The IV James Joyce Conference in Rome, endorsed by The James Joyce Italian Foundation, will be hosted by the Department of Comparative Literatures at the Università di Roma Tre, on the occasion of Joyce’s 129th birthday, February 2-3, 2011.

1. Joyce and the Reading Public
2. Reading Joyce at University
3. Joyce and Visual Culture
4. Joyce’s legacy in Contemporary Literature
5. Joyce and Nationalism, Internationalism and Socialism
6. Joyce between Ireland and the World
7. Joyce in Eastern Europe
8. Postcolonial Joyce

We welcome proposals and abstracts for both individual papers and panel sessions. Proposals and abstracts should be limited to 250 words. Papers and presentations are limited to a maximum of 20 minutes. Submissions must include name, contact information, and institutional affiliation or independent scholar status.

(posted 7 August 2010)

This one-day conference is organised by A.C.E. (Anglophonies: Cultures, Écritues), E.A. 1796, Université Rennes 2.

We invite papers of 20-25 minutes on any aspect of Cusk's fictional or non-fictional writing.
Abstracts of 300-400 words together with a short academic CV should be sent to:
Consult the conference web page at: http://www.sites.univ-rennes2.fr/ace/Bienvenue_files/Cusk.html

On account of the presence of colleagues from British universities, it is preferred that conference papers be in English.

British author Rachel Cusk made her début on the European literary scene in 2006 when the French translation of Arlington Park, which was hailed as an English version of Desperate Housewives, was greeted by general critical acclaim in France. Although this was the first of her novels to be translated into French, Cusk had already made a name for herself back across the Channel with five published novels and an autobiographical memoir. Following the publication of her fifth novel, In the Fold, she was named as one of Granta's 20 Best Young British Novelists in 2003, a tribute to the strength of her writing which probes with incisive, chiselled precision both the pain and the comedy of her middle-Englanders' humdrum existences. The publication of A Life's Work : On Becoming a Mother in 2001, an autobiographical account of the feelings of ambivalence motherhood can engender, saw her embroiled in a controversy with which her name remains connected and which she says has stuck to her like a label. Although she has received numerous literary prizes, her work has until now been largely ignored by university scholars, with the exception of a few published articles.

This one-day conference seeks to pave the way for a more in-depth scholarly study of Cusk's oeuvre, not only Arlington Park, although this will surely figure high on the list, but also her previous and subsequent novels, as well as her works of non-fiction (see list below). We will seek to map out the major themes of her work, many of which coincide with the preoccupations of contemporary criticism. Cusk has recently published an article in The Guardian (12th December 2009) entitled "Shakespeare's Daughters" on the legacy of the women's movement in an age that she describes as "barely acknowledg[ing] its debt to feminism". In the light of her remark in the article that another name for "women's writing" might be "the book of repetition", the representation of the feminine or of what Cusk has called "iterative female experience?" could fruitfully be re-examined.

While the influence of postcolonialism on feminist critical thinking has led to increased emphasis on the link between place or location and identity (Susan Stanford Friedman), Cusk's narratives play out scenes of dislocation and dispossession among a cast of largely white middle-class English women. Scenes of social gathering and interaction, be it the dinner party, birthday or more intimate encounter with a lover, or merely the face à face with the self in a changing-room mirror, do no more than disclose the fragile nature of human relations, the realisation of which often leads to a headlong flight from self (the protagonist of The Country Life, for example, flees into self-imposed exile from London to the countryside). Cusk exposes the tensions between the individual and her stifling community, outlining the contours of a world that is at times oppressively introspective (she is often compared to Virginia Woolf, another possible strand for exploration) and at the same time shot through with a lurking sense of menace.

Notwithstanding their introspection, however, Cusk's characters remain perfect strangers to themselves and to their readers. Uprooted and adrift, her men and women are all "anti-heroes" whose social, emotional or cultural failures are played out both in the most public of settings (the office, the workplace, the world of work being seen as always dissatisfying, if not slightly ridiculous) as well as the most intimate (the home) -- and even upon the maternal body, locus of the most firmly anchored social prejudices which Cusk sets out to challenge and upset. Her interest is in the mediocre, the banal and the everyday at the heart of which is an enigma that is never entirely resolved or dissipated, but instead forces her characters, from being once well-integrated in their social milieu, to confront their isolation.
List of publications by Rachel Cusk:

"The narratives of the world are numberless," Roland Barthes stated in his famous introduction to the structural analysis of narrative in 1966. "Narrative is first and foremost a prodigious variety of genres, themselves distributed amongst different substances -- as though any material were fit to receive man’s stories. ... Caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself."
In the years that have passed since Barthes' seminal essay, scholars in the humanities and the social sciences have devoted considerable effort to exploring the roles and functions of narrative in human history and behavior. They have done so not only with regard to literature and other epic modes of expression, but also in the areas of psychology, cultural studies, communication studies, cognitive sciences and sociology.
In recent times, trans- and interdisciplinary perspectives on narrative studies have drawn increasing interest. The purpose of this conference is to contribute to this ongoing development by welcoming papers which explore and reflect the transdisciplinary aspects of narrative theory and conceptualization.
Papers focusing on the following subjects will be of special interest to the conference:

* Comparative surveys of narratological concepts across disciplines.
* Use/misuse of narratological concepts in uncommon narrative environments.
* C onceptualization and analysis of multimodal narratives.
* Conceptual development with interest in unnatural narratives and antinarrative strategies.

Keynote speakers:

* Jan Alber, Freiburg University: "The Unnatural Across the Fiction/Non-Fiction Divide"
* Cynthia M. Grund, University of Southern Denmark: "Narrative and Music"
* Lars-Christer Hydén, Linköping University: "Narrative and Medicine"
* Matti Hyvärinen, Tampere University: "Traveling concepts of Narrative"
* Susan Lanser, Brandeis University: "Toward an Intersectional Narratology: Negative Plotting and Feminist Inquiry"
* Wolf Schmid, Hamburg University: "Selection and concretization of elements in verbal and filmic narration as seen from the perspective of Russian Formalist and Czech Structuralist film theory"

NEW deadline for submission of abstracts: October 18th, 2010.
Send 200-word abstracts to Associate Professor Per Krogh Hansen (University of Southern Denmark, Center for Narratological Studies): <pkh@litcul.sdu.dk>. Please write ‘ENN Conference: Working with stories’ in the subject line.
Book exhibition: Please bring relevant books for a shared display.

Pre-Conference Doctoral Course, March 9th, 2011: We are pleased to announce a pre-conference doctoral course on transdisciplinary narrative theory. The course will be directed by John Pier, Université François-Rabelais de Tours and CRAL (CNRS/EHESS), and Per Krogh Hansen, University of Southern Denmark. Ph.D. students working on any text type with narrative relevance are eligible to participate. Prospective participants are asked to send 2- to 3-page descriptions of their Ph.D. projects to <pkh@litcul.sdu.dk>. Please write "ENN Conference: Working with stories: Doctoral" in the subject line. The deadline for submissions is October 18th, 2010. The doctoral course is arranged in cooperation with The Hans Christian Andersen Graduate School, University of Southern Denmark.

(posted 28 November 2010)

(posted 22 September 2010)

Even if by its very nature Peter Pan has become the symbol of timelessness, this character's history has very specific origins and will by 2011 literally come of age. Peter and Wendy's centenary celebration may sound like an oxymoron, but it also seems to us the perfect occasion to reflect on what, after all, it might mean not to want to grow up but not being able to help it. J.M. Barrie's masterpiece has in fact grown, very much so; it has grown across criticisms, disciplines and media. Peter Pan and Wendy has not only received attention as a literary work but also as a cultural icon, if only to mention the various remakes it has inspired in world cinema, as graphic and illustrated novels or even as a very contemporary pathology which keeps bringing us back to Neverland.

Professor R.D.S. Jack (University of Edinburgh) author of The Road to the Never Land: A Reassessment of J M Barrie's Dramatic Art (2010)

All those interested please send a 500 word abstract to congresopeterpan@gmail.com before January the 15th, 2011. You may want to consider the following themes:

• Peter Pan and (children’s) literature
• Peter Pan and philosophy
• Psychoanalytical studies of Barrie’s work
• Peter Pan and Visual Culture
• Peter Pan as Cultural Icon

(posted 23 November 2010)

The relationship between the British and foreigners has played a crucial role in Britain’s search for a national identity and in its construction. More often than not, the perception of the foreigner spawns a feeling of strangeness, unease, even defamiliarisation when the “native” is confronted with geographical, cultural and linguistic differences. In the 17th and 18th centuries, voyages of exploration, together with commercial and colonial trips from the West to the East Indies led the English to discover other peoples and territories. 19th-century British imperialism and colonisation, 20th-century decolonisation and the rather strained British relationship with Europe raised many issues that beg the question of how the Other has been perceived and represented in Britain. Through these encounters, the British have made other nations fill the “empty space” (in Ricoeur's words) which characterises the figure of the Other.

Indeed, the foreign and the strange are concepts that are subsumed by the notion of Otherness. As Julia Kristeva points out, the foreigner is “the one that does not belong to a group, the Other”. The emphasis laid on the sense of belonging implies that foreignness is not necessarily linked to geographical distance since, first and foremost, the foreigner is or feels alienated or estranged from a group. Ireland, Scotland and Wales or the example of English regionalisms provide relevant case studies to explore the notions of Englishness and Britishness where the integration or the exclusion of difference plays a significant role.

The concept of Otherness is abstract and fluctuating. Its indeterminacy allows for various modes of representation which blend myth and reality. Indeed, the foreigner seems anomalous, even "abnormal" at times when compared to the cultural codes of "native" identity, although "nativeness" is a complex notion that needs to be qualified and examined as it itself depends on matters of representation and self-perception. This unsettling feeling that is observed in encounters between Self and Other leads the former to resort to stereotypes to define the foreigner's identity. One then needs to examine how important a role imagination and fantasy come to play in this process.

This conference aims at examining how the various figures of the foreigner have been constructed in Britain through representations and discourses in the political and literary fields, as well as in the visual arts. Of particular interest is the way Otherness has participated in the shaping of a national, religious or regional identity, through ambivalent relations of domination or admiration, integration or rejection, idealisation or demonisation. Thus the question of cultural transfers needs to be addressed to explore the particular ways in which British identity has been enriched by contacts with the Other. We also invite papers on British material culture and the visual arts which would consider issues of hybridity and hybridisation, and focus on cultural practices such as adaptation, borrowing and transposition Different theoretical approaches are welcome, among which colonialism and post-colonialism, orientalism, feminism, cultural history, historicism...

- The contribution of the Other to British Art
- Exoticism and orientalism.
- The study of “contact zones” with foreigners in the visual arts, material culture or literature
- The Other's body, voice or dress.
- Racism and xenophobia.
- The Other within the Self and the concept of “third space” (in Homi Bhabha’s words): hybridisation, polyphony, dialogism ...

Abstracts (300-500 words) should be submitted, together with a short bio-bibliographical note, to Vanessa Alayrac-Fielding <vanessa.alayrac-fielding@univ-lille3.fr> and Claire Dubois <claire.dubois@univ-lille3.fr> before 1 March 2010.

Presentations will be expected not to exceed 30 minutes.
Final papers will be considered for publication following a peer-review process.

Bridging the Gaps, Minding the Context is a conference hosted by and designed for PhD and Postgraduate students. It seeks to address a number of issues related to literary studies today, in an attempt to bring together early-career researchers from different disciplines. As the title suggests, this conference proposes to discuss the intersection between literature and culture, and how such connection can successfully reflect deeper changes at other levels: how can borders be crossed in literature? And, how do we cross them when encountering a written text? The fragility and ever-changing nature of meaning and textual veracity will also serve as the starting point from which to explore shifting perceptions of power and authority in the text.

Delegates are expected to reflect on the present state of research in English literature and offer distinct pathways to challenge classical interpretations of literary works from a theoretical or analytical point of view. Therefore, this conference aims to provide a stimulating environment for postgraduate researchers and other students to present their work and get in touch with current avenues of research in the field of literary studies. We do hope to encourage researchers from a variety of disciplines, working across historical, theoretical and ideological borders to come together and discuss the direction of literary studies today while profiting from scholarly contact.

Confirmed plenary speakers include Dr Francisco Álvarez-López (University of Manchester), Dr Teresa Prudente (Universitá di Torino), Marisa Fernández López (Universidad de León) and Dr Maggie Ann Bowers (University of Portsmouth).

- (Neo)Medieval and Renaissance Studies
- Children and Young Adult Literature
- Victorian and Modernist Studies
- Postcolonial and Diaspora Studies
- Graphic Novels and Picture Books

200-word abstracts for papers not exceeding 20 minutes should be submitted before 10 January 2011 (nex extended deadline) and sent to the organisers at: <bridging-the-gaps@uvigo.es>.
Abstracts should contain the title of the paper, full name and institutional affiliation as well as a 100-word biograpical note containing a summary of research interests.

(posted 14 June 2010, updated 6 December 2010)

Although English Studies in France have recently been expanding in order to accommodate increased awareness of the cultural importance of the visual arts, so far relatively little interest has been paid to the field of ceramics. And yet, from the fashioning of Adam to the invention of clay tablets, ceramics have been prominent in historiography and, from Cleanth Brooks' Well-wrounght Urn to Derek Walcott's "shards of an ancient pastoral", ceramic metaphors abound in modern literature and criticism.
The conference will be held at the Musée Georges Labit in Toulouse on March 17-18, 2011.
Proposals for 30-minute papers (preferably in English) should be sent efore 3 January 2011 to the organizers:

- Dr Alain Cazade (Professor, Dauphine University Paris – CICLAS)
- Dr Anna Mauranen (Professor, University of Helsinki, Finland)
- Dr Philip SHAW (Professor, Stockholm University, Sweden)

(posted 21 June 2010, updated 4 December 2010, updated 3 February 2011)

Arts of the table are not that far removed from performing arts. The table is a stage. It has its actors, its backstage, its sets, its props, its rules, its mises en scène, its lighting and musical effects. In English, "boards" can refer both to a table and a stage -- both of which can indifferently be designated by "tréteaux" (trestles) in French. The early modern stage abundantly feeds on this spectacular and festive matter. Plays by Shakespeare or by his contemporaries, notably Heywood, Kyd, Marlowe, Lyly, Greene, Peele, Chapman, Marston or Dekker, teem with episodes where food, feeding and eating are staged and where the table appears as a place of creation, recreation and ostentation. From Titus'
bloody serving-up of dishes to the banquet whereby Timon literally makes his guests’ mouths water, through the trompe-l’œil feast conjured up by Ariel, Shakespeare presents cooking and eating rituals in all their musical, theatrical and visual artifice. "Shakespeare and the arts of the table" is an invitation to study early modern food culture, practices and discourses, to address the representation and aesthetics of both the table and the art of cookery, and to explore recipes, objects and utensils that give shape to the raw and the cooked.
"She makes hungry where most she satisfies": Cleopatra, described as "a morsel for a monarch", is changed through a gastronomic metaphor into a work of art whose meaning and taste are not exhausted in consumption but which feeds instead a pleasure that is endlessly renewed, generating desire that is consequently never satisfied. Foodstuffs must undergo transformation in order to become royal dainties whose meaning goes beyond mere physical necessity and pure instinct. Arts of the table refer not so much to food that satisfies as to food that leaves you hungry while being a source of sensual pleasures, be it for the hosts or the guests.
A study of Shakespeare and the arts of the table implies an exploration of the rules of hospitality and etiquette as well as of their transgression. The festive, civil table can become a table of torture. One should not only interrogate food stuffs but also table manners as they are taught in the numerous Renaissance treatises on civility and conduct and as they are staged and perverted in the plays. As was shown by Michel Jeanneret, arts of the table have to do with edibles but also with speakables and readables; they reconcile the stomach and the head by summoning the two functions of the mouth: eating and talking. In Shakespeare's world, the arts of the table inevitably lead to the arts and pleasures of the tongue, to table talk and feasts of words.
This appetizing theme is bound to provide food for thought and invite proposals which will enable us to draw up a mouth-watering menu.
Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin
Institut de Recherche sur la Renaissance, l’âge Classique et les Lumières
UM 5186 du CNRS Université de Montpellier III Paul Valéry

2nd International Conference Organized by the University of Oradea
Papers are invited in the following conference sections:

- British and Commonwealth Literature

- American Literature
- Cultural Studies
- Gender Studies
- Film and Drama
- Language Studies
- Translation Studies
- Teaching English as a Foreign Language

Deadline for submission of proposals: February 15th 2011
To register, check your registration or keep up with conference news, you may visit our site at http://www.deoradea.info
Conference fee:
For participants from Romania: 150 RON (early registration)/ 200 RON (late registration)

Account number: 999901374015

For participants from abroad: 40 EURO (early registration)/ 50 EURO (late registration)

Account number: 999901390834

The fee covers participation costs, coffee breaks, lunches on Thursday and Friday, the conference cocktail on Thursday, print programme and the publication in the conference volume.

(posted 3 February 2011)

• Professor Ranko Bugarski, Faculty of Philology, Belgrade
• Professor Svetozar Koljević, Fellow of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences, Novi Sad

Abstracts by university staff and doctoral students for 20-minute presentations in English on one of the following general topics are invited:

• English Language: (1) Phonetics, Phonology, (2) Morphology, Syntax, (3) Semantics, Pragmatics, Discourse Analysis, (4) Sociolinguistics, Psycholinguistics, (5) Contrastive Linguistics, Contact Linguistics, (6) Corpus Linguistics, (7) Language Teaching, Language Acquisition, (8) Translation Studies, (9) Cultural Studies, (10) Lexicography
• Anglophone Literatures: (1) Literary History and Theory, (2) Literary Genres, (3) Approaches to Literature, (4) Literary Theory across Cultures and Disciplines, (5) Postmodernism and Postcolonialism, (6) Women’s Voices, (7) Contemporary Writing, (8) Literature and the Media, (9) Literature and the Film, (10) Poetry Today

After the Conference, a refereed selection of papers will be published as an ISBN-numbered e-book of proceedings.

Organizing Committee: Professor Vladislava Gordić-Petković (chair), Dr Ivana Đurić-Paunović (coordinator), Dr Sabina Halupka-Rešetar (coordinator), Biljana Radić-Bojanić (secretary)

(posted 19 April 2010)

Borders and Border crossing of whatever type, either geographical, cultural, racial, linguistic, narrative or even virtual, are obviously issues of great import and principally at the present time, given the mutability of both the concept and the materiality of borderlines and crossings. It is true that the concept of the fixed, clear-cut borderline has grown inadequate given the considerable mutations humanity has undergone and is still exposed to. The lines drawn between centre and periphery and the crossing from one to the other have recently witnessed an unprecedented fluidity that restructures and reformulates notions of difference, otherness and identity. Yet new/old walls are re-erected and frontiers are still invented, obviously not always for the so called aim of protection. The process of coming or living together in a globalized space has undoubtedly never meant and would not necessarily lead to the collapse of lines of division, the crossing of which becomes most often subject to transgression or negotiation that at times culminate in conflictual situations or in the creation of interstitial spaces or Third Space.

The present conference which is organized by the Research Laboratory on Culture and Communication is an attempt to study the concept of Borders, to debate its current complexities and representations as well as to explore its diverse types and rites of crossings and passages.

The conference welcomes proposals for papers that may address, but are not necessarily limited to, any aspect of the topic of Borders and Border Crossing, such as:

- The concept and representation of border and border crossing
- Significance of the various types of border crossing/transgression
- Thresholds, barriers, walls and borders
- Centre and periphery
- Experiences of liminality at crossing borders
- Typology of border crossing
- Rites of passage and initiation
- In-between space/Third Space/ interstitial space
- Cultural/linguistic/racial borderlines.
- contact zone / middle ground
- Translation as border crossing
- Migration, expatriation, exile
- Crossbreeding, Miscegenation
- Crossing the borders between literary genres
- Crossing the borders between different currents of thought
- Interdisciplinarity (crossing the borders between fields of knowledge)
- Borders between the local, the regional, the national and the global
- Regionalism
- The concept of border in globalization

- Khalid Chaouch at <chaouch63@yahoo.com>
- Cherki Karkaba at <cherkikarkaba@yahoo.fr>

Conference pack
Coffee break refreshment
Farewell dinner

Menara Marrakesh Airport (3hrs drive/taxi ride to the Hotel in Beni Mellal)
Mohamed V Casablanca Airport (3hrs drive/taxi ride to the Hotel in Beni Mellal)

(posted 7 September 2010)

The Gender Studies group (representation and construction  of gender identity in literature, history and the visual arts) will be holding a one-day conference on Friday, March 25, 2011 on the following theme :

Margaret Gillespie <margaret.gillespie@univ-fcomte.fr>
Jennifer Murray <jmurray@univ-fcomte.fr>

(posted 14 November 2010)

Professor Laura Marcus (University of Oxford)
Professor Bonnie Kime Scott (San Diego State University)
Professor David Trotter (University of Cambridge)

Other Participants include: Dame Jacqueline Wilson, Ali Smith, Dr Rebecca Beasley, Dr Faith Binckes, Professor Elleke Boehmer, Dr Elena Gualtieri, Professor Kirsty Gunn and Susannah Harker, Professor Mary Joannou, Professor Sydney Janet Kaplan, Dr Gerri Kimber, Professor Patricia Moran, Dr Anna Snaith

This conference explores new research concerning notions of modernism(s), with a particular focus on Katherine Mansfield. Mansfield was hugely influential on, and influenced by, writers including John Middleton Murry, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, A. R. Orage, T. S. Eliot and Aldous Huxley. Woolf's statement that Mansfield created ‘'he only writing I have ever been jealous of', highlights her significance within modernism and emphasises that her complex, experimental, satirical and humorous writing deserves further attention.

Proposals for papers are invited on topics that address Mansfield’' relation to other writers and artists, as well as the broader lines of influence and exchange within modernist networks and between different disciplines. We particularly welcome papers specifically concerning Mansfield, but are happy to consider submissions from researchers working in related fields of modernist study. Submissions from postgraduate students are encouraged.

- Mansfield and 'high modernism'
- Rhythm and modernist magazines
- Modernist literary form: tradition, innovation and experimentation
- Modernism and the short story
- The influence of the First World War on modernism
- Notions of avant-garde and marginal modernisms
- Modernist literature and music
- Modernism, politics and social class
- Mansfield and cinema
- Mansfield and queer modernisms
- Notions of the modernist canon and its revisions
- Expatriate, displaced and colonial modernisms
- Gendered modernisms

- Alice Kelly <ark40@cam.ac.uk>
- and Dr. Kate Kennedy <kma23@cam.ac.uk>

(posted 9 June 2010, updated 24 February 2011)

31 January 2011: a number of documents can now be downloaded:
To commemorate the Tennessee Williams's centennial, the School of American Studies at the University of East Anglia, will host a one-day international conference on 26 March 2011, focusing on theatrical representations of American identities.
The invited keynote speaker is Professor Stephen Bottoms (University of Leeds).

On the day of Tennessee Williams’s 100th birthday, the 20th Century American Drama International Postgraduate Conference looks to revisit the theatre produced in the last century, considering a plurality of approaches from literary to theatre and performance studies, film, gender and GLBTQ studies, reflecting on the most recent critical and academic canon. Stressing the importance of Tennessee Williams, the conference hopes to be an international point of intersection for all those interested in Williams’s work and 20th century American drama in general. Topics of individual talks or collective panel discussions might include, but are not limited to:

- Identity authenticity, representation, construction, and performativity;
- Identity permanence, plurality, multiplicity, fluidity, and fragmentation;
- Private versus public identity;
- Identity and the other;
- Dissidence and identity;
- Selfhood and identity;
- Identity now and then;
- Identity and identification;
- Aspects of/informing identity, such as age, class, culture, gender, politics, race, religion, and sexuality;
- Theoretically inflected discussions of identity (Psychoanalytic, Feminist, Queer, etc.);
- Contesting/Subverting prescribed identity constructions.

The conference will commence with a plenary speech, followed by the different panels, and will conclude with a round table discussion, which will consider themes arising from the day.

Please send a titled abstract between 200-300 words (for 20-minute paper presentations) and a brief CV to <f.costa@uea.ac.uk> by 17 December 2010.
For more information on the conference, please visit:
http://100yearsoftennesseewilliams.wordpress.com or http://www.uea.ac.uk/ams/eventsnews.

(posted 15 October 2010, updated 31 January 2011)

This conference aims to provide a space for debate and discussion on reconfiguring the category of 'Labour' within Postcolonial Studies. Historically speaking, given its Marxist affiliations and the tropes of eurocentrism in universalising 'Labour' as a normative category against the local and particular, Postcolonial Studies has not engaged critically with the notion of ‘Labour’. However, the concept is now gaining purchase in the field owing largely to globalisation, international division of labour, immigration and the radical restructuring of work and professions both within and outside the West. Yet, despite these recent developments, Postcolonial Studies can be criticised for effectively abandoning the economic essence of cultures by ceaselessly reworking 'difference', 'hybridity' and 'disjunctures' as the cultural markers of historical and persisting inequalities. In the last twenty-five years we have witnessed the emergence of a wide range of literary and filmic productions that reconfigure the notion of 'Labour', including Hanif Kureishi's My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999), Monica Ali's Brick Lane (2003), Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things (2003), Hari Kunzru's Transmission (2004), Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) and Aravind Adiga's White Tiger (2008).

• How, and in what ways, can the concept of 'Labour' be redressed from a culturally contingent perspective (as opposed to totalising Marxist approaches)?
• How does the recent surge of immigrant and diasporic literature and film reflect the workings of 'Labour' in their narratives?
• In light of globalisation -- the increasing global division of labour, shifts and uncertainties of financial markets -- is there a need for Postcolonial Studies to embrace the Marxist concepts of labour without categorically abandoning its culturalist project?

We invite papers from postgraduates working in the disciplines of literature, history, cultural studies, sociology, film and media studies, human geography, linguistics, politics, religious studies and communication among others. Proposals reflecting an interdisciplinary approach are particularly welcome. Some suggested themes are:

- Labour and its Cultural Constructions

- Labour and Power Relations
- Labour and Globalisation
- Labour and Capitalism
- Labour and Gender
- Labour and Identity
- Labour and Exploitation
- Labour and Exile

Although the conference is open to scholars at all levels of their career, we particularly welcome presentations in the form of workshops where postgraduate students can share and discuss their work in progress. In addition to the paper presentations, postgraduate students are encouraged to present early findings of their research in the form of posters.

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words for individual presentations (20 minutes), workshop presentations or poster presentations to <eaclals.pg.conference@googlemail.com>. Include your name, affiliation, email address, a brief biography and indicate whether you will present in a PANEL, WORKSHOP or with a POSTER.

Participants must be EACLALS members. Please see the EACLALS website at http://www.eaclals.org for subscription rates and further information.

(posted 24 May 2010, updated 15 October 2010)

The specific focus of the York Gissing Conference will be an often-overlooked aspect of Gissing's artistic philosophy. While many readers have emphasized Gissing's almost sociological engagement with material conditions, Gissing saw himself as a more detached devotee of art "pure & simple." In a famous letter to his brother Algernon (22 September 1885), he observed that the artist should "keep apart, & preserve [his] soul alive" because the natural environment of the artist is "the shade," where he "can make a world within the world." Papers are therefore particularly sought on all aspects of Gissing as an artist, notably his engagement with late Victorian aesthetics and obsessive "detachment from the vulgarities of the day." Topics may also include, but are not limited to the following:

- Absorbing non-verbal aesthetics into the fictional constructs: the world as picture; ekphrasis; the visual arts in Gissing
- Artistic leanings, amateur and professional: representational strategies
- Gissing and Aestheticism
- Exploring generic boundaries: Gissing and the Künstlerroman
- Not his line of work? Gissing, drama and poetry
- Classical Gissing
- Gissing as Critic

This conference will feature a session on "Teaching Gissing in the Twenty-first Century." If you are interested in participating in this panel, please provide the organiser with a brief description of your particular approach to teaching Gissing. You may apply both to deliver a paper and to participate in the teaching session.

Please submit abstracts of 300 words for 20-minute papers with a brief biographical note and/or applications to be involved in the Teaching panel to Nicky Losseff, University of York: <nl5@york.ac.uk> no later than 15 November 2010. Please include the following personal details with your abstract: name and institutional affiliation, email address, postal address, telephone and mobile phone numbers, and A/V requirements (if any).

Participants will be notified of their acceptance by 15 January 2011 (or earlier, for those who require official letters of invitation for the purpose of obtaining support from their home institutions). Further details about registration costs, travel arrangements and accommodation (ensuite single bedrooms available on campus) will be available on the conference website after the summer:

Conference dinner to be followed by a piano concert (by students from the Music Department of the University of York - Gabrielle Fleury repertoire)

An optional excursion to the nearby city of Wakefield, birthplace of the author. Anthony Petyt, of The Gissing Trust, will organise a visit to the Gissing Centre and a tour of Gissing’s Wakefield.

Advisory Committee: Prof M. D. Allen (University of Wisconsin-Fox Valley); Prof Maria-Teresa Chialant (University of Salerno); Prof Pierre Coustillas (University of Lille); Prof Constance Harsh (Colgate University); Dr Christine Huguet (University of Lille); Dr Simon J. James (Durham University); Anthony Petyt (The Gissing Trust, Wakefield); Dr Bouwe Postmus (University of Amsterdam).

(posted 29 June 2010)

Scientific Committee: Pierre Cotte, Paul Larreya, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Ruth Menzies, Jacqueline Percebois, Linda Pillière, Wilfrid Rotgé, Sandrine Sorlin, Monique De Mattia-Viviès.

This conference will examine cases where there is a discrepancy between syntax and meaning and/or where syntax does not produce the expected meaning, raising the question of grammatical categories and, more generally, the workings of the language. Put schematically, such discrepancies are symptomatic of a potential unbinding between form and meaning, signified and signifier, and thus pose questions as to the definition of linguistic signs. Misleading syntax or, to borrow Laurence Rosier’s term, deceptive syntax, which reveals a constitutive residue in the language, which Jean-Jacques Lecercle terms a "remainder", is particularly prevalent in literary texts. Various types of disconnection between form and meaning can be analysed. To take but one example, utterances such as They say he is dead, where they is indeterminate, contain a discrepancy between form and meaning. The main clause in syntactic terms does not match what is, in semantic terms, the main information. The utterance possesses the formal characteristics of classic indirect speech, but is it in fact an example of indirect speech, when considered from a semantic perspective? This type of utterance raises questions about the category of reported speech itself and about its definition, which necessarily transcends formal considerations.

Analyses may give rise to epistemological reflexion on the workings of language: to what extent are Saussure's model and the theory of signs applicable here? Or the pragmatics of Austin (there is a locutionary meaning independent from the illocutionary meaning of the action) and Grice (the intentional subject dominates language and controls it, following a whole series of maxims)? What can be inferred regarding the residue (Jean-Jacques Lecercle's theory of the remainder), since language inevitably produces its own remainder? Where is this to be located? What role is played by context? Where should this be included in the grammar of the English language? These are just some of the questions which can be raised in the context of the symposium.

Other examples of disconnection between form and meaning, as well as of 'deceptive' syntax, can be found in the extended version of this presentation, which is available on the LERMA website, at the following address: http://www.univ-provence.fr/gsite/document.php?pagendx=1356&project=lerma
 

For more than two decades, the causes, effects and manifestations of traumatic experiences have been studied from a variety of perspectives: psychoanalysis, medicine, anthropology, history and literature. As is well known, trauma involves personal or collective shock, disempowerment and memory disorders. The recovery process does not usually follow a linear, uninterrupted sequence; traumatic events refuse to be put away, since the memory of trauma keeps coming back in  incomprehensible and fragmentary forms such as hallucinations, nightmares or flashbacks. Somehow, resolution of the trauma is never final, recovery is never complete, as the impact of the traumatic event continues to reverberate throughout the survivor's life.

Beyond Trauma: Narratives of (Im)possibility seeks to analyse this phenomenon and the  possibilities of recovering from trauma as represented in contemporary narratives in English. Is fiction the appropriate site to explore the therapeutic process of working through traumatic events? Or are non-fictional forms like testimony or autobiography better equipped for it? What narrative strategies are deployed in order to convey that process? Are some literary genres more suitable than others for the representation of trauma and/or self healing? Is there any significant divergence in the approach to trauma and healing by hegemonic and marginal or minority groups? How are the ethical implications of representing trauma conveyed?

•    Ethics and the aftermath of trauma
•    The possibilities of working through trauma
•    Repetition, obsession and the return of the dead
•    Loss, mourning, commemoration and ritual
•    Formal experimentation and the representation of trauma and healing
•    The invisible inscription of gender and its traumatic effects
•    The depathologization of melancholia in non-normative genders and sexualities
•    Survival and guilt
•    Unresolved mourning
•    Victims as/and perpetrators
•    From dissociated trauma to acknowledged memory
•    From traumatic memory to the narrative of the unspeakable
•    Remembrance and affect
•    The revenge fantasy versus the forgiveness fantasy
•    Recovery and the reawakening of trauma
•    Trauma as the source of a survivor mission (political, social, religious commitment)
•    Transgenerational trauma and the (im)possibility of recovery
•    Unhealed racial divisions and violence
•    Testimony as a ritual of healing

Three copies of completed papers (max. 2,500 words, aprox. 9 double-spaced pages, including notes and works cited) following the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, together with a 100-150 word abstract should be sent to the organisers. Author information is to be sent in a separate sheet (including name, filiation, contact address and paper title).
New extended deadline for submissions: December 31, 2010.

Marita Nadal <mnadal@unizar.es> and Mónica Calvo <mocalvo@unizar.es>.
Dpto. de Filología Inglesa y Alemana
Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. Campus Plaza San Francisco
Universidad de Zaragoza
50009 Zaragoza
Spain

(posted 21 June 2010, updated 3 December 2010)

Lawrence and Freud were contemporaries but Freud's essay "Civilization and its Discontents" was only published in 1930, too late to have any influence on the novelist. Yet Lawrence, like many writers in this tormented period, had a lot to say about the disease and decline of  civilisation. His  views are sometimes strikingly similar to those expressed by the psychoanalyst in his essay and often very different. He hated Freudian theories, of which he had mostly a second-hand knowledge.  He  was infuriated when a reviewer read Sons and Lovers as an illustration of the Oedipus complex. We will see how this proximity and this antagonism helped the novelist to shape his Weltanschauung and his conception of the psyche.

Proposals for papers should be sent by e-mail before November 30th 2010 to:
before the end of november 2010.
Please send an abstract.