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.

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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.

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.

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

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