Author: Michelle Ryan

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Call for Papers Special Section in Journal of the Short Story in English

Call for Papers: Affect and the Short Story (Cycle)

 The Journal of the Short Story in English announces a call for papers for an upcoming special section—“Affect and the Short Story (Cycle)”

 The guest editors are interested in papers addressing how the field of Affect Studies can help inform the ways we read short stories and the ways we theorize about formal and generic labels like the Short Story and, especially, the Short Story Cycle. We are also interested in papers that make use of short story or short story theory in ways that might inform our understanding of the transmission and operation of affect and emotion.

Submissions might put affect theorists such as Sara Ahmed and Sianne Ngai into conversation with scholars of the short story and cycle like Susan Garland Mann and James Nagel. Other approaches might examine the implications of Deleuzian understandings of affect for both genre (Is the short story a particularly minoritarian form?) and structure (Can Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the plateau illuminate the affective workings of the cycle structure?).

Suitable submissions will follow the guidelines posted on the JSSE website

(http://jsse.revues.org/234) and deal explicitly with understandings of emotion in topics such as (but not limited to) the following:

-Affect and the short story

-Affect and the short story cycle

-Affect in the short story

-The affective power of the short story

-Brevity and affect

-The role of the affective moment (the epiphany, the moment of being, the

moment of time) in the short story

-Affect and genre (the gothic, sentimental literature, etc.)

-Affects and categories

The guest editors welcome studies of individual stories and short story cycles, as well as comparative studies, from a range of periods. Inquiries, as well as complete and correctly formatted articles should be submitted directly to the section editors at both fmm09@my.fsu.edu and pa09d@my.fsu.edu by September 1, 2014.

Guest Editors: Paul Ardoin, Florida State University

Fiona McWilliam, Florida State University

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Call for Papers Special Issue of Journal of the Short Stories in English: D.H. Lawrence

Call for Articles for a special issue of the Journal of Short Stories in English devoted to D. H. Lawrence

Guest editors: Christine Zaratsian (Aix-Marseille Université) and Shirley Bricout (Montpellier III)

Transgressing Borders and Borderlines

 This special issue aims at bringing into focus the patterns of transgression which map out borders and borderlines as well as in-between territories in D. H. Lawrence’s shorter fiction. The characters he stages within the boundaries of the stories evolve along patterns of harmony and discord which lead them to transgress limits as they “seek that invisible and promised territory, that country that does not exist but that [they bear in their] dreams, and that must indeed be called a beyond” (Julia Kristéva, Strangers to Ourselves).

Lawrence himself crossed geographical borders when he left his native country, breaking free from political, social and religious conventions. He also tested and transgressed literary norms by blurring the limits of shorter fiction which developed into novellas, long short stories or short novels, a range Pierre Tibi expounds on in his Aspects de la nouvelle. In April 1924, on the day he sent “The Border Line” to his agent Curtis Brown, Lawrence encapsulated his approach to writing shorter fiction in a letter to his American editor Thomas Seltzer: “I am busy doing a few short stories – I wish they’d stay shorter. But they are the result of Europe, and perhaps a bit dismal.” In his lifetime, Lawrence published five volumes of short stories and three others were published posthumously. His career as a short story writer opened with “The Prelude” which was published under Jessie Chambers’s name. Providing an interesting cue, the title of this very first piece already points to the in-between territory where the artist crosses the border between nothingness and creation. On the other hand, in an iconoclastic twist, his last short story called “The Man Who Died” inverts the crossing of the border from life to death as the main character rises from the dead to join the living.

The contributors may explore how the characters’ liminal position acquired in a time of crisis empowers them to experience renewal or how it brings about their doom. The textual dynamics fostered by the transgression of borders and borderlines can be examined as they endow the open endings of most of Lawrence’s stories with a mythopoetic dimension and enable “the text [to] overrun the limits assigned to it” (Jacques Derrida, “Living On” in Deconstruction and Criticism). Therefore, just as the characters reach out from their insularity to explore a geographic or symbolic beyond, the short story may no longer be self contained but pertain to a larger aesthetic pattern.

We invite contributions around the following themes

–         Distinct/ indistinct, fluctuating boundaries

–         The beyond and the unknown

–      Insularity

–      Escape and exile

–     The journey as a means to cross boundaries

–         Encounters and exchanges / alterity

–      Life and death / the body and transgression

–         Iconoclasm / transgression of the sacred

–         The boundaries of the text / intertextuality

–         Recurring patterns of transgression

This list is, of course, not exhaustive.

Contributors are invited to use, when available, the Cambridge Editions of D. H. Lawrence’s short stories.

Abstracts in English (300 words) with bibliographical references and a short biography are to be sent by 31 May 2014 to both

Shirley Bricout shirley.bricout@ac-rennes.fr and

Christine Zaratsian christine.zaratsian@univ-amu.fr

Only original articles will be considered.

Notification of acceptance by end of September 2014.

Articles are to be sent in by 15 September 2015 with an abstract in English and in French, and a bibliography. Suitable submissions will follow the guidelines posted on the JSSE website http://jsse.revues.org/234

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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

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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

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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.

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ENSFR

The European Network for Short Fiction Research was created as a joint initiative of researchers at Edge Hill University (U.K.) and the CRILA research group (UPRES EA 4639), Université d’Angers, France. Our broad aim is to provide a forum and resources for European-based researchers, and to stimulate further research, both theoretical and practice-based.