Category: Calls for papers

Posted on

CFP Blue Short Stories — Special Issue N° 85 of the Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE) — Deadline for proposals 1 November 2024

Painting by Julia Himmelstein, “3 a.m”, from her Portland exhibit Bodies of Water

Blue Short Stories

Special Issue N° 85 of the Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE)

 Guest editors : Bénédicte Meillon, Université d’Angers, and Frédérique Spill, Université Jules Vernes Picardie

Since the turn of the century, the stakes inherent in climate change have turned out to be indissoluble from the threats affecting coastal and marine ecosystems. Scientists around the world have provided evidence that global warming is interlinked with rising sea levels, with the warming and acidification of the ocean, with the dwindling of fish populations, the bleaching of coral reefs, and with an increasing number of endangered marine species. As a matter of fact, we have come to realize that the future of our predominantly blue Earth and its myriad co-dwellers hinges in great part on the blueing of our minds. Following the recent “blue turn” in the humanities and ecocriticism, which seeks to remedy the rampant “ocean deficit disorder” diagnosed by Dan Brayton and to draw our attention beyond “green,” land-based issues to “blue” ones, the call for papers for this volume arises from the awareness that blue short stories deserve more attention that they have been getting. This special issue of the JSSE will consequently focus on blue short stories, i.e. short stories dealing with marine matters and, more largely, aquatic and terraqueous beings and places in ways that depart from anthropocentric land-based studies and frameworks. The overall aim is to explore short stories that help us venture into largely uncharted dimensions of experience and knowledge, and that may thus promote urgently needed ways of blueing our perception, worldviews, and ways of life. Continue reading “CFP Blue Short Stories — Special Issue N° 85 of the Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE) — Deadline for proposals 1 November 2024”

Posted on

Special issue, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, ‘Materiality in the Short Fiction of Alice Munro’, deadline extended to November 15th.

Short Fiction Theory and Practice

‘Materiality in the Short Fiction of Alice Munro’, guest edited by Corinne Bigot, University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès, and Christine Lorre, Sorbonne Nouvelle University

“People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable—deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.”

(Munro, Lives of Girls and Women, 1971. ShrThroughout her fourteen collections of short stories, Alice Munro has shown a clear interest in how her characters’ inner life and perception of the world are defined by the material things most immediate to them, as exemplified in the epigraph, a well-known quotation from Lives of Girls and women. Materiality is an integral dimension of culture (Tilley et al., 2006), and in Munro’s work, it is central to an understanding of social, gendered and individual existence, as the two are interconnected. Material things nurture the imagination, where they stick and develop as significant, unfathomable images. They embody the mystery of life, being paradoxically, like landscape, both “touchable and mysterious” (Munro, 1974). They physically anchor characters in the here and now, but they also speak to mind and spirit. They can embody connections as well as disconnections. Whether they are kept or discarded, over time, they haunt the protagonist and lead on to chains of memories, repeatedly re-membered, and with variations. They may become symbols of something larger than themselves, but more often than not they remain images stored up in memory, as so many active links to the past that transform the perception of the present. Objects act as signs that relate to the signified – and often as an index of atmosphere – but also, beyond that, to coded concepts, in a dual dynamic that binds surface and depth, that fuses realism and myth.

 

The international, peer-reviewed journal, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice (Intellect Books) is inviting original submissions for a special issue to be published in Spring 2025, that will explore material culture in Alice Munro’s work. We welcome critical articles, short fiction, and reflections on practice that investigate any aspect of the question of materiality in Munro’s short fiction.

 

Suggested topics might include, but are not limited to:

  • Material domains: architecture, home furnishing, technology, food, clothing, style.
  • Everyday materiality: houses and their contents, the materiality of domesticity.
  • Materiality and social class: class markers, social distinction, social belonging, Marxist theory.
  • The lifecycle of things: things made, exchanged, consumed.
  • Things and their meanings: performance, transformation, obsolescence.
  • Things and social identity: politics and poetics of displaying, representing, conserving material forms.
  • Material forms and the (gendered) body: embodied subjects, body care, role of the senses, phenomenology.
  • Material forms and sociality: subjectivities, intimacies, social and familial relations, worldviews.
  • Materiality and remembrance: signs of time passing, change, transformation, evolving interpretation.
  • Materiality and circulation: exchange and consumption, technology.
  • Materiality and discards: remains, junk, waste.
  • Archeological or ethnographic situations: materiality in alien settings.
  • Material memory: cultural memory, monuments and memorials.

 

Articles should be 4,000–8,000 words long and must not exceed 8,000 words including notes, references, contributor biography, keywords and abstract. All submissions are peer-reviewed. Contributions should be submitted electronically through the journal webpage, by clicking the submissions tab here https://www.intellectbooks.com/short-fiction-in-theory-practice.

 

For style guide and submission details, please see https://www.intellectbooks.com/short-fiction-in-theory-practice.

For further enquiries, please contact the editor, Professor Ailsa Cox, coxa@edgehill.ac.uk. The deadline for submissions is extended to 15 November 2024.

 

NB: This call for papers was produced before Andrea Robin Skinner, Alice Munro’s daughter, made public revelations about her stepfather in the summer of 2024. The guest editors will pay due attention to this event and its repercussions in their editorial to the issue.

 

 

 

 

Posted on

Call for papers, ‘Materiality in the Short Fiction of Alice Munro’, guest edited by Corinne Bigot, University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès, and Christine Lorre, Sorbonne Nouvelle University

‘People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable—deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.’

(Munro, Lives of Girls and Women, 1971)

 

Throughout her fourteen collections of short stories, Alice Munro has shown a clear interest in how her characters’ inner life and perception of the world are defined by the material things most immediate to them, as exemplified in the epigraph, a well-known quotation from Lives of Girls and women. Materiality is an integral dimension of culture (Tilley et al., 2006), and in Munro’s work, it is central to an understanding of social, gendered and individual existence, as the two are interconnected. Material things nurture the imagination, where they stick and develop as significant, unfathomable images. They embody the mystery of life, being paradoxically, like landscape, both “touchable and mysterious” (Munro, 1974). They physically anchor characters in the here and now, but they also speak to mind and spirit. They can embody connections as well as disconnections. Whether they are kept or discarded, over time, they haunt the protagonist and lead on to chains of memories, repeatedly re-membered, and with variations. They may become symbols of something larger than themselves, but more often than not they remain images stored up in memory, as so many active links to the past that transform the perception of the present. Objects act as signs that relate to the signified – and often as an index of atmosphere – but also, beyond that, to coded concepts, in a dual dynamic that binds surface and depth, that fuses realism and myth.

 

The international, peer-reviewed journal, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice (Intellect Books) is inviting original submissions for a special issue to be published in Spring 2025, that will explore material culture in Alice Munro’s work. We welcome critical articles, short fiction, and reflections on practice that investigate any aspect of the question of materiality in Munro’s short fiction.

 

Suggested topics might include, but are not limited to:

  • Material domains: architecture, home furnishing, technology, food, clothing, style.
  • Everyday materiality: houses and their contents, the materiality of domesticity.
  • Materiality and social class: class markers, social distinction, social belonging
  • The lifecycle of things: things made, exchanged, consumed.
  • Things and their meanings: performance, transformation, obsolescence.
  • Things and social identity: politics and poetics of displaying, representing, conserving material forms.
  • Material forms and the (gendered) body: embodied subjects, body care, role of the senses, phenomenology.
  • Material forms and sociality: subjectivities, intimacies, social and familial relations, worldviews.
  • Materiality and remembrance: signs of time passing, change, transformation, evolving interpretation.
  • Materiality and circulation: exchange and consumption, technology.
  • Materiality and discards: remains, junk, waste.
  • Archeological or ethnographic situations: materiality in alien settings.
  • Material memory: cultural memory, monuments and memorials.

 

Articles should be 4,000–8,000 words long and must not exceed 8,000 words including notes, references, contributor biography, keywords and abstract. All submissions are peer-reviewed. Contributions should be submitted electronically through the journal webpage, by clicking the submissions tab here https://www.intellectbooks.com/short-fiction-in-theory-practice.

 

For style guide and submission details, please see https://www.intellectbooks.com/short-fiction-in-theory-practice.

For further enquiries, please contact the editor, Professor Ailsa Cox, coxa@edgehill.ac.uk. The deadline for submissions is 1 September 2024.

 

 

 

 

Posted on

ENSFR Annual Conference — Manchester October 23-25, 2023: Short Fiction: Landscape and Temporality

In The Country and The City (1973) the Welsh cultural theorist Raymond Williams wrote that the landscapes of the country are associated ‘with the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue’, whereas, city is associated with ‘the idea of an achieved centre: of learning, communication, light (p.1. 1973). Williams goes on to claim that ‘powerful hostile associations’ have developed between the city and country, with the ‘city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition’ and ‘the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation’ and that the ‘contrast between country and city’ is a ‘fundamental’ approach to literary representations to these different landscapes. (p.1. 1973). This conference will aim to consider the work that short story writers have done in supporting, disputing and subverting these claims in their depictions of landscapes. It will aim to consider a plethora of landscapes including, but not limited to, rural, urban, barren, populated, cosmopolitan, pastoral, flourishing, dying, futuristic, ancient, native, foreign, hostile, welcoming.

The other strand of short fiction writing that this conference will consider is depictions of temporality. Michael Trussler, in his paper in Contemporary Literature, writes that ‘short stories seem particularly concerned with investigating the nature of temporality. An elemental human experience is the chronological progression of time; we respond to this rudimentary condition by essentially narrativizing this process through linking events into a continuous series. Short stories intimate, however, that translating events into a continuum potentially reduces the ‘meaning’ of an event to its relative significance within an ongoing series. Opposed to synoptic assimilation (the method most historians and novelists favour), short stories maintain that the narratives we tell ourselves often mask the incongruities of existential temporality’ (p.599-600, 2002). This conference will aim to consider the relationship that the short story form has in its depictions of temporality and ask does the short story form do things uniquely, that other literary forms don’t do, in its depiction of temporality.

This conference will also engage with Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope. In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Bakhtin defines a chronotope as ‘time space’, which allows literary critics to analyse how the ‘intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships’ is ‘artistically represented in literature’ (p.84. 1981). Bakhtin goes on to state that in a chronotope, ‘Time […] thickens […and] becomes artistically visible’, and space becomes ‘charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history’ (p.250. 1981.) We aim to bring together scholars with an interest in examining these tensions and the different ways in which short story depicts landscapes and temporality. The conference’s goal is not to look at the short form in antagonism to other literary forms, but rather, we invite papers that cross-examine the marginal spaces that short fiction occupies and the intersections between landscape and temporality, that the short story form can shine a light upon.

Continue reading “ENSFR Annual Conference — Manchester October 23-25, 2023: Short Fiction: Landscape and Temporality”

Posted on

DEADLINE EXTENSION [FEBRUARY 28 2023] Call for Papers: “Short Forms in the Classroom: Breaking Down Boundaries” University of Angers, France, 10-12 July 2023

The University of Angers is organizing a closing conference for the Short Forms Beyond Borders (SFBB) pedagogical innovation project (European Erasmus + “Strategic Partnerships”) July 10-12, 2023. These three days will be structured as a “Multiplier Event,” i.e. a conference which aims to share the results of the project and initiate a reflection about its impact through the organization of conferences, workshops, and round tables. The SFBB project draws connections between research and innovative pedagogy through a focus on “short forms.” The diverse objects of study and tools in short formats can be the following: news, micro-news, tweets, pitches, Facebook or Instagram posts, short videos, short fiction, fanfiction, short films, news flashes, street art, cartoons, songs, etc.

The conference will be addressed to not only short form specialists but also primary and secondary school teachers interested in pedagogy and didactics. It also aims to reach a wider audience who might be curious to know more about these short forms which have always been associated with education, but are particularly present in contemporary modes of information and communication, often in ways of which we are not aware.

This interdisciplinary and international meeting will allow the partners of the project to present the results of their activities in innovative pedagogy with short formats to not only the pedagogical and scientific community, but also to researchers from various disciplines in the humanities, languages and social sciences. We would like to continue to reflect upon these short forms that we often struggle to define and therefore welcome presentations or activities (innovative forms are welcome) about the following topics

– Short forms and pedagogical practices

– Short literary, audiovisual and cultural forms

– Short forms and tourism

– Short forms and social mediation

– Short forms and migration

– Etc.

Languages of the conference: English and French

In person attendance is required (no online presentations will be allowed), but a hybrid format will be considered for foreign audiences to attend the discussions and conferences.

A peer-reviewed publication is planned for conference presentations.

Please send a brief (300 word) description of your proposed presentation, along with a brief (150 word) bio-bibliography to the following addresses by 28 February 2023 [deadline extension]:

Cécile Meynard: cecile.meynard@gmail.com

Michelle Ryan: michelle.ryan-sautour@univ-angers.fr

Emmanuel Vernadakis: emmanuel.vernadakis@univ-angers.fr

Posted on

Study Day on Crime Fiction Lille Catholic University, France – 7 October 2022: New Date

 

Deadline for abstract submissions: 31 May 2022

Modern detective fiction is usually considered to have started with Edgar Allan Poe’s three Dupin short stories and it is certain that the Sherlock Holmes short stories in The Strand magazine brought the new genre to the attention of the world. Other notable writers who helped shape the genre in the early 20th century, including G. K. Chesterton and Melville Davisson Post, stuck to the short form and managed both to innovate and to produce works which are still appreciated today. For Ellery Queen, writing in 1942, it was still possible to state that “the original, the ‘legitimate’ form” of detective fiction “was the short story” and to perceive the detective novel as an inflated short story. According to Catherine Ross Nickerson, “[t]he mechanisms of a detective narrative are more apparent in a short story, since there is less upholstery for hiding the ropes and pulleys. The shorter form also forces writers to make a more clear decision about whether to focus on the puzzle or on the character.”

.
However, today, some readers, writers and critics seem to prefer the longer form. For P. D. James, this is because novels give “opportunities for even more complicated plotting and more fully developed characters” and because writers “if visited by a powerful idea for an original method of murder, detective or plotline, were unwilling ̶ and indeed still are ̶ to dissipate it on a short story when it could both inspire and form the main interest of a successful novel.” In spite of this, short crime fiction still has enthusiastic readers, as has been proved by Martin Edwards’ and Mike Ashley’s numerous commercially successful anthologies, which combine long forgotten gems unearthed from various archives and stories on a particular theme written by contemporary authors. Two collections of P. D. James’s own short stories, published posthumously, have also sold extremely well; the prolific Joyce Carol Oates comes to mind as well for she regularly brings out collections of “mystery and suspense” stories which are instant successes on both sides of the Atlantic.

Short crime fiction is published in various contexts. Sherlock Holmes’s unexpected resurrection from the Reichenbach Falls is probably the reasons for many authors preferring the open series, with a beginning but no end except the author’s death, like Chesterton’s Father Brown stories. Several authors have however produced closed collections like Agatha Christie’s Labours of Hercules or Chesterton’s The Man Who Knew Too Much. Others, like Ellery Queen, have found the short format ideal for radio or television episodes. For authors who mainly write novels, like Ellis Peters and Kate Charles, a short story may provide a useful prequel or sequel to a series of novels. Equally, while detective novels are almost exclusively concerned with murder, authors frequently use the short story format to write about other, often less serious, crimes as Susan Pettigru King does in her series of stories, Crimes Which the Law Does Not Reach, published in Russell’s Magazine in 1857 and 1858.

We are looking for 20 to 25-minute papers about any aspect of short crime fiction in the English-speaking world including stories published individually in magazines, short story series, cycles or collections, anthologies, radio and television series or short plays. Papers on short crime fiction for young adults or children as well as adults are welcome.

How to Submit

Please send your proposals (approx. 300 words) to Suzanne Bray (suzanne.bray@univ-catholille.fr) and Gérald Préher (gerald.preher@univ-artois.fr)   for the revised deadline of 31st May 2022.

Posted on

CfP Modernism and Matter

Conference “Modernism and Matter” 13-14 October 2022 Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier3

An International workshop organised by EMMA (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier3) in collaboration with CIRPaLL (Université d’Angers) This workshop on modernism and matter is an incentive to interrogate the meaning of matter, and investigate its power in modernist literature. Proposals 1 June 2022.

Continue reading “CfP Modernism and Matter”

Posted on

Alasdair Gray Conference Glasgow June 2022

A message from Dr Rodge Glass to all those interested in Alasdair Gray’s short fiction.  Follow the link below for further information about this exciting event.

The University of Strathclyde and the Alasdair Gray Archive, in partnership with the Glasgow School of Art, the University of Western Brittany (HCTI), Aix-Marseille Universite (LERMA), Edge Hill University, the University of Lausanne and the Tannahill Fund for the Furtherance of Scottish Literature, are pleased to invite you to the 2nd International Alasdair Gray Conference. The conference will take place from 16th to 17th of June 2022 at the University of Strathclyde.

This two-day interdisciplinary conference will examine the nature, value and legacy of Alasdair Gray’s artistic output, considering his literary work, and his visual practice, and the relationship between the two in Gray’s oeuvre. The conference is entitled “Making Imagined Objects” in tribute to Gray’s own repeated and modest claim that he was a “maker of imagined objects”.

This is the second International Alasdair Gray Conference. The first one, convened by Professor Camille Manfredi, took place in Brest in 2012 and resulted in the critical book, Alasdair Gray: Ink for Worlds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), which Gray himself contributed to. This second Alasdair Gray Conference, with some of the same organisers involved, intends to be its continuation a decade later, expanding towards an even greater validation of Alasdair Gray’s plurality of forms.

 

Posted on

ENSFR Annual Conference — Lisbon October 2022: Short Fiction as World Literature

In Death of a Discipline, Gayatri Spivak mentions the problematic identification of “literature” with the novel form in comparative literature (2005: 123). Her concern with our general blindness to non-hegemonic forms recalls the consternation frequently shown in short fiction criticism toward the enduring novel-centrism of literary studies. This conference aims to bring together scholars with an interest in examining this tension and the different ways in which it may extend to the field of world literature. But our goal is not to look at the short form once again in stark opposition to the novel. Rather, we invite papers that interrogate the marginal spaces of short fiction from other angles and explore the underestimated potential of the short story as a cosmopolitan form, focusing on how it may tell an alternative history of literary circulation.

While brevity may well be an insufficient criterion to define the genre, it is, in the simplest sense, what makes the short story highly portable and translatable. With its ability to easily navigate distinct narrative registers, subgenres, styles, and literary traditions, the short story’s inherently movable nature is reflected in the rapidity and abundance of its publication. It often circulates in both literary and non-specialized sources that are more volatile and transmissible than books: journals, pamphlets, academic and cultural periodicals, and, increasingly, digital outlets such as websites, blogs, online magazines, and social media. It is also typically faster to translate than longer forms like the novel, as well as arguably easier to translate than more semantically and structurally complex forms like poetry. The short story is widely translated and disseminated in anthologies that frequently aim to introduce their readers to lesser-known or previously untranslated works. Additionally, the short story is the object of frequent adaptations to cinema, television and other audiovisual media.

But the short story also travels through language(s) by other means. On one hand, it is a migrant or a traveling form even within its linguistic and geo-cultural world, often appearing in collections that promote the categories of Lusophone, Anglophone, or Francophone short story. On the other hand, its portability also means that short-story writers are often influenced by, and respond to, international peers and predecessors. In this sense, the modernist short story is an apt example of an intrinsically transnational genre in which the influences of Chekhov, Kafka, Mansfield, Borges, and others, cut across national boundaries. Looking into post-modern and contemporary fiction we also have to consider emerging and renewed forms of migrant writing, with an increasing number of multilingual authors writing in a second language and sometimes acting also as translators of their own work.

Considering the diversity that characterizes the many genres of short fiction, the topics we hope to explore in the ENSFR Conference of 2022 through the theme of “Short Fiction as World Literature” include, but are not limited to, the following:

• The short story in motion: translation, adaptation, circulation

• The history of short fiction in connection to literary and social change •

• The short story as a portable form •

• Intermedial and transmedial approaches to short fiction

• Intertextuality and the short story

• The short story as a global and a local form

• Migration and the short story

• Reception theory and the reader’s response to short fiction

• Transnational styles and genres (e.g. novella, flash fiction, short story cycles)

• Multilingualism in short fiction and cross-cultural aesthetics

• The native, foreign, hegemonic, and peripheral languages of the short story

• Short fiction anthologies in world literature

• Creation and the short story: creative nonfiction, crossover fiction, multimedia storytelling.

Proposals of about 300 words for presentations in English, Portuguese, or French, together with a short biographical note (50 words) should be sent to ensfrconference2022@gmail.com by June 3.

We welcome interdisciplinary and creative presentations. Proposals from students and early-career researchers are especially encouraged. A selection of articles based on papers from the conference will be published in Short Fiction in Theory and Practice and in Journal of the Short Story in English.

The 2022 ENSFR Conference will take place in-person at the University of Lisbon School of Arts and Humanities (Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa).

Organizers: Ailsa Cox (Edge Hill University) Amândio Reis (Universidade de Lisboa) Elke D’hoker (KU Leuven) Michelle Ryan-Sautour (Université d’Angers)