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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ENSFR conference deadline for proposals

‘The Child of the Century’: Reading and Writing Short Fiction Across Media
Edge Hill University, UK, May 13-14, 2016: deadline for proposals extended to January 31st 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 31st 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/

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

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Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story Bandol, France, 10-12 June 2016

Conference organised by the Katherine Mansfield Society Hosted by the town of Bandol, France Supported by the New Zealand Embassy, Paris and the University of Northampton, UK

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS Professor Enda Duffy University of California, Santa Barbara, USA Professor Ailsa Cox Edge Hill University, UK

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS This international conference celebrates the centenary of Katherine Mansfield’s visit to Bandol, where ‘The Aloe’ (the first draft of ‘Prelude’), was completed, Jan-March 1916. The genesis of this story bears witness to Mansfield’s development as a modernist writer, with her everyday subject matter and privileging of modernity, her focus on small, seemingly insignificant details at the expense of comprehensive description, her preference for the vignette which provides the reader with only fleeting glimpses of people and places, and her preoccupation with colour and her emphasis on surfaces and reflections. Her employment of multiple, shifting perspectives which are both subjective and fractured also displays an affinity with Impressionism, as does the attention she pays to the ephemeral effects of artificial and natural light, weather effects, and seasonal changes. Like painting in watercolours, short story writing may seem a deceptively easy task for those who have not attempted it, and this goes part way to explain the dismissive tone taken by so many critics towards the genre.

H. E. Bates was an early-twentieth-century critic who understood this difficulty: ‘[t]he short story is the most difficult and exacting of all prose forms; it must not be allowed to foster the illusion […] that its very brevity makes it easy to do’. Clare Hanson makes the claim that the short story has often been the ‘chosen form of the exile […] who longs to return to a home country which is denied him/her’, Mansfield’s work being an obvious example of this tenet. Even today, the short story is perceived to be a lesser genre, contributing to the view held by some critics of Mansfield as a minor writer. Yet, the development of her own particular free indirect discourse form of writing, linking it to literary impressionism, culminated in her position as one of the most important early exponents of the modernist short story. Her techniques include the use of symbolism and humour; themes incorporate violence, war, death, childbirth, relationships – especially in marriage – together with feminist and sexual issues. Suggested topics for papers might include:

• The modernist short story • KM as practitioner of the short story genre • KM’s development as a short story writer • KM in the South of France • KM as commentator on the short story • KM and her legacy to the short story form • Literary influences on KM as a short story writer • Artistic and musical influences on KM as a short story writer • KM, the short story and the marketplace • Reception of KM as a short story writer

Abstracts of 200 words, together with a short bio-sketch, should be sent to the conference organisers: Dr Gerri Kimber, University of Northampton, UK Professor Janet Wilson, University of Northampton, UK at kms@katherinemansfieldsociety.org Submission deadline: 31 March 2016.

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Adaptation Conference, Lille 2016: Call for Papers

Adaptation, Revision, Translation: From Life to Art, from the Page to Stage and Screen

June 17-18, 2016 at Lille Catholic University

Reflecting upon the new edition of her Theory of Adaptation published in 2013, Linda Hutcheon feels that the first version of her study only looked at adaptation “in terms of repetition with variation.” She now sees “new forms and platforms” and wonders “where to draw the line at what we call an adaptation?” In an endeavour to fuel the body of work already available on adaptation theory, this conference means to explore a variety of avenues. Contributors are welcome to work on textual manipulations: short stories being turned into novels, the use of myth, legends and of the epic tradition in children’s books or “original rewritings” such as Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1998).

History or real crime finding their way into fiction or film also have their place here, whether in detective fiction classics like F. Tennyson Jesse’s A Pin to See the Peepshow (1934) or glamorous historical bestsellers like Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl (2001). As Linda Seger points out, “adaptation is a transition, a conversion, from one medium to another. All original material will put up a fight, as if it were saying ‘take me as I am’.” How novelists and screenwriters resist that temptation and engage in the necessary reconceptualising in order to create a storyline and a work of art is an essential part of our subject.

It will also be interesting to reflect, in a more traditional way, on adaptations of fiction into film and, in a less conventional way, on fiction that derives from film. We shall thus see in what ways Kamilla Elliott’s comments in Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate can be taken further for, according to her, “if art draws from real life, then an art adapting another art is one step further away from real life as a representation of a representation.” Other points of entry would be to dive into the relationship between plays and musicals (My Fair Lady being the classic example of the genre) or from a story or event to painting, sculpture or graphic art. As Hutcheon’s study suggests, adaptation is interactive in that it enables “the knowing audience” to envisage “adaptation as adaptation.” The remakes of famous films – re-adaptations – such as The Great Gatsby could lead to discussions on revision as a means of introducing the young public to classics. Other forms of adaptation such as fan fiction or new translations of famous works could also be taken into consideration. The word “adaptation” will thus be understood in a broad sense, making interdisciplinary approaches possible.

Abstracts of about 500 words should be sent to Suzanne Bray (suzanne.bray@univ-catholille.fr) and Gérald Préher (gerald.preher@univ-catholille.fr) before January 15, 2016 along with a short biographical note.

Academic panel: Suzanne Bray (Lille Catholic University), Cindy Hamilton (Liverpool Hope University), Jacqui Miller (Liverpool Hope University), Gérald Préher (Lille Catholic University)

 

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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

Home

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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/