Water imagery is one of the central topoi in poetic, fictional and critical language. Since the victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588, the national consciousness in Britain has been directed towards the movement from solid land and coast out into the open sea by the art of navigation. The literary imagination followed, and coast and sea have provided room for projections of hope, longing, and fear. The transition from solid land to fluid ocean challenges culturally induced value systems and world views; the confrontation with foreign worlds undermines identities and generates new images of alterity.

In this context sea and coast are historically highly semanticized and hotly contested topographical spaces, which enable the discovery and designation of new cultural spaces in imagination and practice. This conference will focus on fictional representations of sea and coast in their topographical, ecological, and economic specificities, as endangered and endangering realms, as enabling and conditioning forces of the cultural imaginary in the history of English-speaking literatures and media.

•    Postcolonial and transatlantic (re)writings of conquest and travel narratives
•    gendered perspectives on maritime heroism
•    first colonial encounters with overseas cultures
•    the role of the sea in the development of national identities
•    the cultural production of alterities
•    negotiations of 'class' and 'race' in maritime fictions
•    island and survival narratives
•    the sublimation of sea and coast in British Romanticism
•    the "Black Atlantic"
•    tales of emigration to the US
•    narratives of whaling and fishing
•    sea and coast as the unknown
•    sea monsters and the edge of the world
•    maritime utopia and dystopia
•    living by the sea
•    outposts of civilisation
•    ecocriticism
•    ships on stage

•    great floods in literature

There will be a section dedicated to papers by graduate students.

(posted 22 September 2009)

This international conference, organized by the research group REWEST (Research in Western American Literature: http://www.ehu.es/rewest will focus on the different ways in which literary interpreters of the American West have shaped and reshaped traditional western imagery and themes. We would like this conference to offer as diverse and rich a picture of current research on the literature of the American West as possible. We particularly invite specialists of western American studies to consider the literary representation of the complex interaction between the mythic dimension of the West and its real historical, social, and cultural features. Papers can address a variety of critical issues in literary studies of the West:

- the role of "place", "space", and "region" in western writing
- the interplay between myth and history
- the construction and deconstruction of western stereotypes
- gender politics and power
- masculinity and cowboy mythology
- border landscapes and narratives
- race and ethnicity (multiculturalism, assimilation, exclusion, transculturation...)
- immigration and exile
- forgotten and neglected Wests
- the impact of globalization, urbanization, science, and technology on the West
- nature writing, ecocritical perspectives, and environmental concerns
- the popular West
- memory and (auto) biography in the West
- the New West
- class issues
- religion in the American West
- personal / regional identity (re/de) construction in the West
- the role of family and relationships
- the American West in non-U.S. literatures

Papers should not exceed 10 pages (2,500-3,000 words: 20 minutes‚ delivery). Although English will be the official language of the Conference, papers in Spanish or Basque will also be accepted.

Please submit your proposal (300 words) plus a brief CV to the conference organizers by April 30, 2010.
Proposals should be submitted via e-mail to David Rio <david.rio@ehu.es>, including copies to Amaia Ibarraran <amaia.ibarraran@ehu.es > and Martin Simonson <martin.simonson@ehu.es>.

(posted 23 January 2010)

Perspectives on 9/11, organized by the LERMA (Aix-Marseille University) conjointly with the research group ERIC LINT ("The Lower Manhattan Project", Figura, UQAM, Montreal).
Scientific committee : Gérard Hugues, Sylvie Mathé, Richard Phelan and Sophie Vallas for the LERMA ; Annie Dulong and Bertrand Gervais for ERIC LINT.
This symposium will focus on 9/11 and its aftermath in the US from two general perspectives : first, the political impact on American institutions; secondly, the challenges, ethical and aesthetic, posed to representation.

    • How far is the 9/11 drift of presidential power different from previous similar situations (Civil War, Pearl Harbor etc.)?
    • Causes and magnitude of the popular and mediatic consensus in the wake of the attack.
    • Slow and gradual emergence of an opposition with special emphasis on the forms it took.
    • Reaction (or absence thereof) of the other poles of power (Congress, Supreme Court) and of the media.
    • Role played by lobbies in the process of extension of presidential power.
    • Attitude of the major parties toward presidential activism.
    • Possible consequences of the crisis upon the future evolution of US institutions.
2. The challenges of representation: ethics and aesthetics

If, as Jay Parini writes in his poem "After the Terror," "Everything has changed, though nothing has," what are the challenges posed by the attacks on the World Trade Center in terms of witnessing and recalling, personal and collective trauma, historical and fictional representations, and more generally figurative and interpretive narratives?

We invite papers that will address aspects of the issues raised by the adjustment of aesthetics to ethics in the (re)presentation and recreation of the events of September 11 and their aftermath.

Presentations, in English or in French, should be limited to 25 minutes to allow ample time for questions and discussions.

Abstracts (under a page, with key-words and an abbreviated CV) should be sent by March 15, 2010 to:

This interdisciplinary and cross-cultural gathering welcomes presentations on the environmental challenges now faced by diverse populations, both human and nonhuman, in the Western lands of Canada, the United States, and Mexico.

Academics and other stakeholders from the wider community are invited to participate in this urgent and compelling dialogue. The conference invites academics from the humanities, social and natural sciences, as well as activists, businesses, artists and others to speak across the boundaries that conventionally divide them.

Since both the geographical and critical terrains at issue are considerable, a wide array of topics and time periods is welcome. The shared concern will be the interaction between humans and the natural environment in the context of Western history, geography, climate change, and commercial/sustainable development of lands and resources.

* sustainable economic development
* indigenous ways of knowing
* urbanization/suburban sprawl in the "New West"
* popular culture and the mass media
* literary or filmic representations of natural, urban or industrial environments
* government action/inaction on the environment
* ecofeminism
* environmental racism and justice
* ecological or ecocritical examinations of particular Western environs and climes
* specific issues such as the Cophenhagen Summit, Kyoto Protocol, or oil/tar sands development
* the borderlands of Canada / United States / Mexico
* environmental education in K-12, postsecondary and community contexts
* historical perspectives
* environmental activism
* environmental law and policy

Proposals of 250 words (attached to an email as a .doc or .docx file) can be sent to either Robert Boschman or Mario Trono : <RBoschman@mtroyal.ca>  or <MTrono@mtroyal.ca>.

(posted 11 February 2010)

Political systems in the Western world, and beyond, have been reshaped  by decentralising, federalising, regionalising and devolution reforms  since the 1960s. These reforms are often considered as challenging the  Nation-State model.

The existence of multiple layers of citizenship ñ regional, national, European, global ñ allows citizens to have both rights and duties, to take part in political and social life, to be part of territorialised identities at the local, regional and even European scales but this raises the  question of socio-spatial inequalities. The current drive towards a more decentralised State, the ever intensifying delegation of powers to sub-state communities are ways of better adapting the law  to each territorial community. However, one consequence is the growing  conflict of vertical interests (between the regional, the national and  the European levels) and of horizontal interests (between same-level  units).

In continuation with previous work on the questions of national and regional identities at the University of Poitiers (Devolution in Britain, the Canadian and Spanish cases), this international conference will further explore this multidimensional political and territorial challenge.

This conference invites 20-minute papers. Proposals for panels are also welcome. Although other topics may be considered, we welcome papers dealing with, but not being limited to, issues and questions such as the following:

- The history, sources, founding myths and ideologies of federalism, regionalism, decentralisation
- The legal and constitutional stakes of such reforms.
- Are all forms of decentralisation an efficient way of addressing the  question of the democratic deficit?
- The theoretical and scientific debate(s) around such reforms.
- Decentralisation reforms and party politics
- The global and European dimensions: what are the interactions between decentralisation and globalisation? The interactions between the European integration process and decentralisation reforms? Are they part of the same process of denationalisation of the State? Is there a pan-European convergence?
- The interrelations between national identity(ies) and the State.
- The role of such reforms in conflicts and their resolution.
- Case-studies and comparative approaches.

(posted 20 February 2010)

In the second half of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st, the material conditions of avant-garde poetry's circulation have come to the attention of critics. With the development of reader-response theory, research about the poets’ ways of informing the larger public of their experiments has come to encompass technical considerations, economic, social and political preoccupations. Small presses -- not the vanity presses of former times -- thus became the laboratories of the publishing world, picking up on the latest avant-garde movements.

How do these publishers, and the poets who entrust their works to them, contribute to poetic innovation in a publishing context marked by commercial decline of the book and the poem alike? To what extent do small presses convey aesthetic initiatives that would otherwise remain "readerless"? Could one talk, along with American poet Barrett Watten of a "systemic de-totalization" bringing about new configurations of the poetic landscape into networks and archipelagoes?

We are inviting papers that will risk answers to these questions in the context of a wider reflection on the publishing world, its margins and its objects, notably poetic texts inspired and shaped by the recent advances of sociology, philosophy and cultural studies. The aim is a global assessment of the circulation of avant-garde poetry.

Hélène Aji, Université du Maine, France <Helene.Aji@univ-lemans.fr>
and Manuel Brito, Universidad de La Laguna, Canary Islands, Spain <mbrito@ull.es>

(posted 27 February 2010)

Works of fiction in which a mimetic representation of the real plays a major role, or that include elements external to the work of fiction itself, call on both the imagination and the limited framework of the historical account, of a specific space, culture or linguistic system. They can therefore not be translated without making reference to the individual or collective memory, or both. Beyond the straightforward remembering of the past, this approach attempts to construct an interpretation -- absorbing an outside element plunged into the present of a translational situation with a contextual shift. Memory therefore boosts the movement towards the other, towards extraneous discourses the representation of which resorts to various hybridizing techniques such as collage, embedding, or merging. Integrating memory -- that is, reconstructing the real from non-fictional (or supposedly non-fictional) elements -- into the heart of a fictional work raises the question of superimposing different genres within a literary work and making the overall work coherent on the level of discourse as well as that of the textual object, with an eye on the social, historical and cultural factors affecting its production. Different texts will have different rationales depending on their origin, function and target readers and the translation will re-arrange conceptual borders considerably, given the linguistic and cultural constraints imposed on it.

Central to this study will be works of fiction (novels, short stories, plays and poetry) bearing the mark of the real (historical accounts, newspaper extracts, scientific or philosophical essays, etc) or containing documents conjuring up memory (personal diaries, letters, reports, etc)

In addition to studying the diversity of translating strategies when dealing with various types of texts or discourses, papers will focus on the analysis of discrepancies caused by overlapping discourses (history and poetry for example). Addressing both theory and practice they will bring together theorisation, the history of translating practices -- in particular the role of memory in these practices -- and text analysis.

Proposals (a half-page summary in English or French) plus a short CV should be sent, by 30 April 2009 at the latest, to:

Christine Raguet
<c.raguet@univ-paris3.fr>
Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3
Institut du Monde Anglophone
5, rue de l’École de Médecine
75006 Paris

(posted 10 December 2009, updated 15 March 2010)

Prof. Dan Rebellato (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Dr Chris Megson (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Dr Graham Saunders (University of Reading)
Dr Aleks Sierz (Rose Bruford College, Boston University London branch)

The conference seeks to address representational trends and practices in post-1995 British theatre. It will examine the work of playwrights who produced their most influential plays during the last fifteen years and changed the face of contemporary British theatre, contributing to the development of new playwriting traditions in the UK. The conference will shed light on how these playwrights can be seen as belonging to a new canon, which is redefining extant notions of theatre and representation.

•    Influential plays and playwrights
•    Responding to social change: new issues for British theatre
•    Renegotiating form, content and genre: testing the boundaries of representation
•    New political theatre(s)
•    Contemporary British theatre and Europe: influences, exchanges, aesthetics
•    Contemporary British theatre and gender
•    Contemporary British theatre and national identity
•    Specific theatres, artistic directors and repertoire choices

(posted 1 February 2010)

SELICUP, the Spanish Association of Literary Studies in Popular Culture, is pleased to announce its 4th international conference to be held at the University of the Balearic Islands in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. The global topic chosen for the conference is "Past, present and future of popular culture: spaces and contexts".

SELICUP was born with the aim of becoming a forum for scientific exchange between teachers and researchers sharing an enthusiasm for the study of popular culture in and outside Spain. The 4th International SELICUP Conference, to be held in Palma de Mallorca, a meeting point for cultures and languages on the Mediterranean, intends to continue with the work done by SELICUP up to now and to open lines of debate about the new realities of culture(s) in the globalised world.

Through a selection of papers, roundtable discussions, and keynote addresses, debates will be held around the present, past, and future of our fields of study and the cultural products that inspire them.

- Popular culture and teaching
- Methodological approaches fostering the use of popular culture as a teaching tool
- 'Culture' vs 'culture’': perpetuation in society, deconstruction in teaching?
- Cultural studies: its place in the education system and Academia
- Educational reforms and popular culture
- Popular culture in the globalisation era: local identities
- The effects of globalisation on popular culture
- Popular culture and the audiovisual media
- The demands of local cultures and identities in the 21st century
- New forms of popular culture in the globalised world
- Birth, development and local adaptation of 'slow' movements- Theoretical frameworks for the study of popular culture
- Poststructuralist, postmodern and postcolonial views on popular culture
- Theoretical articulations of culture. Key voices and critical debates
- Cultural theory/ies and practice/s
- Minorities/multiculturalism: deconstruction in popular culture
- Appropriation, subversion, deconstruction in/of popular culture
- Representations of the subaltern in popular culture
- The subaltern and popular culture consumption
- Effects of multiculturalism on hegemonic cultures
- Language and popular culture
- Movements for the revitalisation and defence of minority languages and cultures, as well non-standard language varieties
- Manufacturing of languages or sub-languages in the fight for cultures and identities
- Language-contact situations
- Tourism and popular culture
- The representation of cultural identity in tourist promotion: stereotyping, exoticising, otherness
- Tourism and communities in contact: development and transformation of popular culture
- Tourism and its impact on the visitor: travel literature

Proposals for papers, roundtables and workshops are to be submitted online by 15 May 2010. Please follow the cfp link on the conference website http://www.selicup2010.org and follow the instructions. It must be noted that delegates may only submit a maximum of 2 different proposals.

Conference paper proposals should include a title, a 300-word abstract (including bibliographical references, if applicable) and a 100-word bio-note. Please note that presentations should not exceed 20 minutes, followed by 10 minutes' discussion time.

Roundtable proposals should include a 1000-word abstract. This will briefly state the aims and feature a summary of each speaker’s presentation as well as a list of key bibliographical references. Please note that three is the minimum number of speakers per round table.

Workshop proposals should include a 1000-word abstract. This should briefly state aims, structure, and a list of key bibliographical references. Workshops will be allotted 90-minute slots and should always remain essentially practical in nature and foster audience participation.

(posted 30 October 2009)

"What has been lost (…) is the epic, or rather, the taste for the poetic continuum such as once informed the epic vein of Romanticism" (C. Doumet). How much of a fact is that? For, as "a wandering path towards what must be an ancient skill" (S. Bouquet),  the epic and the heroic continue to haunt the literary landscape in a wide variety of fashions ranging from the "fictions of globalization" (J. Annesley)  to The Lord of the Rings craze and to the recent new translations of foundational texts of the genre -- Yusef Komunyaka's Gilgamesh (2006) and Ciaran Carson's Inferno (2002) and Táin (2007) among them -- as well as the uninterrupted dialogue with heroic gestures being written by contemporary poets.

Martinican writer Edouard Glissant in his Faulkner, Mississippi (1996) may offer a possible gate of entry to the question of the relevance of the epic when he observes that:

Participants in the conference are invited to address the question of whether or not the notions of "the exclusionary heroic" and of the "participative and inclusive heroic" are useful starting-points for a renewed reflection on the heroic and the epic. Should one speak of the expansion or even of the distension of the epic instead of the predicted dilution of the heroic?
However, it is equally obvious that this generic and political reexamination of the relation between the heroic and the building of worlds cannot be confined solely to the field of American literature as this would defeat the purpose of this conference, whose intention it is to consider a more global epic possibility. So both English-language literature specialists and comparatists are welcome to submit: this is primarily an invitation to examine American works with epic features of the past twenty years -- in the field of poetry and also of literature as a whole -- but this conference also wishes to rekindle "Relation" and be an occasion for taking a retrospective look at older works which may shed light on more recent uses of the heroic and the epic -- from Piers Plowman to Claude Simon's novels. The comparative approach is of course irreplaceable to attain even a tentative panoramic view of the genre.
The languages of the conference will be English and French.
A volume of the articles selected by the reading committee will be published.

Paul Bowles is widely acknowledged as one of the twentieth century's most skillful storytellers and imaginative composers of modern American music. His unsettling literary themes and expatriation to Morocco made him into a cult figure whose life and work continue to fascinate contemporary audiences.

By examining the interplay between literary, musical, visual and cultural texts, the conference aims at stimulating discussion on Bowlesian musical and literary themes, as well as cultural and anthropological issues and on the relationship between the artist’s challenging work and current inner and outer geographies.

Given the international and interdisciplinary academic mould of the conference, and the author's polymath profile, we encourage contributions from scholars and artists of different fields and welcome suggestions for papers, panels and sessions, and also multimedia proposals.

The Conference will be hosted by the American Studies Research Group at the University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies (ULICES /CEAUL), Portugal, from October 21 to 23, 2010.

• Bowles and Portugal (influences, writings, translations)
• Paul Bowles and Jane Bowles (interactions/interinfluences)
• American Existentialism (the Beats, American negativity, dissonance, crime, Modernism)
• The Maverick Tradition (rebels, individualism/community, Avant-garde, Anti-art)
• New American Music (trends, aesthetics, fictions)
• Literature and Other Arts (music, contemporary opera, spoken-word, film music, cinema)
• Gothic and the Grotesque (American gothic, horror, dark poiesis)
• Exile (Moroccan fiction/place/culture and travel)
• Literature and Anthropology (Anarchism, cultural clash; magic/smoking/religion)

250-word abstracts, or any queries, should be sent by April 6, 2010 to: Anabela Duarte and Hermínia Sol at:

<doyoubowles@gmail.com>.

University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies
Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon
Alameda da Universidade
1600-214 Lisbon
PORTUGAL

(posted 30 January 2010)

This two day symposium to be held in Bordeaux in October 2010 seeks to mark the anniversary of the publication of Border Country (1960) Raymond Williams' first novel in which he explores questions of identities according to place and time, of border lands and margins, of migrants and the return of the native. The conference will be centred around two main themes, that of Raymond Williams himself, his writings, his theories and in particular his relation to wider intellectual traditions, a writer interested not in retrospective nationalist politics but rather in prospective politics. Although he died before the coming of devolution and the setting up of the Welsh Assembly, his instinct for Wales as a region with a distinct voice is clear throughout his writings
Raymond Williams - Welsh European
Raymond Williams has been described as "the last of the great European male revolutionary socialist intellectuals" and indeed he was not a typical British thinker. His intellectualisation of questions of culture, history and identity belongs more to the European tradition of Gramsci, Sartre and Foucault. The greatest of Britain's post-war cultural historians, theoreticians and polemicists, he was also one of the founders of Cultural Studies at the beginning of the 60s because he was concerned to understand cultural form as the manifestation of a social process. Crucially, he understood that this was linked to society, history and place. His politico-intellectual theories were thus linked to the social, to community, to place and time.
As a Welshman his deep historic sensibilities allowed him a highly privileged sense of identity and national identity, not constrained to questions about nationalism and society and definitely not concerned with patriotism, but examined within a broader, humanist context. This brings us to the question of language, for although Raymond Williams was not a Welsh speaker he defended the language as an identity marker underpinning social continuity within the fragmented historical, social, political and cultural complexity that is Wales.
His recognition of the plurality that is inherent in Welsh identity introduces the second theme of the symposium which is the plurality of identities inherent in the European model, a plurality which finds an outcome in the privileging of the European regions. There are several points in common between Wales and other "Historic" European regions, especially those of the Atlantic Arc, such as the Basque country, where regional authorities exploit their regional status to bypass central government, not least in the matter of language, where they seek the support of such EU institutions as the Commission and the Parliament. It is interesting to note that the so-called crisis among Europe's regions since 2000 actually seems to correspond to a wider crisis of national identity as much within member states as in the Union itself. This therefore complicates the application of EU policy, which is enforced concretely but lacks formal support on the part of the main European institutions. At the same time this situation allows the development of new thinking and fresh links within the European area which may in fact be a return to pre-nation-state identities.
Thus, within the wider European identity, Welsh and other regional identities find strength not in nostalgia for past grandeur nor in bitterness over lost causes but rather through political, social and cultural practices which reflect those diverse social identities which promote individual development and civic responsibility.

"Inquities in such a country somehow always made pictures" (“A London Life”, Complete Tales, Vol. VII, Leon Edel ed.p. 88).  Pondering over the contrast between the picturesque serenity of an old dower-house and the  scandalous custom of the expropriation of the widow it embodied, the American heroine of the story entitled "A London Life"  expresses her unfavourable judgment  of English institutions but is also overwhelmed and puzzled by the sense of a "curious duplicity (in the literal meaning of the word)" : "She had often been struck with it before - with that perfection of machinery which can still at certain times make English life go on of itself with a stately rhythm long after there is corruption within it" ("A London Life", Complete Tales, Leon Edel ed., p.105). Figures of duplicity abound in Henry James’s writings, both in form and contents, fiction and non -fiction, disrupting the established order, the normative vision or the canonic genre. "Successful duplicity" characterizes  some of James's achievements in the domain of short fiction — the way some nouvelles or “novels intensely compressed” managed to  “masquerade” as anecdotes to be accepted  as "good" short stories, "heroically" dissimulating their "capital". (Preface to Vol. XVI ot the New York Edition, Literary Criticism II, p. 1240). The art of "duplicity" is also part of the lesson of Balzac, and other supposedly canonic realist writers whose complex vision "washes us successively with the warm wave of the near and the familiar’ and the tonic shock of the far and the strange". (préface to  vol. II, Literary Criticism, p. 1060). Duplicity also pertains to the ghostly and the uncanny effect, the double register of representations embroidering "the stange and sinister" on "the very type of the normal and easy" (preface to vol. XVII, Literary Criticism, p. 1264). 
We propose to examine the multiple facets of Henry James's art of duplicity in both fiction and non-fiction, not forgetting the aesthetic borderlands  where text and paratext coalesce, the clandestine figure of the author, "marking off", as Foucault would have it, "the edges of the text". (« What is an Author ? », in Textual Strategies, J.H. Harrari ed., Cornell UP, 1979, p.147)

Annick Duperray, Université de Provence <annick.duperray@free.fr>
Adrian Harding, Université de Provence & American University of Paris <aharding@aup.fr>
Dennis Tredy, Université de Paris 3 (Sorbonne Nouvelle) <dennis.tredy@wanadoo.fr>.

Please send proposals (300 words maximum,) to <annick.duperray@free.fr> & <aharding@aup.fr>.
Deadline 1 June 2010.
Working languages : English or French

(posted 27 February 2010)

As is regularly demonstrated in the news, the representation of the past and the transmission of memories in contemporary societies are crucial stakes in terms of politics and identity. National history, as once symbolized by Lavisse in France, traditionally used to rely on the celebration of "defining moments", whose memory was to be transmitted from one generation to the other, but the way in which such moments are selected and represented is open to variation. As shown in La Guerre des Mémoires (Wars of Memories), edited by Pascal Blanchard and Isabelle Veyrat-Masson in 2008, the progress of knowledge, the accessibility of new archives, the emergence of new media as well as -- especially -- the evolution of political agendas or the appearance of new claims, may all result in the re-reading of events belonging to a more or less distant past, or even possibly their re-writing in order to suit new agendas and/or targeted audiences.

The conference will address these various types of fluctuating memories, and use a comparative approach to study the historiography of some "defining moments" of French- and English-speaking nations. It will examine how history is practised by "serious" historians ("academic history") or written in school-manuals ("school-history"), but also how it may be conveyed by fiction, a medium whose significance needs to be re-evaluated in the light of such works as Christian Salmon's analysis of "storytelling". Papers may compare the ways in which the same event is described in different national contexts, or the evolutions of national historiographies. They may also consider how historical and political legacies are instrumentalized and transferred from one community to another, or  analyse the use of fiction and personal accounts to introduce young people and adults to history. Preference will be given to papers that offer a comparative perspective on French-and English-speaking societies.
This is the first of two conferences that will be co-organized by CRIDAF and LERMA, in collaboration with the Institut International Charles Perrault. The second one will take place in Aix in 2011 and consider Histories of Forgetting. In a similarly comparative perspective, it will consider the gaps in collective memory and the episodes that have been ignored or dismissed from national narratives.
We invite scholars to submit case studies on the three folllowing themes / periods :
We are particularly interested in proposals that are based on:

The Department of British Literature and Culture, University of Łódź, is happy to announce an academic conference in cultural studies.

- Monty Python's humour
- the language of Monty Python
- the visual poetics of Monty Python programmes and films
- Monty Python and the British tradition of humour
- Monty Python and the idea of Britishness
- Monty Python and stereotypes
- cultural subversion and iconoclasm
- Monty Python and counterculture
- The postmodern contexts for Monty Python
- The influence of Monty Python on British/international culture
- The reception of Monty Python abroad (in Poland and elsewhere)

(posted 4 January 2010)