The “Short stories and short forms” team of the CIRPaLL laboratory has received funding from the Erasmus + Strategic Partnerships program. This European research program aims to promote transnational projects set up by networks of teacher-researchers in Europe in order to develop and share innovative practices in the fields of education, training and youth.

With the “Short Forms Beyond Borders (SFBB)” project, we intend to work collaboratively on short forms as a tool for cultural, educational and social mediation in Europe. The relevance of short forms is becoming more and more visible in today’s society. Brevity is becoming a way of doing things, a question of time and style, indeed of thinking. Examples of short forms include short videos, text messages, short stories, Instagram stories, sound fragments, television series, short speeches, sales pitches, news briefs, slogans etc. Continue reading ““Short forms beyond borders” (SFBB): AN ERASMUS+ Strategic Partnerships Project”

We are delighted to present the programme for this year’s ENSFR Conference in Montpellier:

Short Fiction as Humble Fiction

An International Conference organised by EMMA (Etudes Montpelliéraines du Monde Anglophone) with ENSFR (The European Network for Short Fiction Research)

 

17-18-19 October 2019

Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier3, France

Site Saint Charles 2

Auditorium & Salle Kouros

Convenors: Jean-Michel Ganteau & Christine Reynier

 

 

 

Thursday 17 October

9h45-10h15 Welcome

 

Auditorium

10h15 Opening of the Conference

 

10h30 Keynote lecture

Chair: Christine Reynier

Elke D’hoker (University of Leuven, Belgium)

Humbling the Human: Animals in Contemporary Short Fiction

 

11h30 Coffee break (Jardin d’hiver)

 

12h Parallel panels

 

Ecocritical Echoes (Auditorium)

Chair: Judith Misrahi-Barak

       Xavier Le Brun (University of Angers, France)

Malcolm Lowry’s Humble Hypotyposes in Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place (1961)

       Diane Leblond (University of Lorraine, France)

Organic Connections and Creatures of Compost in Ali Smith’s “The Beholder” (2015) and Daisy

Johnson’s “Starver” (2016): When Humility Reframes the Ambition of Short Fiction

 

Humble Details (Salle Kouros)

Chair: Julián Jiménez Heffernan

       Maxwell Donaldson (University of Aberdeen, UK)

The “Little” Things: An Exploration of the Use of Gesture in J. D. Salinger’s Nine Stories

       Etienne Février (University Toulouse Jean-Jaurès, France)

Humble Ambitions: Steven Milhauser’s Short Fiction

 

13h Lunch Break

 

14h30 Parallel panels

 

Invisibilities 1 (Auditorium)

Chair: Elke D’hoker

       Julián Jiménez Heffernan (University of Córdoba, Spain)

The Humiliating Thing: Infrastructural Storytelling in Henry James’s “Julia Bride”

       Emmanuel Vernadakis (University of Angers, France)

Tourism, Tourists and the Humble in E. M. Forster’s “The Story of the Siren” (1920)

       Emma Liggins (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)

Haunted Space and the Inescapable Past in May Sinclair’s Uncanny Stories (1923)

       Victoria Margree (University of Brighton, UK)

Imitation and Innovation in the Ghost Stories of Eleanor Scott

 

Humble Women (Salle Kouros)

Chair: Bryony Randall

       Diane Drouin (Sorbonne University, France)

“A ridiculous little accident”: Mina Loy’s Forgotten Short Stories

       Elena Gelasi (University of Cyprus)

The Lonely Voice of Women. The Humblest among the Humble. From Freeman to Simpson

       Ena Panda (University of Delhi, India)

Representation of Alienation in Short Stories Written by Contemporary Francophone Women

Writers of Québec

       Ailsa Cox (Edge Hill University, UK)

An Extremely Private Literary Giant

 

16h15 Coffee break (Jardin d’hiver)

Auditorium

16h45

Short Story Competition

Short Story Readings 1

 by Cormac James, Ashutosh Bhardwaj and Ailsa Cox

 

Jardin d’hiver

18h Cocktail

Friday 18 October

 

10h Auditorium

 

Humble War Stories

Chair: Isabelle Brasme

       Elsa Högberg (Uppsala University, Sweden)

‘Unaccustomed to the ear, primitive harmonies of the world’: Katherine Mansfield’s Cries

       Lisa Feklistova (University of Cambridge, UK)

‘Humble struggles’ —Mundane Routine in the Short Story in the Wake of the Great War

       Lucy Durneen (University of Cambridge, UK)

“Walking back into your besieged life”: War Stories, Humbly Told

 

 

11h30 Coffee break (Jardin d’hiver)

 

12h Keynote lecture

Chair : Jean-Michel Ganteau

Ann-Marie Einhaus (Northumbria University, UK)

Scraps of Paper? First World War Short Fiction and the Ephemeral

 

13h Lunch (Salle Médicis)

 

 

14h30 Parallel panels

 

Migrants and Refugees (Auditorium)

Chair: Emma Liggins

       Judith Misrahi-Barak (University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France)

The Writing of the Refugee: Re-examining ‘bare life’ in Edwidge Danticat’s Short Stories from

‘Children of the Sea’ to ‘Without Inspection’

       Carol Millner (Curtin University, Western Australia)

       Trace: Short Fiction and the Western Australian Migrant Experience

       Laura Gallon (University of Sussex, UK)

Short Stories & Recipes: A Reflection on Food, Gender and Genre

 

Ordinary Lives (Salle Kouros)

Chair : Emmanuel Vernadakis

       Florence Marie (Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour, France)

Dorothy Richardson’s Humble Short Fiction

       Bryony Randall (University of Glasgow, UK)

‘Partly in Prose’: Woolf’s Humble Cutbush

       Mallory Alexandre (University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France)

“My roots go down to the depths of the world”: Virginia Woolf’s Humble Short Fiction

 

16h Coffee break (Jardin d’hiver)

 

Auditorium

16h30 Short Story Readings 2

by Jane Alexander, Lucy Durneen, Dan Powell,

Alison Boumid and John David Rutter

 

20h Dinner in town

 

 

Saturday 19 October

 

9h30 Parallel panels

 

Regional and National Identities (Auditorium)

Chair: Ann Marie Einhaus

       Alda Correia (New University, Lisbon, Portugal)

Regionalist Short Fiction as Humble Fiction

       Gérald Préher (UC Lille, France)

Shirley Ann Grau’s “The Empty Night”: The Humble Story Behind a Pulitzer-Prize Winner

       Kritika Chettri (University of North Bengal, India)

The Nepali Short Story and its Humble Conflicts

 

Invisibilities 2 (Salle Kouros)

Chair: Xavier Le Brun

       Leila Haghshenas (University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France)

Humbled Selves in Leonard Woolf’s Short Fiction

       Tina Terradillos (University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France)

Radclyffe Hall’s Short Fiction: A Humble Ethics of the Flawed

        Sylvie Maurel (University Toulouse Jean-Jaurès, France)

From Minority to Humility: Jean Rhys’s Short Fiction

 

11h Coffee break (Jardin d’hiver)

 

11h30 Parallel panels

 

Specific Forms (Auditorium)

Chair: Ailsa Cox

       Ashutosh Bhardwaj (Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, India)

Conversations between the Story and the Novel: Reflections on the Self and the Other

       Jane Alexander (University of Edinburgh, UK)

Writing chronic illness in short fiction

 

 

Readers (Salle Kouros)

Chair: Sandrine Sorlin

       Amanda Bigler (University of Lille, France)

Empathic Second-Person Narrators in Short Fiction

       Dan Powell (University of Leicester, UK)

The shape of the British Short Story in the Mid-twentieth Century: Developing a Preclosural

Methodology for Writing Short Fiction

       John D. Rutter (University of Central Lancashire, UK)

The Death of the Reader

13h Lunch (Salle Médicis)

 

Tour of Montpellier

Musée Fabre

 

 

Organising Committee

Lynn Blin, Alice Borrego, Charlotte Chassefière, Jean-Michel Ganteau, Laura Lainvae, Xavier Le Brun, Maroua Mannai, Katia Marcellin, Judith Misrahi-Barak, Christine Reynier, Tina Terradillos

https://emma.www.univ-montp3.fr/

 

 

 

This ENSFR affiliated conference will is organized by the Karima Thomas and François Huggonier of the research group CIRPaLL, Université de Angers. Keynote speakers are Michael Cart, Claude Chastagner, Rebecca Munford and Claude Savignon. You can find the programme and all information here.

Borders, Intersections and Identity in the Contemporary Short Story in English is a conference organised by the Research Project Intersections: Gender and Identity in the Short Fiction of Contemporary British Women Writers (FEDER/AEI – FEM2017-83084-P) and the Research Group Discourse and Identity (GRC2015/002, GI_1924) in affiliation with the ENSFR (European Network for Short Fiction Research). The conference is to be held at the Faculty of Philology, University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain, on 23 and 24 May, 2019.

Continue reading “CFP: Borders, Intersections and Identity in the Contemporary Short Story in English – Santiago 23-24 May 2019”

A new collection of essays on Alice Munro is out. Here is a flyer of the collection.

Flyer Space and Place in Alice Munro’s Fiction

Protest Europe

Award-winning British publishing house Comma Press, in partnership with the University of Angers, is looking to build link with other publishers, festivals and universities across Europe to partner with on an international collaboration project designed to re-engage readers and writers with people’s history and shared, common cultural heritage through a series of commissions focusing on the history of European protest. Exploring the links between different protest movements across Europe, these commissions will bring together publishers, writers, historians, activists, translators, researchers and universities to collaborate on the creation of a series of short stories, semi-fictionalising this history in a way which shows shared goals, influences and strategies.

The stories will be written by fiction writers working in close collaboration with experts (historians and living activists) who will also write short afterwords to accompany the finished stories. The stories and afterwords will be translated and published simultaneously across various language editions. The project will also host public events and develop digital materials to celebrate and better understand these pivotal moments of ‘popular resistance’ – protests which, in some small way, helped to shape modern Europe.

If you or your organisation would like to find out more about this project, email coordinator Ra Page at ra.page@commapress.co.uk.

The Society for the Study of the Short Story invites proposals for its 15th conference to take place in Lisbon, 27-30 June 2018. The conference theme is “Beyond History: The Radiance of the Short Story”. The full cfp and further information can be found on the conference website.