Category: Calls for papers

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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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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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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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Katherine Mansfield and France

Katherine Mansfield
and France

International conference organised by the Université Paris III
—Sorbonne Nouvelle (EA 4398 PRISMES)
in conjunction with the Katherine Mansfield Society

19–21 June 2014

Guest speakers will be:
C. K. Stead, Sydney Janet Kaplan and Gerri Kimber

2014 seems the ideal year to celebrate Katherine Mansfield’s lifelong attachment to France and her passionate involvement with all things French: not just the language, literature and the arts, but the everyday world too, from recipes and customs to the contemporary socio-political context, transport, economics and of course the devastating impact of the war. France for Mansfield was a land of transit, a haven to escape to and a place of exile; it was an adopted home and a sad reminder of how far away those she loved were; life the other side of the Channel was sometimes a source of wonder and inspiration, at others the trigger for comic irony and bitter satire.

Mansfield’s biographers have minutely charted out her constant channel crossings in the years 1914–1923. Her letters, notebooks and stories all point to the different repercussions of France and French culture on her vivid imagination. Recent critical studies have explored both the story of Mansfield’s reception in France and the various influences French arts had on her own creative output. But the time now seems ripe to bring together scholars, researchers and students to try and piece together an overall picture of Mansfield in France and ‘une Mansfield française’.

Suggested topics for papers might include:

 Mansfield and French arts and literature: her reception in France; Mansfield as reader, critic and reviewer of French arts in Great Britain; her influence on contemporary and later French authors; translations and the publication history of her works in French.

 The French influence on Mansfield: French language and culture in her education and apprenticeship years; France as a setting for her stories; French life recorded in the journals in early story sketches; her readings of key French authors and their influence on her works; French aestheticism, fin-de-siècle and early-twentieth-century philosophy.

 Mansfield and French life and society: as journalist and eye-witness of war-torn France; a satirist of local habits and customs; a bemused observer of expatriate and émigré life; Paris and the French Riviera as the specific locations that have become so much associated with her work, but also French geographies of displacement, both real and affective.

 Mansfield, the polyglot, cultural ambassador and cosmopolitan: France as a step outside Englishness; forms of cultural otherness, alienation and renewal through the meeting and mixing of identities; language as empowerment and disempowerment; nationalism versus the political repercussions of border crossing; bilingualism; redefining the self as other; Mansfield the European.

 Mansfield and Frenchness as a means of thinking between: cross-dressing, roleplay, borrowed identities, impersonation; travesty, but also Frenchness itself seen from within and without, from the privileged outsider’s point of view, the ‘devenir français’ from Mansfield’s perspective.

Biographical, linguistic, literary, sociological, political comparative . . . all approaches are welcome in this endeavour to embrace Katherine Mansfield’s French life. Our exploration of the various French avenues in her life, works and afterlife will take place in the heart of Paris, and time out will be programmed into the conference to enable all those who attend to obtain a very literal sense of place and setting. Possible Mansfield-inspired walks within Paris itself and additional excursions to the immediate environs will be suggested later.

The three-day conference will also include an alternative, intercultural approach to Mansfield’s French life in the form of a cello recital given by London-based cellist Joseph Spooner and New Zealand pianist Kathryn Mosley with a programme of early twentieth century French music and works by Arnold Trowell.

 

Please submit abstracts of 250 words plus a bio-sketch of 50 words to the conference organisers kminparis@gmail.com
Deadline for abstracts: December 31st 2013
Organisers:
Claire Davison, Caroline Pollentier, Anne Mounic, Anne Besnault-Levita

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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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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.