Month: July 2014

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Cfp Essays on David Mitchell

Collection of Essays on David Mitchell – Call for Abstracts

Courtney Hopf (NYU) and Wendy Knepper (Brunel University)

contact email:
ch126@nyu.edu and wendy.knepper@brunel.ac.uk

Building on from our successful Symposium on David Mitchell held at NYU London on 9 May, we are moving forward with a proposal for a collection with a major publisher and are seeking abstracts for selection.

Mitchell’s oeuvre is often celebrated for its distinctive vision of cosmopolitanism, remediation of genre(s), and relationship to postmodern, posthuman, and postcolonial discourses. This collection of essays aims to expand our understanding of Mitchell’s work by considering all aspects of his literary and cultural output, including novels, short stories, cinematic adaptation, opera/libretti, and multimodal aesthetics.

Works by David Mitchell

– Ghostwritten (1999)
– number9dream (2001)
– Cloud Atlas (2004)
– Black Swan Green (2006)
– The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010)
– The Bone Clocks (2014)
– Short stories
– Libretti / operatic performance
– Translation (perhaps in connection with disability studies)
– Film adaptation (Cloud Atlas and The Voorman Problem)

Possible topics (but not a comprehensive list!)
– Stylistic concerns, such as experimentation, realism, genres, slipstream, etc.
– Eco-criticism
– Gender / Feminist / Queer perspectives
– Terror / Trauma
– Postcolonial perspectives
– Biopolitics and in/securities
– Disability Studies
– East/West
– Globalization
– World literature
– Music and/or Multimodal approaches
– Popular Culture
– Influences and intertextual readings

Deadline for abstracts: 1 August, 2014
For this collection, we would prefer to see proposals focusing on a single text or grouped works as listed above. Please email abstracts of 300-400 words to Wendy Knepper at wendy.knepper@brunel.ac.uk and Courtney Hopf at ch126@nyu.edu. If you would like to write on The Bone Clocks, please do contact us to arrange for a later submission deadline. We anticipate chapters of 6,000 words in length.

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Women Writing Across Cultures Conference

WOMEN WRITING ACROSS CULTURES: PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

An international symposium at St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford

Friday 26 September to Sunday 28 September 2014

This symposium aims to foster dialogue among researchers and practitioners dealing with women’s writing in a variety of fields:

  • transnational writing and writing across cultures;
  • writing across academic disciplines, across the humanities and social sciences, across the arts and sciences;
  • encounters between the critical and the creative, the academic and the popular, art and life, history and life-writing, orality and literacy, collective and individual authorship, analysant and analyst;
  • crossing temporal boundaries: women’s writing of the past impacting on the present, imagining futures for women’s writing.

Organized by the ‘What is Women’s Writing?’ Interdisciplinary Research Group, supported and funded by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH).

Speakers include short story writer Kate Clanchy

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Indo British Fiction Anthology

Indo-British Anthology of New Fiction: Call for Submissions

Radical fiction or ‘New Fiction’ (NF) is a challenger that is here to break tradition. The passé is no longer acceptable in the Anthology, a book of new writing in English that aims to promote new modes of thinking, seeing and expression.
NF is all about innovation in writing, fiction written in a new way, challenging our preconceptions. It is ‘dangerous’ stuff composed by mobile, imaginative minds across a fast-shrinking globe. We are looking for short stories in all their manifestations, preferably composed in English, from Indian or British writers.
The editors want bold, angry pieces of writing that are unhappy with the deterministic, narrow story-telling framework of previous generations of writers, literary editors and academics, and which are cerebral and innovative. The ideal New Writer (NW) for us is ‘impatient’, the way Derrida was with the Western logos and everything foundational, metaphysical and fixed, and tells us about current problems facing their respective nations, showing us the real UK and India.
The Indo-British Anthology of New Fiction will be edited by Dr. Nick Turner (Edge Hill University, UK) and Dr. Sunil Sharma, principal, Bharat College (affiliated to University of Mumbai), Badlapur, Mumbai, India, and published by the leading publisher Authors Press India. http://www.authorspressbooks.com/index.php. The model will be similar to Dr Sharma’s earlier publication:
https://authors-unlimited.org/book-member/indo-Australian-anthology-of-short-fiction

Each selected/invited contributor will receive a free copy, and the rest at discounted rates.

Deadline: September 30, 2014.

Each writer is requested to submit one or two short stories of maximum 5,000 words each, along with a brief bio and contact details. The stories must be previously unpublished.

Please contact Sunil Sharma drsharma.sunil@gmail.com for Indian writings, and Nick Turner for British ones at drnicholasturner2013@gmail.com.

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John Burnside wins Edge Hill Prize

The Scottish writer John Burnside has won the 2014 Edge Hill Prize for a published short story collection from the UK or Ireland for his collection, Something Like Happy.  The other four finalists were Bernie McGill,  Jaki McCarrick, David Rose and Rachel Trezise who won the Readers’ Choice prize, judged by creative writing students at Edge Hill.  The judging panel for the main prize was headed up by last year’s winner, Kevin Barry.

http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/news/2014/07/edge-hill-short-story-prize-2014-winner-announced/