Month: June 2013

Posted on

Katherine Mansfield and France

Katherine Mansfield
and France

International conference organised by the Université Paris III
—Sorbonne Nouvelle (EA 4398 PRISMES)
in conjunction with the Katherine Mansfield Society

19–21 June 2014

Guest speakers will be:
C. K. Stead, Sydney Janet Kaplan and Gerri Kimber

2014 seems the ideal year to celebrate Katherine Mansfield’s lifelong attachment to France and her passionate involvement with all things French: not just the language, literature and the arts, but the everyday world too, from recipes and customs to the contemporary socio-political context, transport, economics and of course the devastating impact of the war. France for Mansfield was a land of transit, a haven to escape to and a place of exile; it was an adopted home and a sad reminder of how far away those she loved were; life the other side of the Channel was sometimes a source of wonder and inspiration, at others the trigger for comic irony and bitter satire.

Mansfield’s biographers have minutely charted out her constant channel crossings in the years 1914–1923. Her letters, notebooks and stories all point to the different repercussions of France and French culture on her vivid imagination. Recent critical studies have explored both the story of Mansfield’s reception in France and the various influences French arts had on her own creative output. But the time now seems ripe to bring together scholars, researchers and students to try and piece together an overall picture of Mansfield in France and ‘une Mansfield française’.

Suggested topics for papers might include:

 Mansfield and French arts and literature: her reception in France; Mansfield as reader, critic and reviewer of French arts in Great Britain; her influence on contemporary and later French authors; translations and the publication history of her works in French.

 The French influence on Mansfield: French language and culture in her education and apprenticeship years; France as a setting for her stories; French life recorded in the journals in early story sketches; her readings of key French authors and their influence on her works; French aestheticism, fin-de-siècle and early-twentieth-century philosophy.

 Mansfield and French life and society: as journalist and eye-witness of war-torn France; a satirist of local habits and customs; a bemused observer of expatriate and émigré life; Paris and the French Riviera as the specific locations that have become so much associated with her work, but also French geographies of displacement, both real and affective.

 Mansfield, the polyglot, cultural ambassador and cosmopolitan: France as a step outside Englishness; forms of cultural otherness, alienation and renewal through the meeting and mixing of identities; language as empowerment and disempowerment; nationalism versus the political repercussions of border crossing; bilingualism; redefining the self as other; Mansfield the European.

 Mansfield and Frenchness as a means of thinking between: cross-dressing, roleplay, borrowed identities, impersonation; travesty, but also Frenchness itself seen from within and without, from the privileged outsider’s point of view, the ‘devenir français’ from Mansfield’s perspective.

Biographical, linguistic, literary, sociological, political comparative . . . all approaches are welcome in this endeavour to embrace Katherine Mansfield’s French life. Our exploration of the various French avenues in her life, works and afterlife will take place in the heart of Paris, and time out will be programmed into the conference to enable all those who attend to obtain a very literal sense of place and setting. Possible Mansfield-inspired walks within Paris itself and additional excursions to the immediate environs will be suggested later.

The three-day conference will also include an alternative, intercultural approach to Mansfield’s French life in the form of a cello recital given by London-based cellist Joseph Spooner and New Zealand pianist Kathryn Mosley with a programme of early twentieth century French music and works by Arnold Trowell.

 

Please submit abstracts of 250 words plus a bio-sketch of 50 words to the conference organisers kminparis@gmail.com
Deadline for abstracts: December 31st 2013
Organisers:
Claire Davison, Caroline Pollentier, Anne Mounic, Anne Besnault-Levita

Posted on

The Spatial Imaginary in Contemporary British Literature and the Arts – 18-19 October 2013, a SEAC Conference

Université de Nantes, France
contact email: 
georges.letissier@univ-nantes.fr

ANNUAL SYMPOSIUM OF THE SOCIÉTÉ DES ÉTUDES BRITANNIQUES CONTEMPORAINES
The Spatial Imaginary in Contemporary British Literature and the Arts
18th- 19th October 2013 University of Nantes (France)

http://www.laseac.fr/

The “spatial turn” which was largely initiated by Henri Lefebvre’s work La production de l’espace opened up new perspectives to investigate both literature and the arts through their intrinsic relation to the imaginary.
The renewal of interest in the category of the imagination (J.Su, 2011) affords new tracks to study contemporary fiction writers (P. Ackroyd, M. Ali, J.Barnes, E.M. Forster, J. Fowles, G. Greene, K. Ishiguro, D.H. Lawrence, Z. Smith, V. Woolf), by adopting renewed approaches that may differ from the postmodern and postcolonial paradigms. Departing from a tradition going back to Kant, and more largely the Romantics, contemporary thinkers no longer draw a neat dividing line between reason and the imagination, confining the latter to the realm of aesthetic judgment and artistic creativity. They tend rather to see the magination as a way to reach and shape other forms of knowledge, or to attain to knowledge by different means, through oblique, circuitous ways. Far from being a safe retreat, severed off from the world, the imagination may be said to be fully engaged in it. It is no longer associated to the ethereal and the abstract but should instead be seen as an intensification of the real, through “a transgression of the senses,” as André Brink once put it. Seen in this perspective, space in literature, and more generally in the arts (paintings, visual arts and installations etc.), is no longer limited to a tropical, metaphorical or rhetorical function. Space, which is no longer reduced to the level of setting or backcloth/ground, pertains to the artistic experience, both at the production and reception levels. Edward Said’s claim that “[a]fter Lukács and Proust we have become so accustomed to thinking of the novel’s plot and structure as constituted mainly by temporality that we have overlooked the function of space, geography and location,” might probably call for a slight corrective.
Contemporary criticism by encouraging the dialogue between cultural geography and the poetics of space seems to have heeded Thomas Hardy’s words: “I don’t want to see landscapes…[as] scenic paintings [or]…original realities [but rather as]… the expression of what are sometimes called abstract imaginings.”We invite contributions addressing the links between the poetics of space and the imaginary in the different areas of contemporary British studies: fiction; poetry; drama; plastic arts and theory.
Many possible directions can be considered and the following list is by no means exclusive.
– From the pre- and post-millennial urban visionary to an update on the regional novel at the beginning of the second millennium. (R. Lehmann, A. Powell)
– Cosmopolitan and heterotopic spaces (Ford Madox Ford, W. Self).
– The perception of the city in diasporic fictions (, D. Dabydeen, B. Evaristo, H. Kureishi, S. Rushdie, S. Selvon).
– Journeys to the antipodes or the poles in neo-historical novels (W. Golding, M.Kneale, L. Norfolk).
– Recurrent topoï in contemporary novels: the remains of the British estate novel (A. Hollinghurst, I. McEwan, E. Waugh), the stage, theatrical houses, music halls (A. Carter, S. Waters).
– Spatial configurations (labyrinth, spiral, installations) (I. Sinclair), architecture/texture, architectonics.
– The dynamics of space (perambulation, flânerie).
– The invention of imaginary spaces (utopia, dystopia, uchronian and futuristic places).
– Spatial hauntology (genuis loci, dybbouk) revenance.
– Theatrical spaces, spatial palimpsests (A. Ayckbourn, S. Beckett, T. Stoppard).
– The revival of canonical forms: the pastoral, green writing: Romanticism and ecology (T. Hughes, P. Larkin, E. Morgan).
– Space and theory, Mapping, artialisation.
Abstracts (200 words) with a short bio. must be addressed by June 15th to either :
georges.letissier@univ-nantes.fr
julie.morere@univ-nantes.fr
claire.patin@univ-nantes.fr

Posted on

Conference: The Short Story and Short Story Collection in the Modernist Period: Between Theory and Practice.

Academia Belgica (Rome) * 12-14 September 2013

Universiteit Gent – Katholieke Universiteit Leuven – Università di Perugia

Keynote speakers: Adrian Hunter (University of Stirling), Christine Reynier (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3), Raffaele Donnarumma (Università di Pisa)

The modernist period (1900-1940) is a time when the short story came into its own as an intricate, flexible and highly respected literary genre. Across Europe, writers experimented with the form in ways which have come to shape the short story until the present day. Within the changing publication contexts of the time, moreover, writers also devised new approaches to publish short stories together within a collection, sequence or cycle. In the first half of the twentieth century, finally, several writers and critics also sought to define the short story as a genre and to distinguish its characteristics from both earlier forms of shorter prose and from the novel.

This conference hopes to address all these different guises, debates and contexts of the short story in the modernist period, across different countries and literary traditions. Its primary aim is to reflect on the modern short story and short story collection from a theoretical perspective, but it also seeks to contextualise this theoretical approach through a number of case studies from different literary traditions. By bringing together scholars from these different traditions, the conference also aims to trace cross-references, intertextual links or general influences in a broader comparative perspective.

The conference is organised by the departments of literary studies of the universities of Ghent, Leuven and Perugia. It will take place in the Academia Belgica in Rome.

The program can found at the following link:

http://www.shortstoryandmodernism.ugent.be/programme

Posted on

13th International Conference on the Short Story in English

The 13th International Conference on the Short Story in English, (15*)16 to 19 July, 2014, Vienna, Austria.

Theme: Unbraiding the Short Story

This conference will bring writers of fiction in English (Irish, British, American, Canadian, Australian, Caribbean, South-African, Indian, Sri Lankan, Indonesian, etc.) and writers who have had (or will have for this event) their work translated into English together with scholars of the short story, and all will join in reading sessions, roundtable discussions and panels, and translation workshops.