Category: Calls for papers

Since the turn of the twentieth-century, Irish fiction has seen innovation and experimentation on many different fronts. Many novelists have pushed the boundaries of the novel form and also the Irish short story is being rewritten along new lines. It is in this respect telling that the Goldsmiths Prize for innovative fiction has, since its inception in 2013, already been awarded to three Irish novelists and that many other Irish writers have won major prizes such as the Booker Prize, the Costa Award, and the BBC short story award. To get a sense of the variety of innovation and experimentation that is going on in Irish fiction at the moment, think of the re-kindling of (post)modernist experiment by Eimer McBride, Mike McCormack and Caitriona Lally; the extraordinary take of ordinary life by Sara Baume, Colm Tóibín, Donal Ryan, and Claire-Louise Bennett; the play with genre conventions in the work of Claire Kilroy, John Banville, and Anne Enright; the powerful re-invention of the historical novel by Lia Mills, Sebastian Barry, and Mary Morrissy; or the darkly comic tales of Irish life on the part of Kevin Barry, Lisa McInerney, Keith Ridgway and Paul Murray. In the short story too, formal experimentation and innovation can be found in the work of a new generation of Irish writers: Danielle McLoughlin, Lucy Caldwell, Mary Costello, and Colin Barrett have exploited the conventions of the traditional Irish realist story to suit their own thematic ends, while writers like Jan Carson, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Roisin O’Donnell and June Caldwell combine the realist story with magical, folkloric or fantastic elements to tell tales about contemporary Dublin and Belfast life.

Continue reading “CFP: Innovation and Experiment in Contemporary Irish Fiction – University of Leuven – 29 Nov – 1 Dec 2018”

(NOTE: the deadline for proposals has been extended to the 21st of January)

This event is the latest in a series of workshops and symposiums that have been organized in 2016 and 2017 by the University of Angers and the University of Nantes for the FOBrALC project, and indicates a growing interest for short forms research in the newly formed conglomerate of Loire Valley and Brittany Universities, France.

The concept of brevity is, of course, not necessarily synonymous with shortness, and the question of the relationship between short forms and time deserves more critical attention.

In the concept of fleetingness, time is seemingly unhinged. Between the unchangeable time of the maxim, the immediateness of the aphorism, the instantaneity of the fleeting image that, once retransmitted, “erases the trace of time”, the ephemeral time of performances (land-art, photos posted on Instagram, news briefs, news flashes…), precise time that shrinks, and/or extends into duration (diaries, Facebook posts, tweets, poetry collections), the fragmented time of television series proposing a story through a series of “micro-narratives” or the repetitive temporality of story loops, the concept of fleetingness creates a new dynamic in the short form. We propose to examine the poetics of fleetingness or even its ethics. We could consider, for example, photographic shots stolen by paparazzi or taken during natural catastrophes, or even demonstration banners or websites that overflow with maxims for our modern times. The diversity of these practices leads us to examine the strengths as well as the weaknesses of short forms: their effectiveness and moral relevance as well as the question of sustainability or long term conservation.

Perhaps the idea of fleetingness might also reveal the danger inherent to short forms, that of the unfinished, the risk of irrelevance or nonsense, or even of incomplete reception. It might also generate in short forms the force of shock, as laconic, lapidary bursts could serve as proof of semantic and semiotic effectiveness, and also as a promise of sustainability and conservation.

 

The notions of brevity and fleetingness could also be studied in association with the following:

1. Interconnected concepts:

• The immediate, instantaneous, ephemeral
• Intensity, violence: explosion, shock, impact
• Tone and style: laconic, lapidary, dry, brusque, aggressive; changes in style brought about by changes in form (email, twitter…)
• Mysticism: revelation; myths and the sacred
• Creation and its energies: dazzling, overflowing
• Fragmentation, the relationship between the complete and the incomplete, the inexpressible
• Possible contradictions: finesse vs. coarseness, concentration vs. reduction, density vs lightness, the ephemeral vs. the sustainable

2. Artistic Forms

•  Performances, land-art, street-art, bandes dessinées, comic strips, flashmobs, photography…
•   Literary short forms: Flash-fiction, nano-fiction, embedded stories, anecdotes, poetry…
•   Scenic and audiovisual short forms: theatre, cliff-hangers, television micro-narratives

3. Practices, receptions and uses: zapping, “teasers,” concentration/selection (abstracts, extracts, summaries), stylisation, synthesis, modes of knowledge and comprehension of the world, culture, of reality through short forms (pedagogical, therapeutic, and scientific uses), caricature, stereotype, etc.

4. Forms of expression, of communication and information : manifestoes, slogans, posters, news briefs, media reports, promotional speeches, trailers …

In order to better understand the complex and multiform concept of the “short form” through the prism of temporality, we hope to have a wide-ranging interdisciplinary approach in areas as varied as literature, history, philosophy, information sciences, linguistics, didactics, sociology, medicine, psychology, the arts, performance, the economics of creative practice, etc.

Proposals for papers in English or in French (350-500 words) should be sent to Karima Thomas (karima.thomas@univ-angers.fr) and Cécile Meynard (cecile.meynard@univ-angers.fr), along with a brief CV by 7 January 2018. The scientific committee will examine proposals and send notice of acceptance by 25 January at the latest.

 

Proposals are invited for a conference dedicated to the novels and short stories of British writer, Sarah Hall. The conference will be attended by Sarah Hall herself and papers delivered at the conference will be considered for inclusion in an edited collection to be published in Gylphi’s ‘Contemporary Writers’ series. The conference is hosted by the University of Leuven and being organised by Elke D’hoker (KU Leuven, Belgium) and Alexander Beaumont (York St John University, UK). It will take place at the Leuven Irish college (http://www.leuveninstitute.eu/). Please send a 300-word abstract for a 20-min paper, along with a 100-word biographical note, to Elke D’hoker (elke.dhoker@kuleuven.be) and Alexander Beaumont (a.beaumont@yorksj.ac.uk) by Friday 19^th January 2018.

Sarah Hall published her first novel, Haweswater, in 2002. Since then she has developed into one of the UK’s most protean and quietly acclaimed writers, producing poetry, short fiction and novels in a wide range of genres which are nonetheless bound together by a common style and a common set of preoccupations: wild(er)ness, female sexuality and the deep connection between language, landscape and the body.

Hall’s novels have been nominated for the Booker prize on three occasions and have won a host of other awards; in 2013 she won the BBC National Short Story Award for ‘Mrs Fox’. Her work is regularly reviewed in the British and American press, and, following the publication of The Wolf Border in 2015, has in recent years enjoyed a significant increase in exposure. Yet little scholarly material on Hall’s writing exists, despite its relevance to ongoing concerns within contemporary literary and cultural studies. The complicated legacies of Romanticism; ecocriticism and rewilding; rural poverty and the invisibility of non-metropolitan spaces; social breakdown and the endless reconstitution of political power; the dissolution, renovation and survival of gender norms; the reinvention of subjectivity and the scriptable nature of the body – all are significant preoccupations of the field and features of Hall’s rapidly evolving body of writing.

Topics for papers might include, but are not limited to:

• Romanticism and the ‘post-Romantic’
• The country and the city: agriculture, land ownership and rural labour
• Wilderness and borderlands
• The representation of ‘the North’
• Desire, the body and sexual agency
• Language and poetics
• Art, ekphrasis and aesthetics
• The mixed genres and modes of Hall’s work (pastoral, Gothic, dystopia etc)
• The intertextual dimension of Hall’s writing
• Hall’s relationship with the ‘new nature writing’
• The aesthetics, politics and economics of the short story

 

The fourth ENSFR conference will take place in Lille, France. Proposals are invited (in French or English) that explore the relation between short fiction and desire across different periods and genres, including flash fiction, the novella and short story cycles. As a concentrated and intense form of prose writing, short fiction lends itself very well to representations of desire. As Sarah Hall says, “The form is very good at unzipping the mind’s fly.” Think of Katherine Mansfield’s “Bliss” (1918): “For the first time in her life Bertha Young desired her husband;”or of J. G. Ballard’s “The Subliminal Man” (1963), where hypnotic techniques of advertising turn the desire for consumer items into an irresistible compulsion. The short story form itself may be driven by desire as a structuring principle, the desire for instance of the reader to explore its gaps and mysteries. In Towards the End (1985), for instance, John Gerlach suggests that closure may be an object of desire. Several critics have analysed desire and its objects in the novel. Peter Brooks speaks of “a dynamics of desire animating narrative and the construal of its meanings”, René Girard’s concept of “mimetic desire” suggests that a human instinct for imitation is what drives people. Do these ideas also apply to the short story or do desire and the short story interact in a different way?Literature, religion and art began with objects of desire and have never abandoned the theme. From Helen of Troy and the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden via Novalis’s blue flower to the throne of Westeros, numerous examples spring immediately to mind, and if the ten commandments tell people not to covet anything that belongs to their neighbours, this surely implies that they are highly likely to do just that.

Although we expect most proposals to be individual, panel proposals of three closely related papers will also be considered. Proposals (250-300 words) should be sent to gerald.preher@univ-catholille.fr and suzanne.bray@univ-catholille.fr by 15^th December 2017.