Submissions are welcome, from practitioners and scholars in either discipline, for oral or poster presentation during the Symposium. Themes may include:

the history of interactions between medicine, health and poetry; the impact of health and disease on the writings of the professional poet; poetry as therapy; the nature of the body, and anatomy, as presented in poetry; the history, evolution, current and future state of medical science as seen by poets; the experience of the doctor-poet; the understanding of birth, growth, sickness, disease and death offered by poetry; the use of poetry in health professional training, the experience of doctors, nurses and other staff in hospitals and in the community; the experience of patients, families, friends and carers in these situations; the experiences of acute and long-term illness and dying, of birth, of cure and convalescence as reflected in poetry; the patient journey; the nature and experience of treatment with herbs, chemicals and devices used in medicine; the nature and experience of tests; etc.

(posted 23 January 2012)

Irish cultural history and identity has repeatedly been associated with the traumatic quality of a past which never seems to subside but continues to engage with the present in ways which point to cyclical patterns of almost inevitable recurrence. Such a hermeneutic perspective assumes renewed relevance in any reading of Ireland's current predicament within the global financial crisis which has radically put at risk much of what was achieved in the closing decades of the twentieth century. 

This interdisciplinary conference invites contributions which will adopt the template of cyclicality, recurrence and return in order to question perceptions of post-nationalist, post-Catholic and globalized Ireland as expressed in various cultural forms (literature, media, criticism).

Donatella Abbate Badin, University of Turin
Luke Gibbons, National University of Ireland, Maynooth
Liam Harte, University of Manchester
Gerry Smyth, Liverpool John Moores University

The conference will be organised over three days, with a series of panels and four plenary lectures. Papers should not exceed twenty minutes. The conference programme will also feature the performance of The Brother: a one-act play based on the work of Flann O’Brien, adapted and performed by David Llewellyn and Gerry Smyth.
A definitive programme will be confirmed early in  March.
Suggested Topics:
Further proposals are also welcome for round table or other panel discussion.
Deadline for submission of abstracts (350 words maximum) plus a brief cv (50 words): 24 February 2012
Organising committee: Renzo S. Crivelli (Università di Trieste), Roberta Gefter (Università di Trieste), John McCourt (Università Rome Tre), Laura Pelaschiar (Università di Trieste),
All proposals and queries should be sent to <Irishstudiestrieste@gmail.com>.

France has been a cultural icon for centuries. Its reputation for refinement, sophistication, gastronomy and architecture is appreciated and respected across the world. The very mention of 'France' or 'French' conjures up images of fashion, haute cuisine, literature, philosophy, sport, wine. The names Montaigne, Pascal, Molière, Racine, Napoleon, Rousseau, Voltaire, Flaubert, Balzac, Zola, Camus, Sartre, Mauriac, Derrida, Michel Platini, Thierry Henri, Fabien Pelous, all evoke immediate recognition in their respective areas.

Similarly, for a tiny island with a small population, Ireland has achieved amazing success through its missionary priests, writers, sportsmen and women, dancers, entrepreneurs, charity organisations. Its vast diaspora enables our political leaders open access to the upper echelons of power in most countries of the world. Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, River Dance, U2, Colm Meaney, Gabriel Byrne, Stephen Roche, Roy Keane, Brian O'Driscoll, Padraig Harrington, Rory McIlroy, Mary Robinson, Brian Friel, Edna O'Brien, Colm Toibin, John McGahern, all these names enhance the reputation of Ireland across the globe.

In both countries, the public imagination has been a dynamic social sphere where issues of politics, culture, religion and society have fused and informed each other.

This conference will explore how France and Ireland have assumed a unique position in the public imagination. Papers of 20 minutes duration are invited on any aspect of the theme and can concentrate on France or Ireland, or on a comparison of the two cultures.

Gastronomy and public culture
Visual culture
Literature
Sport
Wine
Travel literature
Philosophy
History
Cultural Studies

For this conference, AFIS is collaborating with ADEFFI (the Irish Association for French and Francophone Studies) and the Department of French Studies, Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick.

Dr. Eugene O’Brien <Eugene.obrien@mic.ul.ie> or
Dr. John McDonagh <john.mcdonagh@mic.ul.ie>

Dr. Pierre Joannon (Consul général de la République d'Irlande pour la région Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur and independent scholar)
Dr. Eugene O’Brien (Head of Department of English Language and Literature, MIC)
Dr. Mary Pierse (UCC)

(posted 19 January 2012)

The Fourth International Conference on American Drama and Theater to be held in Andalucia, Spain, will take place in May 2012, organized by the University of Seville. As many remember, the first and second conferences were hosted by the University of Málaga, and the third, in 2009, by the University of Cadiz.

Seville is one of the most beautiful cities in southern Spain, if not in all Europe; such universal characters as Don Juan or Carmen are among those the city has contributed to universal culture. Given such a Romantic setting, and after devoting the last conference to violence in American theater and drama, we thought that it was perhaps time for something a little lighter, and so, in keeping with the romantic character of Seville, we’ll be looking at the long-time romance between the theater, playwrights, professionals, and, hopefully, audiences. In spite of the persistent rumor of crisis which has always surrounded this art, the truth is that it has never quite disappeared, and has surprisingly withstood the impact of new technologies and other vehicles for artistic communication which the digital revolution has brought about. There is something about the theater that continues to enthrall and seduce us. The first thing we would like to explore in our fourth conference is just this: what it is that makes theater, and American theater in particular, so resilient, and what it is that keeps infusing new life into it with each new generation.          

An answer we soon came up with was that we all love a story. Storytelling has always been as indispensable to human beings as nourishment or clothing (perhaps even more). And theater always tells stories, or at least it did till Gertrude Stein complained that "Everybody knows so many stories and what is the use of telling another story. What is the use of telling a story since there are so many and everybody knows so many and tells so many." And then Bertolt Brecht, and Jerzy Grotowski, and Richard Foreman, and the Open Theater, and the Wooster Group, and other avantgardists went about transforming the traditional ways of telling stories. And yet, upon closer inspection, it is all too easy to realize that storytelling probably was more reluctant to abandon the stage than it proclaimed it was, and American drama continues to tell stories, albeit deploying new formats which reflect the new modes of apprehending reality.

Using both approaches as a starting point, the magic which theater possesses and its ability to captivate audiences, and the complex dynamics between dramatic writing and the desire/refusal to tell stories, we invite American drama and theater scholars to find ways to address these topics from whatever field of inquiry into American drama and theater they happen to work in. We will be receptive to all kinds of proposals that, in one way or another, attempt to shed light on such issues. However, here are some questions which participants might like to use as starting points:

- What kinds of stories has American drama told us? And why those and not others?
- How have such stories been given dramatic form?
- What are the stories surrounding the (hi)story of American drama? And how truthful or otherwise are they?
- What stories have never been told both about American theater and its professionals, performers, directors, playwrights, impresarios…?
- How have 20th century avant-garde European theorists influenced American dramatic craft?
- Is there just one way to tell stories? What other modes have American playwrights come up with? And what artistic/ideological agenda(s) were they meant to serve?
- How are the stories of ethnic groups within the larger culture told by American drama?
- Are stories about canonical playwrights accurate and/or fair? Are there stories about them which have never been told? Why were they kept secret?
- What remains to be said about the silenced (hi/her)story of women in American theater?
- How can we enrich the body of stories which the American theatrical establishment continues to tell us right now?
- Perceiving the theatrical story: cognitive studies applied to the theater.
- How do cinematic and theatrical storytelling in America coalesce, and/or cross-fertilize one another?
- To what extent does dramatic storytelling in America necessitate the participation of the audience? What stories do audiences bring to the theater, and how do they shape what is enacted before them? What is the role of memory in the configuration of past stories, plays, or performances?
- Is there such a thing as storytelling which is specific for highbrow or lowbrow audiences?
- And, why not, what relationships and romances have there been between performers and other practitioners and the theater, or between themselves?
- What are the best-loved productions on the American stage?
- How has American drama dealt with love and romance, and from how many different standpoints?
- What sense can we make of the love/hate relationship between American theater and foreign playwrights and theatrical modes?
- And what can we say of America’s longstanding romance with the Broadway musical?

For updated information on the conference, please check our website.

This international confernece is co-sponsored by CIRLEP (EA 4299) and PRISMES / Epistémè (EA 4398), and organized by Christine Sukic.

In her 1997 groundbreaking study L’Invention du corps: la représentation de l’homme du Moyen Age à la fin du XIXe siècle, art historian Nadeije Laneyrie-Dagen theorizes  on "the invention of the human body". This phrase is particularly suited to the early modern period, especially with the development of the study of anatomy: Vesalius' Fabrica, published the same year as Copernicus' De revolutionibus (1543) can be seen as a revolution reflecting the perception of the human body during that period. Yet the Galenic theory of humours is still prevalent in the vision of the body, probably because the idea of the melancholic body is in keeping with the epistemological crisis that characterizes that period and that affects all fields of thought, leading to a redefinition of norms and categories. The numerous theories of passions published in the 16th and 17th centuries, also attest to the vision of an instable body, fraught with motion and volatility.

This conference hopes to assemble perspectives on the representation of the human body in early modern life narratives. Biographies (or “lives”, as they were generally called then) often claimed objectivity and even historical truth about their subjects. The representation of the body is particularly relevant in the creation of that alleged "truth", as its description in the text, sometimes illustrated by a portrait of the subject, attempts to evidence a kind of proof.  

This proof can take several forms. The body can reveal an uncommon aspect of the subject, turning him / her into a heroic or saintly being. In his "life" of Michelangelo (1568), Giorgio Vasari writes at length of the artist's funeral, which took place twenty-five days after his death. The coffin was opened for a short while for everyone to look at the body: "we found it so perfect in every part, and so free from any noisome odour, that we were ready to believe that it was rather at rest in a sweet and most peaceful sleep; and, besides that the features of the face were exactly as in life (except that there was something of the colour of death), it had no member that was marred or revealed any corruption, and the head and cheeks were not otherwise to the touch than as if he had passed away but a few hours before". Michelangelo's inanimate body seems to have been transfigured, which is one of the topoï of hagiography.

But the body of the subject can also be invested with a form of physical, material truth, revealing this time a body of flesh. This is John Dryden's opinion in his "Life of Plutarch", prefixed to the translation of Plutarch's Lives (1683). Dryden, using Bacon's categories of history ("Commentaries or Annals; History properly so called; and Biographia, or the Lives of particular Men") states that biography is "a descent into minute circumstances, and trivial passages of life” and adds: "here you are led into the private Lodgings of the Heroe: you see him in his undress, and are made Familiar with his most private actions and conversations […] ; you see the poor reasonable Animal, as naked as ever nature made him; are made acquainted with his passions and his follies, and find the Demy-God a Man". The body of the subject appears here to be symbolically naked, as a sign of intimacy with the reader and the biographer. For Vasari, Michelangelo's body is that of a saint; for Dryden, the hero's body is in fact that of a man.

We hope that the conference will also permit a reflection on the role of the representation of the body in the development of the biographical text in the early modern period. We welcome papers based on biographical texts such as: lives, "life and death", hagiography, panegyric, eulogy, funeral oration, biographies of poets, princes, artists, criminals, historic characters, but also autobiographies. All geographical areas of early modern Europe can be covered.

(posted 3 October 2011)

Space as the fifth element is the basis of all the others. It has no limits or boundaries; it is infinite. It, thus, allows a fresh approach to globalization as seen simultaneously from every angle bringing to light interdependence. Space knows no center so globalization can be an expression of growing from every direction: fusion instead of penetration, multiplicity instead of standardization.

Space can also be a potential place for new developments or for neglected or eclipsed expressions of Indian and African cultures:  The idea of making space for classical, high-culture and modernism that is truly Indian or African by getting beyond the usual emphasis on post-colonial perspectives.

The colloquium, Space, aims to inspire original papers on any subject connected to India/Africa from outer space and cyberspace to personal spaces and interpersonal relationships including sacred spaces as well as artistic and musical spacing… with repercussions from globalization.

We welcome papers that explore any of the many facets of this element from academics working in any field from Theology, Literature, History, Sociology, Film, Music and Art to Political Science, Mathematics, Artificial Intelligence and Aerospace.

• Perceptions of Space as the fundamental element (yet conspicuously absent in the West except for Aristotle’s quintessential ether), revealing specific and cross-cultural constructions in India/Africa.
• Globalization issues redefining borders and boundaries and even eliminating the concept of local and vantage point in cultural identities, Diaspora and geopolitics. The spirit of interconnectedness as opposed to Multinational Corporations, comptoirs and colonies.
• The 21st century’s concept of space beyond borders or even localities through cyberspace, call centers, outsourcing, etc.
• Space as a gap or the figure « zero » – a mathematical device - enabling digital symbols which revolutionized measurement as well as data storage. Technological advancements, nuclear power, the race to space, ISRO, IIST…
• Representation of Space in films, art, fashion, architecture, literature, drama, dance and in particular, music as Akash (space) is directly linked to our sense of hearing.

Papers may be presented in either English or French as long as a written version in French is later provided for our publication. Abstracts must be submitted by 15.02.2012. Please send an abstract of < 200 words, the title, together with your name, affiliation, < 50 word biographical blurb, email and snail-mail addresses to both coordinators:

- Deborah Jenner <jennerdeborah@yahoo.fr>
- AND Malou l’Heritier <malou46@wanadoo.fr>.

(posted 22 September 2011)

(M)other Nature? Inscriptions, Locations, Revolutions: 14th Annual Conference of the English Department of the University of Bucharest

The English Department of the University of Bucharest invites proposals for the Literature and Cultural Studies section of its 14th Annual Conference.

Franc Chamberlain (University of Huddersfield)
Carl Lavery (University of Aberystwyth)
Ralph Yarrow (University of East Anglia)
Priscilla Solis Ybarra (University of North Texas)

The conference invites papers on the theme of "nature" from a variety of interpretative approaches, to discuss modes in which the continuous present of (mother) nature -- as concept, reality, representation -- is configured in conjunction with expressions of cultural history, literary and visual texts, as well as a controversial discourse of immanent otherness, of disjunctive forms, of ironic identity constructions, of equivocation and power codes.

An abstraction or a cryptic restatement of the notion, an "alibi", an "elsewhere" of the human subject, the discourse of nature (the equivalent of Lacan's "lettered unconscious") and the repertoire of conflictual positions displayed by (m)other nature contribute in various modes  to the configuration of natural identity and to fantasies of originality and origination. However, the tropes, stereotypes, fetishes of mothering and otherness playing out their differences, and metaphors and metonymies of (m)other nature articulating a (natural?) imaginary all remain marked by an irreconcilable dualism: (m)other natures are "spoken" both as spaces of plenitude and enlargement, beyond logical, visual and geometrical limitations and as forms of duration, as time comprehensive of anteriority and posteriority in fluid intimacy. Nature energized by imagination, reinvented by memory, governing the poets' "rhythmic body", a discordia concors on the stage of the world is still generative of dilemmas: is it an illusion of truth, musealized, denied. or simply "occulted"? An affirmation of the transience and the nearness of the real, the interpretation of nature is, for the “the history man” of contemporaneity, not only a fictional space of freedom, but also a mirage providing social, political, economic and psychological contexts, as well as the aesthetic substitute of adventure, the boundary of selfhood, a state of mind and a signifying tale of both exilic distanciation and compensatory homecoming.

Art and nature
Environmentalism and literary studies
Eco- / environmental criticism
Mythical translations of nature
Nature and feminism
Nature and spirituality
Nature and mortality
Nature and mothering
Nature and memory
Nature and/in performance
Mother country / tongue v. alterity
The location(s) of nature
Psychoanalytical views on nature
Performance and the environment
Race and literary environmental studies
Colonialism / postcolonialism and the environment
(M)othering signatures and appropriations
(Re)writing nature
(Re)inventing nature
Nature and history
Nature and the technologies of control
Utopias of nature
Spectres of Nature

It is anticipated that participants will adopt a variety of approaches, including examinations of individual works in various genres and media, comparative, transcultural and interdisciplinary studies, and discussions of theoretical issues.

Presentations should be in English, and will be allocated 20 minutes each, plus 10 minutes for discussion. Prospective participants are invited to submit abstracts of up to 200 words (including a list of keywords) in Word format, with an indication of their institutional affiliation, a telephone number and e-mail address at which they can be contacted, and a short bio of up to 100 words. Proposals for panel discussions (to be organized by the participant) will also considered.

A selection of papers will be published in University of Bucharest Review (listed on EBSCO, CEEOL and Ulrichsweb).

The fee is payable in cash on registration, and covers the opening reception, conference materials, and refreshments during the conference.

The organizing team: Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru, James Brown, Daniela Cârstea, Eliana Ionoaia, Ruxandra Rădulescu, Ioana Zirra

(posted 2 February 2012)

Scotland's literary and cultural heritage is infused with narratives of crime. Both real and imagined criminals have shaped the image of Scotland's dual soul. The tension between good and evil, salvation and redemption as well as beauty and repulsiveness lies at the heart of the Scottish Tartan Noir tradition, which has been thriving ever since Robert Louis Stevenson published his novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Critics have frequently used Gregory Smith's term “Caledonian antisyzygy” in order to express this duality of the Scottish character, yet up to this day neither the production nor the reception of Scotland's alleged split soul has been properly analyzed and understood.

This conference seeks to look at both literary and cultural forms of Scottish crime fiction in order to enhance our understanding of Crime Scotland -Then & Now. We are particularly interested in interdisciplinary papers that look at Scottish crime narratives from a variety of angles. We invite proposals for 20-minute papers. For possible topics see the conference website at
http://www.englischephilologie.uni-goettingen.de/crimescotland/.

(posted 4 September 2011)

"The everyday is what we cannot but aspire to, since it appears to us as lost to us."
Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary

Proposals are invited for papers to be presented at Pursuing the Trivial. Investigations into Popular Culture. A Postgraduate Conference with Invited Guest Speakers, scheduled for June 1 – 2, 2012 at the University of Vienna. The international and interdisciplinary conference will be organised by Prof. Dr. Monika Seidl (Department of English, University of Vienna), Prof. Dr. Roman Horak (Department of Art and Cultural Sociology, University of Applied Arts Vienna) and Mag. Barbara Maly (Department of English, University of Vienna).

"In larger things we are convivial, what causes trouble is the trivial."
Richard Armour

Pursuing the Trivial invites postgraduate students to submit proposals on papers that deal with aspects of the trivial, the popular, the common, the ordinary, the banal and the everyday. In our conference we would like to explore meanings, roots and routes of mundane practices, texts and artefacts through the ages and how they, for example, relate to gender, class or race identities; language and communication; genre, media and technology; politics and power; local and global impacts, material and economic contexts.

We see our topic as very broad, which means that different approaches and perspectives are most welcome and appreciated.

We are also pleased to announce that we will have Claire Monk (De Montfort University, Leicester, UK), John Storey (University of Sunderland, UK), Andrea Braidt (University of Vienna), Caroline Evans (University of the Arts, London, UK) and Christian Huck (University of Kiel, Germany) performing as guest speakers at our conference, who will give papers themselves and participate in a final panel discussion.

We would like to invite postgraduate students from various disciplines to hand in abstracts of a maximum length of 300 words by September 30, 2011 (NEW extended deadline). Please include a brief CV (1 page max.). You will receive confirmation of acceptance of the proposed presentation by December 1, 2011.

(posted 30 June 2011, updated 14 September 2011)

In their Grammaire française (1962), J. Martin and J. Lecomte define the indicative mood as "the mode of reality" (p.246). Such a definition actually serves as a basis for a scalar approach of reality that can be found in most traditional grammars, which usually make the distinction between potentiality, possibility and irrealis (past or present). It is the relevance and the limits of such degrees that the Bordeaux Conference offers to revisit through the latest trends in linguistic research.

1) Historical and critical analyses of the descriptive concepts, terminology and metalinguistic constructions having marked out the evolution of the representations of reference to reality and its variations in Western and other traditions since Antiquity.
2) The model of representation of reality provided by the grammars of contemporary French, seems to be based on the grammars of classical Greek and Latin, in which the scale of reality is presented as a grammaticalized set, but what about other languages? Typological or comparative approaches are welcome.
3) Among the phenomena to be addressed, the following may be quoted: verbal tenses and modes, adverbs, hypothetical systems, syntactic tools (embedding, correlation, coordination, parataxis), discourse markers (eg. suppose; what if ?...), particles or connectors (in fact; in reality ∑), the notion of endorsement by a speaker, the notions of reality, possibility and potentiality such as they operate in natural languages (semantical, pragmatical, discursive aspects), the construction of an imaginary situation, of possible worlds and mental spaces in discourse.

Each presentation will be allowed 25 minutes, plus 15 minutes for discussion. The Conference will include a poster session, and there will be about 15 presentations altogether. The Conference languages will be French and English. The Proceedings will be published in 2013 in Travaux Linguistiques du CerLiCO, Vol. 26, Presses Universitaires de Rennes.

Submissions should include, in addition to the author‚s institutional affiliation and e-mail address, an anonymous abstract of around 500 words / 3,000 characters, plus references. Authors should specify whether they wish to present a paper or a poster. The abstracts will be posted on the CerLiCO website and sent to participants on registration for the Conference.

Submissions should be sent in electronic format no later than 28 October 2011 (new extended deadline) to Catherine Moreau, Jean Albrespit and Frédéric Lambert : <cerlico.bx@u-bordeaux3.fr>.

(posted 30 June 2011, updated 18 October 2011)

A workshop organized by Équipe EMMA (Etudes Montpelliéraines du Monde Anglophone), Université Montpellier III

In recent years, an increasing amount of research in linguistics has been corpus-based. This is true in a variety of sub-fields within linguistics: in sociolinguistics (Docherty & Foulkes 2000), in syntax (e.g. Sampson 1996, 2001), and in phonology (Durand & Eychenne 2004), and second language acquisition (e.g. Gregg 2003), for instance. The aim of this workshop is to consider the status and use of corpora in linguistic investigation.

- Is the object of linguistic enquiry constituted as collections of observed utterances? Should corpus data supplement intuitive well-formedness judgements (Durand 2009), or be privileged over them, or even replace them, as suggested by Sampson (2005) for syntax and Pierrehumbert et al. (2000) for phonology? Or is Itkonen (1978) right to assert that grammatical inquiry crucially relies on intuitive well-formedness judgements, since those judgements tap into social conventions, rather than observable events (thus Itkonen's claim that corpus-based work in grammatical enquiry is 'idle ceremony'; see Riemer 2009a, 2009b and Lopez-Serena 2009 for discussion).
- Does the use of corpora guarantee empirical and/or scientific status for the investigation in question? What exactly do 'empirical' and 'scientific' mean?  If corpus-based investigation is empirical, does such investigation support some version of Empiricism in linguistics?
- Does corpus-based work support one kind of theoretical approach over another? For example, Arndt-Lappe (2011) claims that corpus-based investigation of English noun-noun compounds supports exemplar theory (Bybee 2001, Pierrehumbert et al. 2001), rather than generative approaches, such as those of Giegerich (2004) and Liberman & Sproat (1992). What light, if any, does corpus-based investigation shed on the role of token frequency, as appealed to in exemplar-based approaches to
linguistic investigation?
- In what senses may different corpora (e.g. the Brown corpus, the LOB corpus, the British National Corpus) be said to be representative? Representative of what, exactly?
- To what extent can corpora be used by researchers who have not constituted the corpus?
- Do corpora allow us access to theory-free, 'objective' data that constitute some kind of 'reality'? Or is Scheer (2004) right to assert that 'Il n'existe pas de corpus sans théorie'?  ('There are no theory-free corpora'). Is Scheer (2004) justified in asserting that 'Le corpus ne représente pas la réalité: il représente la réalité de celui qui l'a construite' ('A corpus does not represent 'reality' in the singular: it represents the reality of the person who constructed it')?

We welcome papers from corpus linguists who wish to present and discuss the methodological problems they have encountered in establishing their corpora, and who wish to link those problems with the general issues outlined above.

We intend to focus on the analysis of English and French, but the analysis of other languages is not excluded. Papers may be given in English or French.

Interested researchers are invited to send a 400-word abstract (excluding references) in French or in English before February 20th 2012 to <corporainlinguistics@gmail.com>.

Organizing committee: Philip Carr, Caroline David, Sandra Deshors, Isabelle Ronzetti, Laurence Vincent-Durroux (EMMA - Université Montpellier 3)

Scientific committee: Philip Carr, Laurence Vincent-Durroux (EMMA-Université Montpellier 3), Jacques Durand (Université de Toulouse Le Mirail)

- abstract submission deadline: February 20th 2012
- notification of acceptance: March 26th 2012
- registration deadline: April 30th 2012 (registration fee: 30 euros; 15 euros for students)

(posted 25 January 2012)

This conference is organized by Ph.D. students from the research group Linguistique, Langues, Parole (LiLPa, UR 1339, University of Strasbourg, France), the Institute of Romance Philology (Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany) and from the joint research unit ATILF (Nancy 2).

Classification constitutes an essential part of scientific proceedings. In linguistics, beyond questions concerning language typology, classifying raises many different problems and involves challenges at every level of analysis. The aim of this conference is to provide a basis for reflection on methodological issues as well on the implications of such classifications, including the choices and relevance of the selected criteria.
Special attention will be paid to papers that focus on one of the following issues:
The organizers do not favor a particular school of thought or specific linguistic theory. Any related field or sub-field of research may be of interest. Applicants are kindly asked to submit a paper accessible to non-specialists in the field to allow open discussion and exchange. The aim is to foster interaction and debate on a specific linguistic issue so that contributions may provide the research community with new insights in this area.
Venue of the conference: Strasbourg, France
Languages: French and English
The abstracts (2 pages maximum) should be submitted via Easy Chair:
https://www.easychair.org/account/signin.cgi?conf=cijc2012
as an anonymous text document (word or pdf).
One (or more) poster session(s) will be organized. Poster applicants should submit a one-page abstract.
The selected abstracts will be given as a 30 minute presentation (20 min talk + 10 min discussion). Poster applicants are asked to give a (maximum) 10 minute oral presentation preceding the poster session(s).
Young researchers in language sciences are invited to submit an abstract: Master's degrees, Ph.D. students and Post-Docs (having obtained their Ph.D. no more than 3 years ago).
Some papers will be considered for publication, after acceptation of final revised versions.
Conference website: http://lilpa.misha.fr/cijc_accueil_en.htm

Great things are done when men and mountains meet;
This is not done by jostling in the street.

Stimulating though these lines may be, one may wonder why - or indeed if - Blake is right. This conference will explore sites (whether virtual or real) where different elements come into contact, where ideas, people, and objects circulate and where transformations occur. This call for papers invites scholars in every field of English Studies to contribute papers to a conference on the theme of Crossroads.

Responses will be in the form of 20 minute papers. It is strongly recommended that these be in English, but papers in French will be considered. 150-word propositions should be sent by January 6, 2011, to the organizers of the conference:

(posted 7 July 2010)

An international conference co-organised by Adrian Grafe and Emilie Loriaux, within the research lab "Textes et Cultures" ( EA 4028, Université d'Artois).
Papers (20 minutes) are invited on any aspect of Hardy's poetry and Hardy the poet. Please send 150-word abstracts and a brief biographical note to A. Grafe <grafe.adrian@wanadoo.fr> by September 4th 2011.
You will be notified of your acceptance by September 10th 2011.

(posted 27 May 2011)

Dickens is known as a prodigious producer of texts and contexts; but to what extent Dickens was also a reader and processer of texts, treatises and literary works has scarcely been focused on. Densely packed with action and teeming with highly original characters his novels give the impression that they are the products of the 19th century and came into being like Fagin: in a process of abiogenesis, engendered out of muddy regions of Victorian urban life and burgeoning capitalism. 

When characters like young David Copperfield, however, withdraw into a nook and start to read novels by Smollett, Fielding, Goldsmith and Cervantes, 21st-century readers are not only made aware of the fact that Dickens's novels are very much indebted to the conventions of the picaresque, but that there is a wide, almost postmodern net of intertextual references which seems to make each novel a part of a long tradition. That this tradition is not only confined to narrative texts can be ascertained when villains like Steerforth furtively (mis)quote Shakespeare or when Sikes sets about killing Nancy before the backdrop of Othello’s blind and murderous rage.

Apart from these instances of high-culture references, it is tempting to look at other lower pop-culture traditions that Dickens as a reader was alert to. That Dickens participated in the re-readings and re-writings of Bunyan's allegorical novel The Pilgrim's Progress is no longer called into question, in light of the fact that he subtitled Oliver Twist as 'The Parish Boy’s Progress,' but to what extent was Dickens responsive to other historic or contemporary texts that inspired him with melodramatic patterns or other literary matrixes? 

Contributions are thus invited on any aspect of Dickens’s wide reading and the way he re-used it in his texts. Topics may include

- Dickens and 19th-century readings of Shakespeare
- Dickens and the picaresque novel
- Dickens as a Victorian reader of Cervantes
- Dickens and the tradition of the literary carnivalesque
- Dickens as a reader and disseminator of Carlyle
- Dickens as a reader of non-literary texts (law, medicine)
- Dickens and the Bible
- Dickens as a Victorian reader of Byron
- Dickens's readings and rewritings of Romanticism
- Dickens and literary pop culture

Prof. Dr. Norbert Lennartz / Dieter Koch MA                       

University of Vechta                       
Driverstraße 22
D-47399 Vechta
<norbert.lennartz@uni-vechta.de>
<dieter.koch@uni-vechta.de>

(posted 22 June 2011)

Co-organised by Jennifer K Dick (UHA/ILLE),  Didier Girard (UHA/Ille), Océane Delleaux (UHA/CREM/Edith), Eric Suchère (École Supérieure d'Art et Design de Saint-Étienne) and Fréderique Toudoire-Surlapierre (UHA/Ille).

"The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is CAPABLE of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension." (Ezra Pound)

As Pierre Garnier wrote almost 50 years ago, "la nouvelle poésie s’alimente, quant à son origine, dans les langages typiques d’autres arts, en particulier celui des arts plastiques, qui lui permettent d’atteindre la dimension d’objet récusant la 'lecture'. " Since then, many movements have given a central place to the use of the word rather than that of any other visual form. As Johanna Drucker wrote, by the beginning of the 1960s "artistic activity […] had dissolved the boundaries between disciplines which had rigidly distinguished high modern visuality from high modern literariness at mid-century […] the experimental innovation had inbred so successfully with other artistic sources […that] current work actually blends visual and verbal elements into what is an increasingly synthetic unity".

Is it emphatic attention to the physical substance of language that draws authors and visual artists together today? Or are there very different modes of representation and conceptual creation engendering cultural upheavals in artistic and literary practice?

This conference will unite researchers from varied disciplines in order to begin formulating a new criticism for the 21st century's authors and visual artists who are given to making texts to see as if they were geometric forms, or forms to read, colors and visual sequences whose nature it had once been to reach spectators and their perceptions with an inherent immediacy.

The goal is therefore to contribute to the development of theoretical reflection regarding the effect produced by the intersemioticity of verbo-visual practices. Discussions and panels will be joined by a series of artistic and literary presentations and performances during and around the conference in the region of Alsace and the city of Mulhouse.

- The use and novelties of visual protocols (typographic plays, scribbling, collages, importation of images, etc.) in ultra-contemporary literature.
- The borders of the visual form of letters in books and out.
- The multimediality of the page as a space for redefinition.
- The stakes and the modality of an image-rhetoric in the context of emerging screen cultures.
- Textual processes which lead to "unreadable" readings, to illegible texts.
- Art for art: metafiction within verbo-visual artwork.
- The genre of the rebus as narrative rediscovery (hommages to Magritte).
- Emergent modes of lexiconographic reading..
- The new relationship to languages--perhaps "a corollary to travel and to the planetarization of culture" (Edeline)?
- The phenomena of simplification of complex thought or of complexification of reading image and text as applied to the creation of lexiconographic works.
- Identity (and the interrogation of identity) of the author-artist by these verbo-visual creative practices.
- New narrative forms in lexiconographic work.
- The Lyricisms of a lexiconographic text or piece of art.

Paper proposals (250-300 words) in French or English should be emailed before the 25th of February 2012. They should be sent to BOTH:

- Jennifer K Dick <jennifer-kay.dick@uha.fr> or <ragment3@yahoo.com>
- and to Océane Delleaux <oceane.delleaux@wanadoo.fr>.

The full call for papers is available on the conference blog, where all the information concerning this conference will be posted: http://lex-icon21.blogspot.com/

(posted 3 February 2012)

Bodies on stage are one of the central elements of theatre and -- implicitly -- also of drama. Characters on the page attain the status of corpo-reality. At the same time, a living person becomes part of the "as-if" world of the play, signifying class, ethnicity, gender, age. Bodies and their movements in space, voice, facial and gestural expression produce additional meanings which often go beyond the written text. Thus, each performance of a play is unique. Physically demanding theatrical moments – from tap dancing to Kung Fu fighting -- especially highlight the precarious liveness of the moment and the virtuosity of the actor.

Theatre and drama in the last thirty years have explored the duality of the body on stage and its potentials in several ways. Cross-gender and cross-ethnic castings (either stipulated in the drama or implemented in a specific production) highlight the constructedness of identities and their political as well as parodic dimensions. Characters can be represented by puppets, projections or even machines. These alienation techniques (in the widest Brechtian sense) point out the gap between actor and character. Other plays do just the opposite: especially In-Yer-Face dramas use bodies as part of emotionally charged, often brutally explicit representations of violence and/or sexuality. Similar effects are created by collapsing the distance between character, author and actor in performance pieces or one-author shows which blur the boundaries between fact and fiction.

What at first sight might look like a going back to basics, cherishing the magic of live theatre and thinking about the bodies involved behind or beyond discursive constructions, can be connected to two trends in recent research. Firstly, studies by -- amongst others -- Susan Bordo, Michel Foucault or Judith Butler focus on corporeality as a site of negotiation between nature and culture, materiality, discourses and power. Their theories on "bodies that matter" (to borrow one of Butler's titles) lead to revised discourses on gender, power and politics. Secondly, the performative turn in theatre studies interrogates the materiality of bodies and their effect on the autopoietic processes and the production of liveness.

The 2012 CDE conference aims at exploring the broad variety of recent drama in English concerning corporeality -- from the importance of actors or ensembles for the production and reception of plays to the discursive experiments written on and around bodies. We invite papers in English of 20 minutes length. Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• writing for bodies: actors and their connection with playwrights
• different strategies of representing corporeality on stage
• explorations of gender, ethnicity, class and age by cross-casting
• typecasting, celebrity casting or casting against the grain
• suffering bodies, violence and nudity and their functions
• old media of the body versus new media
• grotesque bodies

In accordance with CDE's constitutional policy, papers should deal exclusively with contemporary (i.e. post-Beckettian, post-1989) theatre and drama in English. N.B.: Only paid-up members are eligible to give papers at CDE conferences. Membership subscriptions may be taken out or renewed during the conference.

Prof. Dr. Anette Pankratz
Englisches Seminar
Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Universitätsstraße 150
D-44801 Bochum
Germany
<anette.pankratz@rub.de>

(posted 5 October 2011)

This event, organized by the Institut du Monde Anglophone, is held under the aegis of the Marie Curie Actions of the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) of the European Union.

Nancy Huston, like Samuel Beckett, is one of the few writers who has translated her own works. Self-translation, whose status is rather difficult to define, is one of the most complex and interesting forms of translation because it reveals the creative aspect inherent in any act of translation.  Her practice of self-translation in both French and English, merging mother tongue and foreign tongue, subverts the conventional categories of the original work and its translation, bringing into play the relationship to that which is foreign and the problem of identity and otherness.  Her crossover between two languages thus invites us to question our practice and our representation of both writing and translation.

The aim of this Conference is to examine various themes in Nancy Huston’s work related to her practice of self-translation, in particular her relation to her mother tongue and the question of fidelity-infidelity in translation.  The Conference also aims at better understanding her relation to feminism (as shown for instance in her essay on Annie Leclerc) and to some famous female figures such as Jocaste, as well as the following themes present throughout her work: the body, maternity, creation-procreation (Journal de la création), sexuality or pornography (Infrarouge, Mosaïque de la pornographie). The linguistic experimentation of self-translation subverts not only traditional categories of translation (which is usually subordinated to an original work), but also the relationship between production and reproduction that is essential to the establishment of power between the sexes. The theme of individual or collective identity opens up that of masks and multiple identities illustrated by the symbolic figure of Romain Gary. The language of exile, for Nancy Huston, appears to be a preferred place to reinvent one’s self, but as a novelist she also celebrates the power of literature to transcend the limits of the self.  In their search for meaning, authors and translators appear to be engaged in an infinite task of translating, and it would seem that it is all of human experience for Nancy Huston that could be described in terms of a paradigm of translation.

Among the range of topics of enquiry in relation to Nancy Huston’s work that this conference hopes to attract, the following specific themes have been proposed:

1. Self-translation

2. Feminism, the body and maternity

- The relation to feminism and the possibility of writing in the feminine
- The themes of the body and maternity, creation and procreation
- The body and sexuality
- The theme of childhood

3. The question of individual or collective identity and that of multiple identities
4- The language of exile
5. The role of the writer, of literature and of translation

We welcome proposals for papers (a half page abstract in French or English), as well as a short CV indicating your institution and three recent publications. These should be sent to the following addresses by October 15, 2011:

As far back as the 1960s, scholars working in the fields of literature, linguistics or history pinned their faith on computers which, they maintained, opened up new avenues of research. More important still, computers made for new ways of approaching the objects of their research. Louis T Milic, for example, contended that 'the manner of thinking of scholars who have been affected by computers has [...] been modified. The demands of the machine have forced scholars in the direction of more explicit statement, because programs cannot be vague and tentative.' (Louis T. Milic, 'The Next Step', /Computers and the Humanities/ 1.1 (September 1966), p. 4.)
This conference proposes to investigate the contribution of computing to the humanities and the social sciences in terms of the configurations of the various components of research -its objects, tools and productions. Papers may highlight the effects of the use of digital tools on the configuration of knowledge -for instance, on the definition of academic disciplines within the humanities and the social sciences, but also on their relationship with the so-called hard sciences-, on the configuration of each scholar's research in the context of ever increasing data sharing, which makes it possible to set up large-scale collective projects.
Papers may also explore the ways in which digital tools enable scholars to bring to light the underlying configurations of literary and artistic works, of languages, landscapes or societies.
Papers, which must not exceed 30 minutes, can deal with any historical period and any geographical area, but will be given either in French or English.

- Anne Bandry-Scubbi (Université de Strasbourg)
- Françoise Deconinck-Brossard (Université Paris-Ouest Nanterre La Défense)
- Alain Kerhervé (Université de Brest)
- Clotilde Prunier (Université Paris-Ouest Nanterre La Défense)

(posted 9 September 2011)

- Professor Lucy McDiarmid (Montclair State University)
- Professor Matthew Campbell (University of York)

Proposals are invited for a two-day literary conference titled "Behind the Lines: Women, War and Letters 1880-1920", organised as part of a research cluster within the University of Limerick and NUI Galway Gender ARC. The conference will be held at the University of Limerick.

The aim of this conference is to interrogate the literary tropes and political constructions through which women's writing conceptualises conflict. In Ireland, to engage with national politics and national conflicts in the period between the Land War and partition was to find oneself grappling with gendered norms and expectations, through which distinctive modes of patriotic action could be validated or naturalised, but also re-interpreted or condemned. At the same time, in an international context, imperial and colonial conflicts of the late nineteenth-century opened up new conceptions of space and national identity, while in the early twentieth century the First World War produced a sustained literary re-evaluation of cultures of militarisms and masculinity. These political events were, however, taking place alongside a series of other conflicts, conflicts centred around disruptions of norms of gendered behaviour and class alignments, as well as disruptions of literary norms with the rise of Modernism. What meanings accrue to these colliding agendas, needs, and practices? How can we discover them?

- Gender and conflict in literature
- Women’s nation-building narratives
- Imperial femininities in literature, life-writing, travel writing, and/or epistolary writing.
- Genre and conflict
- Literary representations of women soldiers and non-combatants in conflict zones
- Pacifism and conflict resolution in women's writing
- Sexualities in war narratives
- Feminism and war
- Literature as portable heritage: memorialising and commemorating national conflicts
- Literary constructions of memory and trauma in the context of national struggle
- Transnational solidarity in women's war writing

Conference organisers: Professor Margaret Mills Harper (UL), Dr. Tina O’Toole (UL), Dr. Muireann O Cinneide (NUIG).

(posted 28 January 2012)

Discourses frame identity, that is, linguistic processes and other strategies embedded in social practices shape the way individuals and groups (re)create themselves. Language and society are central to identity formation and expression. Our aim is to turn to a multi- and inter- disciplinary approach from fields such as linguistics, literature, sociology, psychology, history, and gender studies, among others, in order to render a comprehensive analysis of this complex issue -- the drama of identity.

Scholars interested in any aspect relating to this theme are invited to submit abstracts for papers. We are particularly interested in papers related to both theoretical and methodological issues, as well as case studies, on the discourse(s) of private and public identities, whether individual or collective, from a linguistic, pragmatic, social, cultural and/or literary perspective, focusing on any kind of texts in English from any period (such as literary works, personal letters, advertising, film, egodocuments, and so on).

Plenary speakers will be Ann Banfield (University of California, Berkeley), Irma Taavitsainen (University of Helsinki), Michael Toolan (University of Birmingham), Ruth Wodak (University of Lancaster) and Laura Alba (UNED, Spain).

The deadline for the submission of abstracts is January 15th 2012. Notification of acceptance will occur by end-February 2012. Slots for papers will be 30 minutes, including time for questions; the language of the papers will be English.

Detailed suggestions for panel sessions should reach us before November 15th 2011, indicating title of session, convenor(s), number of slots needed and possible participants. Acceptance of panels will be notified by December 1st, so that abstracts can reach the convenor(s) by January 15th.
Abstract format: maximum length 350 words or one page A4, using Times New Roman font 12 point, including references. Please send one document (name the WORD file: yourname Discofiden2012) with two versions of the abstract to:
The Organising Committee at the University of Santiago de Compostela:

Organizers: Prof. Dr. Stefan Horlacher (TU Dresden), Prof. Kevin Floyd (Kent State University)
This conference is funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and Kent State University.
Partial subsidies for participants will be available.

Masculinities are routinely studied in one of two potentially incompatible ways: as exemplifying abstract systems such as patriarchy or kinship; or as concrete, corporeal phenomena. The very term masculinity has hitherto been examined in such a broad range of contexts that it can sometimes appear as a pure abstract form, some kind of configuration or ‘relation‘ practically devoid of any concrete, defining content. We might say the same thing about crisis, a term that seems as persistent as it is exhausted. And even concepts that have become staples of masculinity studies, like hegemony or performativity, seem to be wavering between concrete specificity and theoretical abstraction. This conference will explore masculinity as an idea or a concept that operates across, or at least in relation to, a distance/difference that may or may not be bridgeable: between the systemic and the corporeal, the abstract and the concrete.

Thus, this conference will not only encourage scholarly movement in a direction that both builds on recent work in the field of masculinity studies and moves past it toward more comparative kinds of analysis, but it will also explore the relations between different abstract and corporeal, metaphorical and metonymical manifestations of masculinity. With these dilemmas in mind, we invite theoretical, cultural, or literary analyses of masculinities in the US and/or the UK since World War II -- a period in which differentiated masculinities proliferate for specifically national and transnational reasons, including global waves of decolonization, changing patterns of migration, the emergence of ‘new‘ subaltern subjects demanding social, cultural, and political recognition, as well as conservative reactions against these developments.

We especially encourage papers with comparative and/or transnational emphases. Possible topics might involve (but need not be limited to) any of the following:

• Masculinities and/as Systems (which systems -- military, symbolic, technological, post- or neocolonial,
liberal or neoliberal, political or bio-political -- can masculinity embody, exemplify, or perform?)
• Masculinities as Bodies - Bodies as Systems - Systems as Bodies
• Masculinities and/as Structures (structures of feeling, experience, possibility)
• Masculinities and/as Concepts (textual/narrative/discursive, historical/temporal, ethnic/social)
• Masculinities and/as Power (hegemony/kinship/relation to the symbolic order)
• Masculinities and/as 'Crises' (an exhausted abstraction?)

- Prof. Dr. Stefan Horlacher <stefan.horlacher@mailbox.tu-dresden.de>
- and Prof. Kevin Floyd <kfl oyd@kent.edu>.

(posted 24 November 2011, updated 26 November 2011)

An international conference organized by EA Cultural Identity, Texts and Theatricality -- University of Avignon

This conference will explore contemporary site-specific creation, including Land Art, environmental art, public art, and performance, focusing on the analysis of the sensory, intellectual, and aesthetic perception of the work outside of the museum walls, and the study of contextualized / conceptualized forms and their modes of representation. Avignon Locators, a site-specific work by American land artist Nancy Holt, will be unveiled during the event. Commissioned by the University of Avignon, the sculpture reactivates Missoula Ranch Locators -- Vision Encompassed, one of the artist's major works built in Montana in 1972 and dismantled 30 years later. The creation of the work in the campus garden, within the city walls, will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the original creation.

In 1967, the art critic Michael Fried started a debate when he decried what he viewed as a drift toward the theatricalization of the object-viewer relationship in plastic arts. Influenced by Merleau-Ponty, artists -- especially minimalists -- had been highlighting the part played by the audience in characterizing the work of art, thus challenging the modernist frontal and cerebral approach by introducing more participatory and sensual modes of perception. According to Fried, artists such as Robert Morris and Donald Judd questioned the integrity of the artwork by turning the viewer/eye to an actor/body.

Fried was primarily troubled by the difficulty to categorize such creations. Still cautiously called postmodern, these artists addressed precisely the issue of categorization. Judd claimed the hybrid status of his "specific objects" which, he said, were neither paintings nor sculptures. Between non-painting and non-sculpture, Fried positioned what he called "objecthood," provocatively stating that "the espousal of literalists Objecthood amounts to nothing other than a plea for a new kind of theater, and theater is now the negation of art" ("Art and Objecthood," Artforum, June 1967). He also considered the introduction of time in the aesthetic experience as a problem: "literalist sensibility is theatrical because, to begin with, it is concerned with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters literalists work." While modernists defended the idea that any form of aesthetic experience should be instantaneous, the artist, performer, and critic Robert Morris argued that "only one aspect of the work is immediate: the apprehension of the gestalt. The experience of the work necessarily exists in time." ("Notes on Sculpture, Part 2" Artforum, Oct. 1966).

In response to Michael Fried’' statement, Robert Smithson encouraged his fellow-artists to turn away from the modernist approach ("Letter to the Editor," Artforum, Oct. 1967). From then on, the young avant-garde, led by earth and site-specific artists, began to leave the studios and explore the trails of hyper-contextualization, fully assuming theatricality in their approach to art. They broke down barriers between disciplines -- sculpture, architecture, film, photography -- and pushed the boundaries of aesthetic experience. Owing both to performance and earthmoving, their sculptural actions question the viewer's status and involvement in their work. By documenting their own creations, they stage the creative process to the point of turning it into a new aesthetic object. Finally, by developing artworks that require the participation of the actor-spectator -- like Nancy Holt's Locators, emblematic of this approach -- these artists encourage the viewer to reconsider his perception of the physical environment, as well as his own inner space.

This conference will focus on visual arts and performance, without geographical limitations. Topics include, but are not limited to:

- artists' strategies to take over the viewer’s sensory field,
- the perception of time and space in aesthetic experience,
- the legacy of aesthetic theories (picturesque, sublime...) in contemporary site-specific creation,
- tensions between mediation / absence of mediation, site / non-site…,
- the reactivation of site-specific works,
- interactions between work / context / concept,
- the documentation, representation, transmission of site-specific production,
- the local / global dialogue,
- land use, and the environmental, political and economic weight of site-specific works,

- new technologies and site-specific creation,
- performing practices in site-specific creation,
- etc.

Please send an abstract of no more than 250 words for 25-minute papers, along with a short résumé (80-100 words), by March 1, 2012 to:

(posted 17 January 2012)

In recent years the study of trauma has become central to contemporary conceptualisations of personal and collective narratives of pain and loss. Often identified as a 'modern' phenomenon, a product of industrialisation and modernisation, trauma emerged as a distinct pathology alongside the rise of a middle-class readership, and accounts of physical and psychological wounds abound in Victorian fiction. In turn, Victorian tropes of trauma have been appropriated by the neo-Victorian novel, often in ways which offer a self-conscious or critical engagement with past representations.

This conference seeks to examine the intersection between the physical and psychical representation of trauma in both Victorian and Neo-Victorian literature. It aims to explore the importance of the relationship between the mind and the body, as well as the relationship between Victorian literary representations and neo-Victorian appropriations. We welcome papers examining representations of trauma in Victorian and neo-Victorian fiction, as well as contributions from the fields of literary theory, cultural studies, and the visual arts.

· Victorian trauma narratives
· Pain in Victorian art, literature and culture
· Neo-Victorian traumatic appropriations
· 'Wound Culture'
· Traumatic performances (race/gender/sexuality, etc.)
· Imperial trauma

· Emily Hunt <emily.hunt@port.ac.uk>
· or Alex Messem <alexandra.messem@port.ac.uk>.

(posted 25 January 2012)

There are several reasons for multilingualism in film, mainly linked to the realistic depiction of situations which involve travelling, migration, studying abroad, work or personal relations in an international environment, or families whose members are of different national or ethnic origin. Multilingual interactions represented in film including code switching and code mixing, but multilingualism can also come in the form of intertextuality, for example songs or learned quotations. Not only can there be more than one national language in an audiovisual programme; there will, most of the time, also be intralinguistic variations (archaic language, dialects, sociolects, idiolects, as opposed to standard language) which convey important information about the characters. Sometimes, invented languages are present in films.

Audiences themselves are not always monolingual. In particular, spectators of a film in English could be non-native speakers from around the world. And there are several kinds of interesting viewing situations: the 'other' language in a film could be the mother tongue of some of the spectators. It must also be added that the receivers‚ mastery of each of the languages involved as well as their proximity or distance with respect to the cultures which are depicted will inevitably have a considerable influence on their processing of the dialogues and of the visuals, and will affect the way in which they perceive the narrative and the characters.
Sometimes referred to as an afterthought, cumbersome, a necessary evil, an addition to the finished work, translation can sometimes truly be part of the film, of the original version as the director wanted it. An aid to understanding, for sure, but also a voice incarnated in a graphic presence on screen, in the case of subtitles. An artistic choice made by the director and his or her team.
Multilingualism makes communication and mediation issues more visible. When it appears in films, it creates a mise en abyme which stimulates the
viewers to reflect on their experience of being in a world in which we need interpreters and translators. It also stretches the limits of translation by making us see that it cannot be the "full transposition of one (monolingual) source code into another (monolingual) target code for the benefit of a monolingual target public" (Meylaerts 2006: 5).
We welcome contributions on:
Send 450-500 word abstracts in English or French accompanied by a 100-150 word bio note to Adriana Serban at <adriana.serban@univ-montp3.fr> before Tuesday 29 November 2011.
A selection of papers will be published after the conference.
The conference website will be on line soon, with information about the scientific and organising committees, plenary speakers, registration, and
much more. Please send us an e-mail if you would like to know the address.

"Although he was already repellent enough, there arose from the fungous skin-growth with which he was almost covered a very sickening stench which was hard to tolerate... with the use of the [daily] bath the unpleasant odour... ceased to be noticeable" - The prominent surgeon Frederic Treves's description of Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, exposes a body which is simultaneously an assault on the senses and one which has traditionally been de-sensualised. Deformity is sanitised and fitted into a structure of normality. The academy tends to obscure the complexity of the sensuous/sensual/sensed body of the deformed subject, and of the questions, anxieties, and denials which surround deformity when it is located within a continuum of sense.

From freak exhibitions and fairs, medical examinations and discoveries to various portrayals in arts and literature, images of deformity (or monstrosity, used separately or interchangeably depending on context) have captivated us for centuries. The result is a significant body of critical and artistic works where these bodies are dissected, politicized, exhibited, objectified or even beatified. Nonetheless, there remains a gap, an unexplored, unspoken or neglected aspect of this complex field of study which needs further consideration. This two-day interdisciplinary conference aims to bring the senses and the sensuous back to the monstrous or deformed body from the early modern period through to the mid-twentieth century, and seeks to explore its implications in diverse academic fields.

We hope to bring together scholars and students from a wide range of disciplines to engage in a constructive dialogue, network, and exchange of ideas and experiences, connecting a community of researchers who share an interest in deformity, monstrosity, and freakery.

- Spectacle/fetishisation of monstrosity and deformity; monstrous sexuality/eroticisation
- The monster as a catalyst of progression/ historical perspectives
- Monstrous symbolism, prodigality, or beatification
- The racialised body; exoticising difference
- Monstrosity in medical literature; disability narratives
- Monstrous becoming; the ‘sensed’ body
- Deformed aesthetics; monstrosity in the visual arts
- (De) gendering the deformed body; humanisation vs objectification

We welcome proposals for 20-minute presentations from established scholars, postdoctoral researchers and postgraduate students from various teratological backgrounds, e.g. in literature, history, media and art studies, philosophy, religious studies, history of science,medical humanities, and critical and cultural theory. Proposals should be no more than 300 words, in .doc format, and should include a brief 50-word biography.

Please send your proposals to <sdefconference@ed.ac.uk> by no later than 16 February, 2012 (new extended deadline) to:

Dr. Karin Sellberg (The University of Edinburgh)
Ally Crockford (The University of Edinburgh)
Maja Milatovic (The University of Edinburgh)

(posted 8 September 2011, updated 27 January 2012)

What is crime? What constitutes violence? What is permissible to talk about or describe in depictions of crime and violence? What is the impact on an audience? These questions and others will be the subject of a two-day conference on "Crime, Violence, and Culture" that will examine the problem of crime and violence historically as well as in relation to contemporary culture.

Depictions of violence and crime have been the subject of sensational treatment in television, film, and ephemeral literature. Crime and war fiction (and film) have deeply imbedded representations of criminality and violence within their defining structural elements. Journalismówhether disseminated through print, electronic transmission, radio, television or documentary filmóoften has an uneasy relationship with the shocking violence depicted. More generally, drama and literature have illustrated a concern with depicting both the psychological dynamics of coercive power and its impact.  In material aimed at a mass audience there is a tendency to depict topicsósuch as organised crime or political and religious extremismóin ways that polarise the ethical perceptions, mask the underlying  social dynamics, foreclose discussion and rational analysis, and/or generate fear and loathing.

This conference is intended to examine representations of violence and crime across a wide range of media (fiction, film, art, biography, journalism etc.) and to interrogate the issues raised. Papers might examine the ethics invoked by different representative frameworks, the danger that violence will be treated as spectacle, and the implications of using violence as a polemical device to shift public sentiment.  Papers might also address the relationship between coercive power, crime and violence that is not necessarily primarily physical, or might examine the political or ideological contexts in which narratives of good and evil are constructed and crime defined.

The organisers of the conference would welcome abstracts of 200 words by 15 January 2012. Papers may be given in English or French. Proposals from postgraduate students as well as from established scholars would be welcome.

- Trish Ferguson (Liverpool Hope University) at <fergust@hope.ac.uk>fergust@hope.ac.uk>

- Suzanne Bray (Lille Catholic University) at <suzanne.bray@icl-lille.fr>suzanne.bray@icl-lille.fr>.

(posted 9 November 2011)

The many ways in which stories are recirculated is astounding -- from relatively straightforward retellings of fairy tales and classical myths, to feminist, queer, postcolonial or ecocritical subversions of central themes, to fan fiction's adaptations of beloved characters and story worlds.

The international colloquium Allusions and echoes – cultural recycling and recirculation is an opportunity to explore the various ways in which texts communicate over borders of space, time, genre and medium. What themes, motifs, backgrounds and details capture the imagination of authors, readers and viewers? How are they recycled and recirculated from one period, or one audience, to another? How and why do they gain currency again and again? Contributors are invited to cast their net widely and consider not only contemporary works, such as The Canongate Myth Series (2005-2011) and Cinderfella (1960, 2013) but also older texts, such as Chaucer's The Physician’s Tale and Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus.

• Recirculation and remediation
• Recirculation and transhistoricism
• Recirculation and cultural transmission
• Recirculation and ecocriticism
• Recirculation and class
• Recirculation and ethnicity
• Recirculation and gender
• Recirculation and queer studies
• Recirculation as political strategy

The colloquium, which is jointly organised by Dr Berit Åström (Umeå University, Sweden) and Professor Sarah Annes Brown (Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK), is aimed at anyone working in the fields of English literature, cultural studies, film and media studies or related disciplines.

If you would like to present a paper (20 minutes), or have a suggestion for a panel, please send a 300-word abstract to:

(posted 3 December 2011)

This is going to be the first conference of the series to be organised in East-Central Europe. Pécs is the fifth largest city of Hungary, located on the slopes of the Mecsek mountains in the south-western part of the country, close to its border with Croatia. The city of Pécs was founded by Romans and the early Christian necropolis became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2000. Pécs has  also been selected as the European Capital of Culture in 2010.

Pécs University has extended a hearty welcome to our international organization, lecture halls have been reserved, and plans are under way for scholarly and social events.

Gertrud Szamosi  Ph.D.
Institute of English Studies

(posted 15 June 2011)

Whether it be presented as a prologue or alluded to in the credits, integrated in the opening sequence or developed in a flash-back, the incipit of a novel represents the first narrative and mise-en-scene enigma to the director whose film is based on the adaptation of a literary text. Philippe Sohet suggests that the incipit is not a stable form, for its function has changed over the years, depending on the cultural contexts and the discursive strategies of the genre, proposing various expressive modes to the opening topos (Philippe Sohet, Images du récit, Québec, Presses universitaires du Québec, 2007). The incipit contains the fictional codes that establish the reading pact between the author and the reader, contributing to the intimacy implicit in the autobiographical mode or announcing the transgression of the fictional codes in "postmodern works".

The fourth edition of "From the Blank Page to the Silver Screen" will promote the study of adaptation through a "magnifying glance" at the first page. The perspective epitomized by the theme of the conference "Opening pages, opening shots" raises the issue of the "adaptation pact -- as illustrated by the film incipit -- the credits or the first sequences defining the "viewing pact" of the work. In her seminal work on film adaptation, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, Kamilla Elliott closely examines the interaction between text and image in the illustrated edition of Thackeray's Vanity Fair: how does the illustration (often integrated into the text itself, intertwining with the first letter of the text) program or contradict one’s reading? Though Elliott uses this example to insist that historically, the novel has often included images, just as the film has historically included text (in the form of intertitles), the juxtaposition of opening images and opening texts is a promising one. Considering that the incipit clarifies the nature of the writing and allows a classification of the genre, what strategies are used to hook the viewer in the first seconds of a film? What effect do these choices have on the narrative and dramatic structure of the adapted film?

- Opening credits as texts to be read or seen (for example in the text scrolling over a black screen that opens Bladerunner, explaining the existence of replicants, or conversely the images that supplant the text in the credits of Farenheit 451)
- The introductory nature of the opening images and lines of text  (establishing shots that recall the opening lines of the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice) and lure encapsulated in the first minutes (a male silhouette hobbling on crutches towards the audience at the beginning of Double Indemnity)
- The problem of "leaving one's mark" and the authorship of the work (the author's voice resounding through Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of Henry V, where Derek Jacobi's quiet recitation of the prologue seeks to differenciate the film with Olivier's famous opening; the novelist and screenwriter's participation in directing Smoke)
- The means of appropriation used in remakes (the mixture of references to previous adaptations as well as to the source text in different versions of The Postman Always Rings Twice)
- The conflict between credits, opening sequence, and source text (as in Soylent Green, whose first images sum up and evacuate the political elements of the novel Make Room! Make Room!)
- The different strategies used to enter the fiction (according to its genre, its time, its source texts).
- The cultural, narrative, commercial markers of books written in a foreign language and adapted to Anglo-American cinema.

- Shannon Wells-Lassagne <swellslassagne@9online.fr>
- and Delphine Letort <delphine.letort@univ-lemans.fr>.                  

(posted 14 July 2011)

A conference organised by I.D.E.A. (Théories et pratiques de l’Interdisciplinarité dans les Etudes Anglophones), the research group of the Nancy-Université English Department.
Conference organisers: Nathalie Collé-Bak, Monica Latham and David Ten Eyck

- Espen Aarseth, (Center for Computer Games Research, IT University of Copenhagen),
- Daniel Ferrer (CNRS, ITEM, France),
- David Finkelstein (Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, UK),
- and Claire Parfait (Université Paris 13, France).

- David Ten Eyck <david.ten-eyck@univ-nancy2.fr>
- and Monica Latham <monica.latham@univ-nancy2.fr>.

Articles based on conference papers will be considered for publication in the Book Practices and Textual Itineraries series, published by the Presses Universitaires de Nancy.

(posted 10 June 2011)

Conference venue: Collège International de Philosophie
How does literature think? In particular, how does the writing of Virginia Woolf think? The field opened up by this question will be the the starting point for this international colloquium, which is dedicated to the points of articulation between Woolf's thought, her oeuvre, and her  writing.

The aim is to renew critical perspectives on her work, to reconfigure the formal studies which make up the history of her critical reception, whether feminist, ideological or historicist, in order to appreciate fully the force of the proposition that thought is intimately related to its written form. It is not therefore a question of "folding" thought back onto writing, of searching for themes, or of subordinating one to the other, but rather of investigating the way in which a certain poetic defines itself as a singular mode of the work of thought.

This aspect of thought could be interrogated according to different spatio-temporal determinations, and in the light of different perspectives, including the following.

How does the realm of thought opened up by philosophy allow us to read that insatiable reader, Virginia Woolf? What philosophers did she read and from what perspectives? Or rather, where for Woolf does the singularity of thought resonate in writing? When she discusses literary form in her own readings and in her essays, what kinds of writing and reading does she define as thought?

One way to approach this would be to examine the cultural movements, the new areas of thought, the historical upheavals, and the political engagements that impacted on the Bloomsbury Group, and to which Viriginia Woolf responded in her own ways: for example by unsettling modes of power and spaces of knowledge, and redefining what is meant by community. But the real question is: in what ways was Woolf's work in conversation with the philosophical currents of her epoch? Several studies already cover this dimension of her work, focusing on the relationships between members of the Bloomsbury Group and philosophy at Cambridge and Oxford, or as in Ann Banfield’s The Phantom Table, on the echoes of contemporary philosophical questions we find in her writing. These aspects of the critical heritage deserve further attention

But an alternative to these positions might be found in the various philosophical dialogues with Woolf's work. The encounters between her oeuvre and Paul Ricoeur, Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Rancière all deserve attention. With Ricoeur and Blanchot the issue is time, with Deleuze the concept of becoming, for Rancière the invention of a mode of subjectification. With the latter two, the critical paradigm of representation as mimesis undergoes a radical interrogation. For Deleuze, it gives way to a logic of the impersonal, of affects and percepts, while for Rancière, to a poetics of literature as a "distribution of the sensible". But this brings us back to the question: how does Woolf’s writing itself interrogate the thought of Paul Ricoeur, Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze or of Jacques Rancière, how does her work read these philosophers today?

Finally, it is above all the inextricable bond between thought and writing that we want to examine. The entanglement of the object of thought (time, life, history, art, the sentence, sexual difference, literary forms, community, but also death, the voice, the spectral, the impersonal, writing...) and the mode in which it is written acts as an invitation to question the place of mimesis in the representation of thought in Woolf's work (when her objective is often pastiche or parody), the resistance to certain modes of thought to which her writing seems to object, and the search for modes of thought proper to her poetic. In her work, certain words, "life", "spirit", "soul", seem to be put into circulation, they play a central role in her singular treatment of the object of thought, of the life of the spirit, and of a mode of thinking. In short, the specific characteristics of this poetic, in the essays as well as the novels, is as much the proposition of an idea of literature and of its paradoxical condition of inoperability. What is at stake will be, however, to show how this a poetic engenders its own objects and modes of thought, revealing at the heart of the cultural legacy that is Woolf's work, the progress of what Lyotard calls a "passion of language" allied to a passion of thought. We might indeed interrogate the ethical and political wagers constituted by this proposition of thought, which continues to give modernity its characteristic promise of a community that is yet to come.

- Université de Paris-Ouest Nanterre (contact: Chantal Delourme <c.delourme@wanadoo.fr>, Richard Pedot <richard.pedot@orange.fr>)
- Université de Toulouse Le Mirail (contact: Catherine Lanone <catherine.lanone@univ-tlse2.fr>)
- Glasgow University (contact:  Jane Goldman <J.Goldman@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk>)
- Keele University (contact:  Scott MacCracken <s.maccracken@engl.keele.ac.uk>)
- Société d’Études Woolfiennes (contact: Claire Pégon-Davison <:claire.pegon@univ-provence.fr>)
- Collège International de Philosophie (subject to agreement)

A first brief proposal (name, institution, title and 1-2 line abstract) must be sent, for organizational purposes, by Feb. 5, 2011.

(posted 10 January 2011, updated 23 June 2011)

We are pleased to announce the participation of seven eminent, guest speakers : Vincent Barras (University of Lausanne), Margaret Healy (University of Sussex), Tony Hunt (University of Oxford), Eric Masserey  (Lausanne), Carole Rawcliffe (University of East Anglia), Jennifer Richards (Newcastle University) and Heirinch von Staden (Princeton University). For more information about these keynote speakers, whose varied research interests reflect the interdisciplinary nature of the conference, please consult the website at http://www.unil.ch/samemes12.

We invite you to submit a proposal of not more than 300 words, including your name, title and institutional affiliation (where relevant) and a brief biography (max. 100 words).

 Proposals for full panels are very welcome. These should include three proposed speakers, including, or in addition to, a chair and/or a respondent. Individual papers will be grouped with two others, and each paper should last no more than 20 minutes. A session of three papers will last 1.5 hours, and will include time for discussion and debate.
Proposals should be submitted to http://www.unil.ch/samemes12.

http://www.samemes.org

- Denis Renevey, Professeur ordinaire , Medieval Literature, English Department, University of Lausanne
- Rachel Falconer, Professeur ordinaire, Modern English Literature, English Department, University of Lausanne

(posted 15 November 2011)

An EMiC Colloquium organized by Marta Dvorak (Sorbonne Nouvelle), Dean Irvine (Dalhousie), Kit Dobson (Mt. Royal University), and Matt Huculak (Dalhousie), hosted by the Sorbonne Nouvelle.

When she moved to Paris in 1950, Mavis Gallant followed a route familiar to generations of modernist authors and artists from Canada and around the world. Many of these expatriates returned home and brought with them their impressions of the circles and salons, magazines and publishing houses, bookshops and galleries, stages and ateliers of Paris that facilitated the formation of modernism across the arts and around the globe. Conversely, they imported knowledge of cultural and aesthetic practices -- whether from North and South America, the Caribbean, Africa, the

Among Canada's other modernists who gravitated to Paris in the first half of the twentieth century were writers such as Marius Barbeau, Morley Callaghan, Marcel Dugas, John Glassco, Alain Grandbois, Anne Hébert, Dorothy Livesay, Jean-Aubert Loranger, Gaston Miron, Thérèse Renaud, Mordecai Richler, and Sheila Watson and artists such as Paul-Émile Borduas, Emily Carr, A.Y. Jackson, Fernand Leduc, Alfred Pellan, and Jean-Paul Riopelle. These expatriates gathered with others from around the world in what David Burke has designated as the West’s intellectual capital of the early twentieth century, a global community that contributed to modernism’s articulation across an array of cultural and artistic movements: art nouveau, cubism, Dada, existentialism, Fauvism, magic realism, negritude, pataphysics, psychoanalysis, surrealism, theatres of the absurd and cruelty, and so on. A century after the earliest of their transatlantic crossings, we return to commemorate the local, national, international, transnational, and global histories of modernism.
In recognition of Paris's modernist legacies and their links to modernists from North America and elsewhere, this colloquium seeks to bring together scholars whose work investigates and participates in intercultural and transcultural exchanges, interlingual and multilingual translations, intermedial and interdisciplinary cross-fertilizations, as well as international and transnational collaborations.
We welcome scholarship that addresses any of the multiple and intersecting modes of modernist cultural production in literature, theatre, the visual arts, and the performance arts. Staged in one of the historic cities of modernism and in what geographer David Harvey calls one of the capitals of modernity, which facilitated the convergence of global communities, this colloquium also invites the participation of scholars whose work builds and circulates through global networks and digital technologies. We encourage presentations that address issues relevant to the global and digital turns of modernist studies in the twenty-first century, including the transformations of modernist media, the remediation of modernism in new media, the representation and interpretation of modernist aesthetics in innovative reading environments, and the implementation of web-based tools to represent the material conditions and geographic locations of modernism’s production.
Subjects, or points of entry, may include, but are not limited to, the following:
We welcome proposals for panel presentations. Panels will feature the standard sequence of 3 or 4 speakers delivering 15-20 minute talks followed by a question period and discussion. We also welcome proposals of roundtable sessions, which may consist of 5 or 6 speakers gathered around issues or topics of common concern in order to generate discussion among the participants and with the audience. Roundtable organizers should ask participants to deliver short position statements in response to material distributed in advance by the session organizer, and they should take turns responding to the moderator's and audience's questions and comments.
Selected papers by conference participants will be collected in a planned volume of conference proceedings.
A limited number of subventions for EMiC participants (co-applicants, collaborators, postdocs, and graduate fellows) will be available to defray travel and accommodation expenses. See the colloquium page on the project website for more details: http://editingmodernism.ca/events/sorbonnenouvelle/
Please submit 500-word proposal, 100-word abstract, and 50-word biographical statement via email to <emic@dal.ca> by 1 September 2011.
For more information about the EMiC project, please visit our website at http://editingmodernism.ca or contact us at <emic@dal.ca>.
EMiC is funded by a Strategic Knowledge Cluster grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

An International Conference hosted by the Faculty of Arts and Letters, Catholic University in RuÏomberok, Slovakia in association with the Katherine Mansfield Society.

Keynote Speakers: Angela Smith, C. K. Stead, Maurizio Ascari, Gerri Kimber, Claire Davison-Pégon

Having arrived in London from New Zealand in 1908 to commence her life as a writer, Katherine Mansfield travelled widely in Europe during the 1910s and early 1920s. Rarely was this for pleasure; the notion of escaping from a situation, people, and later her search for a cure for tuberculosis, predetermined much of her journeying. The resonances of this constant travelling and immersion in foreign cultures can be perceived in both her personal writing and her creative endeavours.

- KM and Germany
- KM and Russia
- KM and Poland
- KM and Belgium
- KM and France
- KM and Italy
- KM and Switzerland
- Notion of expatriation and displacement in KM’s stories
- Responses to, and reception of, KM in Europe
- KM's influence on continental writers
- KM as (post)colonial traveller

A highlight of the conference will be an optional trip on 30 June to nearby Krakow, the home of Poland's most celebrated artist, Stanislaw Wyspianski, with a visit to see the internationally renowned Wyspianksi museum and the stained glass window in the Franciscan church, the inspiration for two of KM's poems.

Please send 200 word abstracts for individual papers of 20 minutes, or 500 word proposals for panels of 3 papers to Dr Janka Ka‰ãáková at <janka.kascakova@ff.ku.sk> by 1 November 2011.
Decisions will be announced by 15 December 2011.

(posted 7 June 2011)

This conference aims to gather academics, writers, artists and translators interested in the work of Malcolm Lowry, both in itself and in relation to our contemporary global civilisation: the aim will also be to try to see how and why it continues to speak to the Twenty First century.

The posterity of Lowry's work does not limit itself to the great lyrical tragedy of our modernity published in his lifetime, Under the Volcano (1947). A large amount of materials (novels, poems, short stories, essays) has been brought to public knowledge by specialists since Lowry's death, and it appears that the tonality is far from being one-sided. No doubt, Lowry is one of those writers who take us beyond the pleasure principle, who detected in modern civilisation a passion for the real beyond the veil of reality, where joy and horror mingle on the path toward destruction. But his "drunken Divine Comedy", the equivalent of Joyce's work in progress, is also an appeal to the joy of bare life. It is an attempt to reintroduce the dimension of desire, of the sacred, foregrounding the living pulse of the body bound to the natural world, and to the "faunetic" substance of language.

Malcolm Lowry's interest in painting and music, in the emerging art-forms of his time like the cinema and jazz music will also provide openings on other cultural fields.

Given the specific context provided by the Centre Culturel International de Cerisy-la-Salle in Normandy, the conference will be held mostly in French and partly in English, in the form of papers, round tables and readings.

- The sacred body and the natural world
- The death-drive and the life-drive
- Lowry and modern melancholy
- Tragedy and beyond the tragedy
- Poetics and politics
- Love objects, objects of hatred
- Lowry as poet of the real
- Illuminations
- The voice of Malcolm Lowry

(posted 15 October 2011)

Contributions are invited for the 5th EASLCE International Conference on "Natura Loquens: Eruptive Dialogues, Disruptive Discourses," to be held in Tenerife, Canaries, SPAIN, 27-30 June 2012. The event is organised on behalf of EASLCE (the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and Environment) by the University of La Laguna, Faculty of Philology, and the Department of English and German Studies, in the island of Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain.
See the EASLCE website: http://www.easlce.eu/

There is an ongoing debate nowadays over the agency of Nature and the necessity of reopening the definition of what counts as speech. One would need to differentiate between new insights about animal communication and the idea that non-animal and inanimate nature "signify," or the suggestion of biosemiotics that life itself is a process of signification. Thus, Nature often presents articulated reactions which can be both eruptive and disruptive. We expect to bring to the arena of this academic meeting, placed at the very foot of Mount Teide (Spain's highest volcanic peak, with an altitude of 3718 m.), as manifold eruptive dialogues as possible. Attention will focus on the contrasting relationship between Nature and humankind, ever in perpetual and delicate interrelationship since the history of humankind and especially after the emergence of the so-called Anthropocene Era (P. Crutzen). In effect, the ability to speak and communicate made it possible to detach this Homo sapiens genus from other animal species, establishing thus a hierarchy that has been working until present day. Such Aristotelian human "loquacity" is based on a "great chain of being" (A.O. Lovejoy) that places this Homo loquens in a superior position, being able to structure and articulate the universe. If we were able to deconstruct and reverse this idea in order to acknowledge Nature’s ability to speak out (Christopher Manes, David Abrams), then multiple and creative conversations could be established, so as to reconstruct the natural order of things. While environmental concerns grow louder and more frequently today, traditional disruptive discourses that posit the idea of nature as an impediment to human progress do continue to emerge and spread out. The main purpose of this conference is then to reenact, rethink and fluidize the dialogic balance between Nature and human knowledge, engaging in an intellectually fairer and more empathetic communication.

Proposals for papers (EITHER standard papers 2500 words/20 minutes OR contributions to paper jam sessions 1250 words/12 minutes) and panels (3 papers OR 5 jam session papers) are now invited.

- Description of Nature's "agency" in cultural, artistic, literary and filmic representations of the anthropocentric canon in diachronic and synchronic historical periods.
- Dialogues and discourses regarding either subalternity or supremacy of Nature in historical, sociological, economic and artistic documents and other media.
- The interaction of Nature and Humankind in the creation/destruction of the world, as depicted in sci-fi, catastrophe literature, and trans- and post-human utopias/dystopias.
- Lead metaphors and metonymies, and other semantic tropes, structuring our perception and comprehension of the natural world, and the human capacity to transform the environment.
- Material/spiritual approaches to the natural world and their political and ethical contestations.
- The "retaliation" of Nature, especially in the 21st century: climate change, the ozone hole, "nukes" and quakes, eruptive ash clouds and other "apocalyptic" signs.
- The mirage/miracle of Nature: biodiversity & homogenization, global and local phenomena, human-made/destroyed landscapes, eruptions and erosions…
- The seemingly "pathetic fallacy": Speaking animals, plants or inanimate objects in literature and the arts.
- Theoretical & critical approaches to Nature, and discussion of their frailties and strengths in contemporary debate: postcolonialism, environmentalism, ecological feminism, material ecocriticism, toxicity and discourse, biosemiotics, ecopedagogy, eco-translatology, and others.

The primary conference languages will be English and Spanish, but (following our practice at previous EASLCE conferences) proposals for panels in other European languages are also welcome.

Please submit proposals for panels or individual papers (title plus 250 words), together with a brief bionote (4-5 lines), and complete contact data, to Professor Juan Ignacio Oliva <jioliva@ull.es> by 31 January 2012, indicating your IT requirements.

(posted 11 September)

The comparative gesture performs both the act and the question of transition between the terms compared. Understood as an intercultural practice, comparative literature may thus also be understood as both a transitive and transnational process – creating its own object/form of knowledge as it identifies and analyses lines of relation and exchange between literary cultures. When navigating between languages, it becomes critically engaged with the possibility and methods of such navigation. Meanwhile, interdisciplinary and inter-medial versions of comparative studies likewise centre about transitions which may themselves remain under-analysed.

The very diversity of comparative practices enumerated, and the attendant versions of comparative discourse, indicate a field of study that is itself faced with the reality of transition. As CLAI (Comparative Literature Association of Ireland) establishes a new space for interaction between comparativists of local and global provenance, the possible directions of this transition are of central concern to this first international conference of the Association.

Panel proposals: 20 January 2012
Individual proposals: 16 March 2012

(posted 26 Novembr 2011)

Isobel Armstrong
Daniel Karlin
Tricia Lootens
Cornelia Pearsell

Over the past two centuries, Robert Browning has been hailed initially as the co-inventor of the dramatic monologue, and more recently, as earlier origins of the genre have been proposed, as its most prominent practitioner. To celebrate the Bicentenary of Browning's birth, the London Browning Society is hosting an international conference to reassess not only Browning's work in what is arguably the defining genre of his oeuvre, but also the broader practice and theory of the dramatic monologue before, after and during his lifetime.

The conference remit of Browning, Before and Beyond proposes, in the first instance, to discuss the dramatic monologue in relation to Browning and other Victorian practitioners of the genre. The conference seeks to explore the reasons behind the rise of the genre during the Victorian era and the extent to which its formal and generic concerns with issues of performativity and spectacle, identity and subjectivity, text and 'truth' are illustrative of key concerns of the Victorian age.

Further, the conference hopes to extend critical discussion of the growth, profile, and generic nature of the dramatic monologue. The organizers welcome papers on pre-and post-Victorian poets and poems as a means of exploring the historical limits and reaches of the genre. Similarly, papers that explore the generic and disciplinary reaches of the form -- its associations with drama, or connections to the Romantic lyric mode, for example -- are warmly encouraged.

20-minute papers are invited on any topic relating to the dramatic monologue. Submissions may include, but are not restricted to:

* new approaches to defining the dramatic monologue and its significance
* reassessments of established approaches to the genre
* the origins/ predecessors of the genre
* Victorian variants of the genre
* issues of subjectivity and selfhood
* Post-Romanticism and the dramatic monologue
* the dramatic monologue and gender
* the genre's relation to history
* hybrid versions of the genre
* twentieth-century and twenty-first century uses of the genre
* the dramatic monologue and performance poetry

(posted 18 January 2012)

WITTY : FUNNY : SATIRIC : MUSICAL : EXCITING : BIZARRE : POLITICAL : THRILLING : FRIGHTENING : METAPHORICAL : COMIC : SARDONIC : BEETHOVEN

To mark the fiftieth anniversary of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange (1962), the International Anthony Burgess Foundation is organising a multi-disciplinary conference to examine its profound and enduring impact on literature, film, music, theatre and society.

The conference will assess the history and reception of A Clockwork Orange in all its manifestations. Papers of 20-30 minutes in length are invited on any aspect of A Clockwork Orange and its legacy. Possible topics might include the linguistic and/or musical aspects of Burgess's novel; invented languages; the film versions directed by Andy Warhol and Stanley Kubrick; the stage adaptations by John Godber, Anthony Burgess and Ron Daniels; translations into other languages and media; the history of book design; the political and Cold War contexts of the book and films; and the continuing influence of Burgess's text on popular music, fashion, or other aspects of youth culture and counter-culture.

The conference will be supported by the UK premiere of Burgess's Clockwork Orange music, a new Burgess/Kubrick exhibition at the John Rylands Library (in collaboration with the Stanley Kubrick Archive), and a film season at the Cornerhouse cinema.

If you would like to submit a paper, please send an abstract of 200-300 words to <director@anthonyburgess.org>.

(posted 16 January 2012)

This inter- and multi-disciplinary project seeks to explore the contemporary experience of Diasporas -- communities who conceive of themselves as a national, ethnic, linguistic or other form of cultural and political construction of collective membership living outside of their 'home lands.' Diaspora is a concept which is far from being definitional. Despite problems and limitations in terminology, this notion may be defined with issues attached to it for a more complete understanding. Such a term which may have its roots in Greek, is used customarily to apply to a historical phenomenon that has now passed to a period that usually supposes that Di-asporas are those who are settled forever in a country other from where they were born and thus this term has lost its dimension of irreversibility and of exile.

In order to increase our understanding of Diasporas and their impact on both the receiving countries and their respective homes left behind, key issues will be addressed related to Diaspora cultural expression and interests. In addition, the conference will address the questions: Do Diasporas continue to exist? Is the global economy, media and policies sending different messages about diaspora to future generations?

The presence and impact of displaced / globalized populations of audiences, spectators and producers of new mainstream /Hollywood /Bollywood cinema are crucial to the emergence of this post-diasporic cinema, as these narratives from texts to screen constitute a fundamental   challenge  for the  negotiation of  complex diasporic issues

Factors are numerous including most prominently, artistic and musical creations, intellectual outputs, and specific religious practices and which have made a significant international impact.

3. Myths and Symbols: how to meet, and get to know each other through the use of créative lenses

Diasporas group, re-group and their group myths and symbols change accordingly. Or Diasporas remain dominated, their myths and symbols mirror (or rebel) their domination. This manifestation could take in linguistic, artistic and other  creative forms…right down to graffiti to propaganda. The effects of Diaspora through a creative lens, as often this is where the true effects of migration and cultural adjustment expose themselves in a personal and celebratory way. These could include:

* Creative Expression as a result of shifting and integrating cultures. Cross cultural and cross disciplinary practices / cross cultural collaboration / representing the self and the nation / connecting history to the future / third space practice
* Shifting Art Practices and how traditional folk based art forms (art / music / literature / dance) can accommodate and represent modern diasporic communities in flux
* New Languages that represent broken boundaries such as graffiti / rap / interactive & web based art forms / global design aesthetics / symbolism / sound & vision / poetry and text / Esperanto

The controversial meaning of private/public spaces remain fundamental arenas in the re/construction of gendered identities in an in-between space as a Diaspora context nurtures challenges to traditional socio-cultural behaviors. Virtual Diasporas -- This questions a range of pre conceived notions about physicality, actuality and place (which in turn open up the discussions around ownership, representation and nation). Virtual diasporas are not limited to the arts of course but the shifts toward new technologies within art and design production are highlighting such issues through various forms of creativity and the critique that surrounds it.

We anticipate that these and related issues will be of interest to those  working/researching  in philosophy, education, ethics, cinematic / literature, politics, sociology, history, architecture, photography, geography, globalization, international relations, refugee studies, migration studies, urban studies and cultural studies.

In the new global world in which cultures act simultaneously how should we be thinking about Diaspora?

Some pertinent questions in this area that the conference is interested in addressing are: What are some of the ways to identity and define the subject in changing political boundaries where cultural interactions are amplified? What are the processes of social formation and reformation of? Diasporas that is unique to a global age? How do an intensified migration age that is coupled with broader and more flexible terrains of social structures can give Diaspora communities a window of opportunity to redefine their social position in both the country of origin and the host country? How does immigration in an age where the media and the internet are highly accessible, bring individuals to deal with multiple levels of traditions and cultures? What new cross-’ethnoscapes’ and cross-’ideoscapes’ are emerging in? In what new methods can we capture the web of forces that influences Diasporas at the same time?

* Economics of diaspora
* Gendered diasporas
* Queer diasporas 'flexible citizenship'
* Contested diasporic identities
* Invisible diasporas
* Emerging and changing patterns -- is there an 'American diaspora' in China? In Dubai? Etc.
* Stateless or homeless diasporas -- diasporas of no return
* Guest workers as diasporans?
* Diasporas created by shifting state boundaries
* Internal (intranational diasporas) -- for example, First Nations or Indigenous/Native migration into urban areas
* Diasporans by adoption or 'diasporans-in-law' (partners of diasporans adopted into diasporic communities, extended diasporas through family relations, etc.)
* Overlapping diasporas, entanglement
* Competing claims or multiple claims on diasporans Inter-diasporan or multi-diasporan realities

The Steering Group particularly welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals. Papers will also be considered on any related theme. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 13th January 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 11th May 2012. Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). Please note that a Book of Abstracts is planned for the end of the year. We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

- Dr S. Ram Vemuri, School of Law and Business, Faculty of Law, Business and Arts, Charles Darwin University, Darwin NT0909, Australia <Ram.Vemuri@cdu.edu.au>
- Rob Fisher, Network Founder and Leader, Inter-Disciplinary.Net, Freeland, Oxfordshire,, United Kingdom <dias5@inter-disciplinary.net>

The conference is part of the 'Diversity and Recognition' series of research projects, which in turn belong to the At the Interface programmes of ID.Net. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and challenging. All papers accepted for and presented at the conference will be published in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into 20-25 page chapters for publication in a themed dialogic ISBN hard copy volume.

Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.

(posted 11 October 2011)