about the voluptuous nature of dangerous liaisons with or without "filles de joie" and on the place of hedonism, eroticism and sadism in the culture and literature of the English-speaking world. Attention could also be paid to the issue of the "use of pleasures" or aphrodisia, to use the expression proposed by Michel Foucault in his History of Sexuality and to retrace, like Michel Serres in The Five Senses, a topography of the pleasures of the body and the "seraphic" pleasures that come from movements such as breathing, jumping and walking, team sports and dancing: "joy inspires, trembles and dances". This same joy can come from æsthetic experience which "laughs at the morals of history" and literature, the graphic arts and music are all playful formulations of joy and pleasure, whether the autistic pleasure of the author or the pleasure of the "reader" of the work, of the famous "pleasure of the text". For Cioran, joy cannot be reduced to pleasure alone: "The word schadenfreude, malevolent joy, is non-sensical. Doing evil is a pleasure, not a joy" (from De l'Inconvénient d'être né, III- "the disadvantages of being born").

A form of perverse enjoyment also emerges from games with narration, focalization, the conventions of genre and onomastics. Attention will thus be paid to humour and the comic strategies of the author, based on puns and wit, and the dizzy richness of the language generated by polyphony and heteroglossy. Lexical creation and punning are a privilege for the author or speaker, and playing with the polysemy of lexical terms and the double meaning of certain phrases is a source of pleasure for the reader or listener, who takes an active part in decoding the meaning - deliberate or otherwise - conveyed by the message he or she receives or perceives. The playful dimension of this interpretative and inferential activity is similar in many ways to the deliberate obfuscation that some narrators introduce with sometimes perverse joy. Thus it is that playing with the I, in reported or free indirect speech, becomes a game with the first and second persons: if I and you become reversible, you can also be defined as the "non-I person" (Benveniste). Writing thus becomes the space in which a "drama" is played out, in the sense in which Tesnière uses the term, involving actors moving in particular processes and circumstances. While syntax would seem to be the least changing scenery in this play, semantic interpretation cannot be detached from the scenery, which must however allow enough play to give free rein to interpretations - by both actors and audience - and inter-subjective adjustments.

Style can also be a source of pleasure, if only through the subtle games of ellipsis, the implicit, the unsaid and/or excesses and hyperbole. Irony and parody are also examples of the double game played by the narrator, playing with his or her knowledge and the power he or she exerts over the reader. Photography, cinema, theatre and choreography stage both the pain and the pleasure of exposure and exhibition, while at the same time inspiring pleasure in the voyeurish spectator. Papers at this symposium will themselves be invited to juggle with definitions, establish distinctions between keywords expressing the satisfaction that relations with other people can provide, here approached from a joyous angle, in a list that could never be exhaustive: elation, gaiety, jubilation, rejoicing, happiness, enchantment, exaltation, exultation and ecstasy. Translation of these terms from French to English is a source of reflection on the contrast between the ways French and English work which points to a number of cultural themes.

Françoise Buisson <francoise.buisson@univ-pau.fr>
Jane Hentges <jane.hentges@univ-pau.fr>
Christelle Lacassain-Lagoin <christelle.lacassain-lagoin@univ-pau.fr>

(posted 19 Jul '08)

An international conference organised at Lille 3 on 20-21 March 2009 by ASERCIB, a component of CECILLE, EA 4074.

Scientific committee : Annie Collovald (Nantes), Richard Davis (Lille 3), Gilbert Millat (Lille 3), Kevin Passmore (Cardiff), Dan Stone (Royal Holloway), Jean Vavasseur-Desperriers (Lille 3).

William Howard Taft called it "The city that knows how". The fourteenth largest of American cities, San Francisco is the farthest west, the ultimate frontier, a last chance for pioneers and immigrants searching for gold. "East is East and West is San Francisco", said O Henry, underscoring the city's mythical status in the American imagination. Yet San Francisco is so far West that it is the most oriental of American cities; so that Robinson Jeffers sees it not transcontinentally, but transpacifically: "this bulging/Eyeball of water, arched over to Asia". Like Sydney, with which it shares so many features, San Francisco forms one of the 'mirror' cities of the Asia-Pacific region.

A village dating back to the Spanish occupation, Yerba  Buena was renamed San Francisco in 1846, just two years before the discovery of the first gold deposits. Gold triggered a population explosion, and by 1850 the city already boasted 25,000 inhabitants. A place of magic and miracle during the Gold Rush, the dream terminus of the first railroad to cross the continent, the site whose slopes inspired Andrew Hallidie to construct his first cable car, the « city by the bay » became a powerful magnet, drawing successive waves of foreigners and adventurers to settle there and build a multicolor, multiracial city, famed for its tolerance and open-mindedness. "I have always been better treated in San Francisco than I actually deserved" confessed Mark Twain who knew something about nineteenth-century American towns. (This welcome, however, was not extended to all: Chinese and Japanese communities, notably, met with hostility and violence in America's evolving multi-ethnic society). Twain was to publish articles in the San Francisco Examiner - alongside Ambrose Bierce, Frank Norris and Stephen Crane - when W. Hearst's newspaper was a popular mix of serious and "yellow" journalism.
Having survived the 1906 earthquake and the ensuing Great Fire - an event captured in word and in photograph by the town's illustrious son, Jack London - the city emerged, as it were, 'reborn from its ashes' to organize the Universal Exposition of 1915. After this dramatic first chapter, twentieth-century San Francisco became the backdrop for Dashiell Hammet's thrillers between the Wars, the focus of Dorothea Lange's scrutiny during the Great Depression, and the theatre of fierce labour opposition to corrupt municipal authorities. The city achieved international prominence when it hosted the First Peace Conference in 1945 and the second one in 1951; the Treaty of San Francisco heralded the birth of the UN.
From now on, the city was to be the favored arena for all who cried freedom, a place to hear the voices of experimental poetry (the San Francisco Renaissance led by Rexroth, Gleason, and Duncan) and the voices (issuing from Reed College) of the Beat Generation, those of Snyder, Whalen, and Welch, a literary brotherhood tuned in to Buddhist teachings which would lure Jack Kerouac to Big Sur and Lawrence Ferlinghetti to Broadway and Columbus where he was to found his legendary publishing house and bookshop, City Lights. San Francisco would resound with the cries of the Free Speech Movement on the campus of Berkeley and with the psychedelic rhapsodies of Timothy Leary et al calling on their contemporaries to "Turn on, tune in, [and] drop out". Becoming, in the process the city that knows how to howl, it amplified Allen Ginsberg’s historic voicings of West Coast Counterculture, the angry demands of the Black Panthers as well as the triumphal tones of the country's largest homosexual community, one to which Armistead Maupin continues to devote his world-famous Chronicles.
Today, San Francisco is a city with a unique cultural heritage, the capital of the unforgettable Summer of Love (1967). The cinema has immortalized its topography and architecture in films which track its famous cable-cars and climb Telegraph Hill (Dark Passage), slalom down its sloping streets (Bullitt), cross the Bay Bridge in the wrong direction (The Graduate), sing its spell-binding charms (Vertigo), magnify its Golden Gate Bridge (Interview with a Vampire), defy its most impregnable fortress (The Birdman from Alcatraz, Escape from Alcatraz), or probe the moral ambiguity of its anti-heroes (the Dirty Harry series). If San Francisco is reputed to be an enlightened city, it is also a green city that has played a leading role in the conservation movement, largely thanks to John Muir who founded the Sierra Club there in 1892 and pioneered environmental campaigning, notably to secure the city's water supply. The spirit of his ecological militancy lives on today in the Bio-regional movement and its intellectual corollary, Deep Ecology, which prominent literary figures of the West Coast, such as Gary Snyder (the "laureate of Deep Ecology"), have helped articulate.
This interdisciplinary symposium is part of a series on American cities inaugurated by the LERMA research centre at the University of Provence with a symposium in 2002 on "Chicago". Papers will cover the multiple facets of San Francisco: its history, geography, literary, cultural and artistic identities, its mythology, image(s) and imaginings, ranging widely over a metropolis which Frank Norris called the greatest "story city" in America.
You are invited to submit your proposals to the organisers by 30 September 2008 :
For papers dealing...

The Association for African American Historical Research and Preservation (AAAHRP) is accepting proposals for individual papers, panels, and workshops for its 2009 Biennial Black History Conference. The conference is scheduled to be held on Saturday, March 21 and Sunday, March 22, 2009 in Seattle, Washington, U.S.A. The Theme of the conference is "Black History: Full Disclosure." Participants are encouraged to present papers, introduce original documentaries, form panels, and conduct workshops.

Scholars, professional and avocational historians, genealogists, librarians, archivists, authors, and graduate students from the United States and other countries are encouraged to submit proposals based on previously unreported or underreported black history and culture. Individuals engaged in the preservation of black history at historic sites, museums, or historical societies are also encouraged to submit proposals. In addition to African American history, proposals within the realm of the African Diaspora that include Africans in Europe, Africans in Canada, Africans in the Caribbean, and Africans in Central and South America are of particularly interest to the AAAHRP Conference Committee.

Abstracts should not exceed 300 words. Your abstract should include the presentation title, your title and name, affiliation, mailing address, country, contact phone number and e-mail address.

(posted 9 Jul '08)

Trauma has become a central trope in the cultural imagination of the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries and critics across ideological spectrums seem to agree that we are now living in an "age of trauma." Being an important sub-strand of the so-called 'Ethical Criticism,' Trauma Studies emerged as a critical trend in the 1990s through the voices of trauma theorists such as Cathy Caruth, Dominick LaCapra, Shoshana Felman and Geoffrey Harpham, among others. This new interest was the  result of the effects of the two World Wars and other armed conflicts, the clash of civilisations, the processes of decolonisation and globalisation, and the alienation of affections triggered off by the new technologies and the consumer society. The Holocaust has become the paradigm of traumatic experience, and the terrorist attacks by religious fundamentalists on the population of New York (11 September 2001), Madrid (11 March 2004), and London (7 July 2005), have introduced the vocabulary of trauma in our general speech. However, trauma theory has also focused on a literature that points to History as the determining factor in causing interracial traumas or postcolonial conflicts.

In the struggle that trauma creates  between the "urge to know" and the "need to deny," we will welcome contributions that will explore the theoretical, heuristic and hermeneutic articulations of trauma in contemporary narrative in English.

* The representation of historical and/or personal trauma in contemporary narrative in English.
* The study of formal innovations devised by contemporary writers in order to represent both collective and individual traumas.
* The connections between the representations of historical traumas and personal traumas, of fiction and testimony.
* Trauma and literary genres, politics, gender, postcolonial studies and indigenous peoples' studies.
* Representations of trauma in the arts.

M. Dolores Herrero, <dherrero@unizar.es>                  
Sonia Baelo, <baelo@unizar.es>
Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana
Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
50009 Zaragoza
Spain

(posted 26 May '08)

Several competing discourses on colonial heritage and immigration have recently emerged in the West. Some of these discourses tended to emphasize the positive impact of a past many people consider to be traumatic, triumphant, or sometimes both at once. In fact, laws have been passed, in France and elsewhere, to create an official version of history that adopted and disseminated one particular version of such history. These laws echo political discourses meant to reflect the nation’s ideals and the tendencies of public opinion. For others, however, these laws are oppressive and discriminatory, and will have a negative effect on minority identities and rights. These two approaches may suggest that there is an official national identity on the one hand, while on the other, peripheral identities are in the process of being constructed, and therefore cannot officially and overtly take part in the elaboration of national ideals.

The conference will explore these and other contested issues associated with nationalism, race and identity politics. Analyzing these notions may also imply a historical reflection on the role, place, and history of minority groups in France and in the English-speaking world. The conference will focus specifically on the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Australia and Canada. It welcomes multidisciplinary contributions from the fields of politics, civilization, history, historiography, sociology, and anthropology. Papers addressing the following areas will be most welcome:

1. Ethnic minorities and nationalisms
2. Multiculturalism or colorblindness
3. Apology and reparations.
4. Affirmation and redefinition of identity
5. Historicization of discrimination
6.  Memory and politics

Proposal should not exceed 500 words, and should be sent with a short biography before November 15th 2008 either to:

Vanessa CASTEJON <castejon.vanessa@wanadoo.fr

Rim LATRACHE <rim.latrache@univ-paris13.fr>

Olivette OTELE  <olivette.otele@googlemail.com>.

(posted 3 Nov '08)

As a prolongation of its one-day conference (March 21, 2008) on "Scientific Objects and Discourse in 19th-century American Imagination", the CEMRA (Centre d'Etude sur les Modes de la Représentation Anglophone) of Stendhal University in Grenoble (France) is organizing an international conference on the theme "Science and American Literary Discourse in the 20th and 21st Centuries", to be held on March 26-28, 2009.

Since its origin, American literature has always had an uneasy relationship with science: born at a time when science was becoming a profession, it repeatedly referred to it, implicitly or explicitly, in order to assert its difference or, on the contrary, to gain a certain form of legitimacy. This specificity of 19th century American literature continued to develop throughout the 20th century, with literature pursuing its epistemological exploration of fundamental scientific questions.

The purpose of this conference is not to analyze the ways in which science and scientists are represented in American literature, but to show how scientific discourse informs literary writing, and to consider the relationship the two types of discourse have maintained: mutual metaphorization, questioning or legitimating, or, to borrow John Limon's terms (in The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science), "preemption," "treachery," or "alienation". The following questions will be addressed:

- To what uses does American literature put scientific models and metaphors?
- How does literary writing constitute a vector of epistemological reflection?
- What sort of knowledge does literature offer, and what is its relation to scientific knowledge?
- How does the recent media revolution affect American imagination and its modes of writing?

These questions will also be considered from a historical perspective, in order to see whether the diverging paths taken by science and American literature in the 19th century have not started to converge in the 20th and 21st centuries.

300-word proposals should be sent by October 15, 2008 to the three following addresses. Authors will be notified by the beginning of November.

Claire Maniez, Professor of American Literature <claire.maniez@u-grenoble3.fr>
Frédéric Dumas, Associate Professor of American Literature <frederic.dumas@u-grenoble3.fr>
Ronan Ludot-Vlasak, Associate Professor of American Literature <ronan.ludot-vlasak@u-grenoble3.fr>.

The term "logic of emotion" can be treated as a whole or in one of the multiple facets of its components. The centrality of emotion in Lawrence cannot be disputed. In one of his early letters, he had already stated : "One sheds one's sicknesses in books-repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them." Lawrence rightly distinguishes between sentiment, emotion and the
er emotions and argues in A propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover that the latter have been replaced by the former : ". by higher emotions we mean love in all its manifestations, from genuine desire to tender love, love of one's fellow-men, and love of God: we mean love, joy, delight, hope, true indignant anger, passionate sense of justice and injustice, truth and untruth, honour and dishonour, and real belief in anything: for belief is a profound emotion that has the mind's connivance. All these things, today, are more or less dead. We have in their place the loud and sentimental counterfeit of all such emotion."

Already we see many possible paths of investigation with the evocation of oppositions:  mental consciousness, spontaneity, the body, sentiment, desire, etc. which should take us into an exploration of  concepts and philosophies of the heart.  An exploration of the logic of the heart should also accompany us on our journey to the heart of logic, keeping in mind Lawrence's warning to us as critics in his essay on Galsworthy: "A critic must be able to feel the impact of a work of art in all its complexity and its force. To do so, he must be a man of force and complexity himself, which few critics are. A man with a paltry, impudent nature will never write anything but paltry, impudent criticism. And a man who is emotionally educated is as rare as a phoenix. The more scholastically educated a man is, generally, the more he is an emotional boor...A critic must be emotionally alive in every fibre, intellectually capable and skilful in essential logic, and then morally very honest."

(posted 13 Sep '08)

Our first conference on /Autonomy and Commitment in Modernist British Literature /attempted to reappraise modernist literature in the light of the two notions of autonomy and commitment that criticism has throughout the years played against each other, the New Critics, the structuralists and post-structuralists defending the thesis of a self-sufficient work of art while later schools of criticism-cultural, feminist, marxist, post-colonial studies, etc.-have insisted on the connection between art and the socio-political context. Should we come to the conclusion that the autonomy of the work of art is necessarily at odds with any form of commitment? Or that the so-called autonomy of the work of art is fundamentally deceptive and finally impossible? Is commitment intrinsically linked with art and autonomy nothing but a form of respect for a certain class-determined ideology? Or should the two concepts be re-thought and re-defined both individually and in relation to each other?

These are the questions that we now want to ask about modernist arts which range from painting to sculpture, from film to photography, from radio plays to music and which certainly cover a wide sample of movements: post-impressionism, vorticism, expressionism, etc.

In /Vision and Design/, Roger Fry develops a Kantian theory of "disinterested contemplation" and extols the virtues of art, "its freedom from necessary external conditions", thus positing the necessary autonomy of art. "Significant form" is Clive Bell's ideal while plastic form is what Gaudier-Brzeska recognizes in Epstein, Brancusi or Modigliani's work; and vorticism parades as an art of intensity where emotion is equated with form, in music as well as in literature, in sculpture as well as in painting or dancing, as Pound showed in the first edition of /Blast/. All tended towards some brand of formalism or abstraction. Is such formalism or abstraction to be understood as a form of autonomy and as excluding all form of commitment? Or can autonomous art be committed in any way? And in what way? Aesthetically, politically, religiously, ethically? Or is autonomy, both from the socio-historical context and the artistic context, unthinkable, and if so, does it mean that art is necessarily synonymous with commitment? Responsibility? Must art be an instrument of warfare, expounding a message, defending a political point of view? Are such politically committed art works servile and simply cultivating a clear conscience? Conversely can committed art be autonomous? Is there any possible form of autonomy for art commissioned during the war, for example? Are autonomy and commitment exclusive of each other or compatible or even, necessary to each other?

These are some of the tracks that those among you committed to modernist arts are invited to follow, pursue further or question in this conference on /Autonomy and Commitment in Modernist British Arts/ that will take place at the University Montpellier III on 27-28 March 2009. Delineating the type of relation there may be between these two apparently antagonistic notions of autonomy and commitment in modernist arts will be the aim of this conference. Walter Benjamin's writings about the "aura", Adorno's "Commitment" or his essays on music may be good starting-points for such a reflection as well as the modernist artists' own essays. Addressing the interconnections between autonomy and commitment should enable us to work towards a re-appraisal of modernist arts. Proposals dealing with the two combined notions of autonomy and commitment in relation to modernist painting, sculpture, cinema, photography, music, etc. will be considered carefully. Selected papers will be published in a volume at the Presses Universitaires du Languedoc et de la Méditerranée.

(posted 30 Apr '08)

Professor Warren Chernaik, University of London
Professor Hugh Cunningham, University of Kent
Professor Kimberley Reynolds, Newcastle University

Both the history of childhood and attention to the child in literature are rapidly expanding areas of research. Childhood in its Time seeks to trace how the history of childhood in Britain is reflected, portrayed, or even created, in literature from the medieval period to the present day. The conference is particularly interested in how literary childhood is represented within its historical period and in how such representations develop over time. Papers are sought which discuss children or childhood in British literature within a specific historical context. We seek papers on both children's literature and on the portrayal of childhood in adult texts.

Interested in the concept of childhood in British literature, i.e., not adolescence or the teenage experience, the organizers welcome proposals for papers or panels on topics including, but not limited to:

* The child in works by Chaucer and other Medieval writers
* Childhood in Renaissance and Early Modern texts
* The Shakespearean child
* Eighteenth-century interpretations of children
* Romantic childhood
* Children in Victorian literature
* Edwardian literature's cult of childhood
* The child in modern and contemporary literature

Please email to BOTH conference organizers:

(posted 3 Nov '08)