Author: Ailsa Cox

Ailsa Cox is Professor Emerita of Short Fiction at Edge Hill University, UK. Her books include The Real Louise and Other Stories (Headland), Alice Munro (Northcote House) and Writing Short Stories (Routledge).
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CFP ENSFR conference 2016 – ‘The Child of the Century’: Reading and Writing Short Fiction Across Media

Call for Papers
‘The Child of the Century’: Reading and Writing Short Fiction Across Media

A conference of the European Network for Short Fiction Research
Edge Hill University, UK, May 13-14, 2016

Writing in 1936, Elizabeth Bowen said: ‘The short story is a young art; as we now know it, it is the child of this century. Poetic tautness and clarity are so essential to it that it may be said to stand at the edge of prose; in its use of action it is nearer to drama than to the novel. The cinema, itself busy with a technique, is of the same generation; in the last thirty years the two arts have been accelerating together.’

The child of the 20th century is still growing and developing in the 21st century, alongside an equally rapid acceleration in new media. Through discussions, presentations and performances, this conference will explore the generic affinities between short fiction and other art forms; intermedial transformations; and migrations of the form. This includes the impact of changing technologies on its writing and transmission, historically and at the present moment. Proposals are welcome from both critics and practitioners.

Topics include (but are not limited to) the following:

Short fiction as electronic literature; hypertext, twitter fiction and interactive short fiction
The short story, print and magazine culture
Short fiction and film
Short fiction and theatre
Short fiction and the visual arts, e.g. painting, photography, illustration
Short fiction and music
Short fiction and poetry
Graphic fiction
Short fiction in performance
Adaptation and hybridity
Short fiction authors working across media
Technology and form in short fiction
Short fiction, radio and podcast
New forms of transmission
Short fiction and social media
Digital research in short fiction

300-word abstracts for 20-minute papers should be sent to coxa@edgehill.ac.uk no later than midnight on the 15th of January 2016. Contributors should also send a short biographical note indicating institutional affiliation. It is envisaged that conference proceedings will be published as a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Short Fiction in Theory and Practice:
http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Journal,id=196/
For further information about the European Network for Short Fiction Research see:

We are moving – nous déménageons

Edge Hill University is located in North West England, within easy reach of Liverpool. http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/.

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International Conference: Digital Literary Studies

International Conference: Digital Literary Studies 
Date: May 14-15, 2015 
Location: School of Arts and Humanities, University of Coimbra, Portugal

‘Digital Literary Studies’ is an international conference exploring methods, tools, objects and digital practices in the field of literary studies. The digitization of artifacts and literary practices, the adoption of computational methods for aggregating, editing and analyzing texts as well as the development of collaborative forms of research and teaching through networking and communication platforms are three dimensions of the ongoing relocation of literature and literary studies in the digital medium. The aim of this two-day conference is to contribute to the mapping of material practices and interpretative processes of literary studies in a changing media ecology.

Continue reading “International Conference: Digital Literary Studies”

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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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