We are delighted to present the programme for this year’s ENSFR Conference in Montpellier:

Short Fiction as Humble Fiction

An International Conference organised by EMMA (Etudes Montpelliéraines du Monde Anglophone) with ENSFR (The European Network for Short Fiction Research)

 

17-18-19 October 2019

Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier3, France

Site Saint Charles 2

Auditorium & Salle Kouros

Convenors: Jean-Michel Ganteau & Christine Reynier

 

 

 

Thursday 17 October

9h45-10h15 Welcome

 

Auditorium

10h15 Opening of the Conference

 

10h30 Keynote lecture

Chair: Christine Reynier

Elke D’hoker (University of Leuven, Belgium)

Humbling the Human: Animals in Contemporary Short Fiction

 

11h30 Coffee break (Jardin d’hiver)

 

12h Parallel panels

 

Ecocritical Echoes (Auditorium)

Chair: Judith Misrahi-Barak

       Xavier Le Brun (University of Angers, France)

Malcolm Lowry’s Humble Hypotyposes in Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place (1961)

       Diane Leblond (University of Lorraine, France)

Organic Connections and Creatures of Compost in Ali Smith’s “The Beholder” (2015) and Daisy

Johnson’s “Starver” (2016): When Humility Reframes the Ambition of Short Fiction

 

Humble Details (Salle Kouros)

Chair: Julián Jiménez Heffernan

       Maxwell Donaldson (University of Aberdeen, UK)

The “Little” Things: An Exploration of the Use of Gesture in J. D. Salinger’s Nine Stories

       Etienne Février (University Toulouse Jean-Jaurès, France)

Humble Ambitions: Steven Milhauser’s Short Fiction

 

13h Lunch Break

 

14h30 Parallel panels

 

Invisibilities 1 (Auditorium)

Chair: Elke D’hoker

       Julián Jiménez Heffernan (University of Córdoba, Spain)

The Humiliating Thing: Infrastructural Storytelling in Henry James’s “Julia Bride”

       Emmanuel Vernadakis (University of Angers, France)

Tourism, Tourists and the Humble in E. M. Forster’s “The Story of the Siren” (1920)

       Emma Liggins (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)

Haunted Space and the Inescapable Past in May Sinclair’s Uncanny Stories (1923)

       Victoria Margree (University of Brighton, UK)

Imitation and Innovation in the Ghost Stories of Eleanor Scott

 

Humble Women (Salle Kouros)

Chair: Bryony Randall

       Diane Drouin (Sorbonne University, France)

“A ridiculous little accident”: Mina Loy’s Forgotten Short Stories

       Elena Gelasi (University of Cyprus)

The Lonely Voice of Women. The Humblest among the Humble. From Freeman to Simpson

       Ena Panda (University of Delhi, India)

Representation of Alienation in Short Stories Written by Contemporary Francophone Women

Writers of Québec

       Ailsa Cox (Edge Hill University, UK)

An Extremely Private Literary Giant

 

16h15 Coffee break (Jardin d’hiver)

Auditorium

16h45

Short Story Competition

Short Story Readings 1

 by Cormac James, Ashutosh Bhardwaj and Ailsa Cox

 

Jardin d’hiver

18h Cocktail

Friday 18 October

 

10h Auditorium

 

Humble War Stories

Chair: Isabelle Brasme

       Elsa Högberg (Uppsala University, Sweden)

‘Unaccustomed to the ear, primitive harmonies of the world’: Katherine Mansfield’s Cries

       Lisa Feklistova (University of Cambridge, UK)

‘Humble struggles’ —Mundane Routine in the Short Story in the Wake of the Great War

       Lucy Durneen (University of Cambridge, UK)

“Walking back into your besieged life”: War Stories, Humbly Told

 

 

11h30 Coffee break (Jardin d’hiver)

 

12h Keynote lecture

Chair : Jean-Michel Ganteau

Ann-Marie Einhaus (Northumbria University, UK)

Scraps of Paper? First World War Short Fiction and the Ephemeral

 

13h Lunch (Salle Médicis)

 

 

14h30 Parallel panels

 

Migrants and Refugees (Auditorium)

Chair: Emma Liggins

       Judith Misrahi-Barak (University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France)

The Writing of the Refugee: Re-examining ‘bare life’ in Edwidge Danticat’s Short Stories from

‘Children of the Sea’ to ‘Without Inspection’

       Carol Millner (Curtin University, Western Australia)

       Trace: Short Fiction and the Western Australian Migrant Experience

       Laura Gallon (University of Sussex, UK)

Short Stories & Recipes: A Reflection on Food, Gender and Genre

 

Ordinary Lives (Salle Kouros)

Chair : Emmanuel Vernadakis

       Florence Marie (Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour, France)

Dorothy Richardson’s Humble Short Fiction

       Bryony Randall (University of Glasgow, UK)

‘Partly in Prose’: Woolf’s Humble Cutbush

       Mallory Alexandre (University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France)

“My roots go down to the depths of the world”: Virginia Woolf’s Humble Short Fiction

 

16h Coffee break (Jardin d’hiver)

 

Auditorium

16h30 Short Story Readings 2

by Jane Alexander, Lucy Durneen, Dan Powell,

Alison Boumid and John David Rutter

 

20h Dinner in town

 

 

Saturday 19 October

 

9h30 Parallel panels

 

Regional and National Identities (Auditorium)

Chair: Ann Marie Einhaus

       Alda Correia (New University, Lisbon, Portugal)

Regionalist Short Fiction as Humble Fiction

       Gérald Préher (UC Lille, France)

Shirley Ann Grau’s “The Empty Night”: The Humble Story Behind a Pulitzer-Prize Winner

       Kritika Chettri (University of North Bengal, India)

The Nepali Short Story and its Humble Conflicts

 

Invisibilities 2 (Salle Kouros)

Chair: Xavier Le Brun

       Leila Haghshenas (University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France)

Humbled Selves in Leonard Woolf’s Short Fiction

       Tina Terradillos (University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France)

Radclyffe Hall’s Short Fiction: A Humble Ethics of the Flawed

        Sylvie Maurel (University Toulouse Jean-Jaurès, France)

From Minority to Humility: Jean Rhys’s Short Fiction

 

11h Coffee break (Jardin d’hiver)

 

11h30 Parallel panels

 

Specific Forms (Auditorium)

Chair: Ailsa Cox

       Ashutosh Bhardwaj (Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, India)

Conversations between the Story and the Novel: Reflections on the Self and the Other

       Jane Alexander (University of Edinburgh, UK)

Writing chronic illness in short fiction

 

 

Readers (Salle Kouros)

Chair: Sandrine Sorlin

       Amanda Bigler (University of Lille, France)

Empathic Second-Person Narrators in Short Fiction

       Dan Powell (University of Leicester, UK)

The shape of the British Short Story in the Mid-twentieth Century: Developing a Preclosural

Methodology for Writing Short Fiction

       John D. Rutter (University of Central Lancashire, UK)

The Death of the Reader

13h Lunch (Salle Médicis)

 

Tour of Montpellier

Musée Fabre

 

 

Organising Committee

Lynn Blin, Alice Borrego, Charlotte Chassefière, Jean-Michel Ganteau, Laura Lainvae, Xavier Le Brun, Maroua Mannai, Katia Marcellin, Judith Misrahi-Barak, Christine Reynier, Tina Terradillos

https://emma.www.univ-montp3.fr/

 

 

 

This ENSFR affiliated conference will is organized by the Karima Thomas and François Huggonier of the research group CIRPaLL, Université de Angers. Keynote speakers are Michael Cart, Claude Chastagner, Rebecca Munford and Claude Savignon. You can find the programme and all information here.

Borders, Intersections and Identity in the Contemporary Short Story in English is a conference organised by the Research Project Intersections: Gender and Identity in the Short Fiction of Contemporary British Women Writers (FEDER/AEI – FEM2017-83084-P) and the Research Group Discourse and Identity (GRC2015/002, GI_1924) in affiliation with the ENSFR (European Network for Short Fiction Research). The conference is to be held at the Faculty of Philology, University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain, on 23 and 24 May, 2019.

Continue reading “CFP: Borders, Intersections and Identity in the Contemporary Short Story in English – Santiago 23-24 May 2019”

A new collection of essays on Alice Munro is out. Here is a flyer of the collection.

Flyer Space and Place in Alice Munro’s Fiction

Protest Europe

Award-winning British publishing house Comma Press, in partnership with the University of Angers, is looking to build link with other publishers, festivals and universities across Europe to partner with on an international collaboration project designed to re-engage readers and writers with people’s history and shared, common cultural heritage through a series of commissions focusing on the history of European protest. Exploring the links between different protest movements across Europe, these commissions will bring together publishers, writers, historians, activists, translators, researchers and universities to collaborate on the creation of a series of short stories, semi-fictionalising this history in a way which shows shared goals, influences and strategies.

The stories will be written by fiction writers working in close collaboration with experts (historians and living activists) who will also write short afterwords to accompany the finished stories. The stories and afterwords will be translated and published simultaneously across various language editions. The project will also host public events and develop digital materials to celebrate and better understand these pivotal moments of ‘popular resistance’ – protests which, in some small way, helped to shape modern Europe.

If you or your organisation would like to find out more about this project, email coordinator Ra Page at ra.page@commapress.co.uk.

The Society for the Study of the Short Story invites proposals for its 15th conference to take place in Lisbon, 27-30 June 2018. The conference theme is “Beyond History: The Radiance of the Short Story”. The full cfp and further information can be found on the conference website.

 

Twentieth-Century British Periodicals: Words and Art on the Printed Page, 1900-1999

4 July 2017

Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading, Redlands Road, Reading, UK

Current scholarship on twentieth-century periodicals is moving beyond the study of the ‘little’ magazine and avant-garde publications. Many mainstream and specialist periodicals, including tabloids, broadsheets, illustrated newspapers, illustrated magazines, fashion magazines, ‘slick’ magazines, women’s magazines, art periodicals, trade and specialist periodicals, pulps, reviews, and political and campaigning magazines have yet to receive sustained critical attention.

This interdisciplinary one-day * conference, coordinated by Dr Kate Macdonald, University of Reading, and Emma West, Cardiff University, will bring together scholars and collectors to discuss the magazines, newspapers, journals, dailies, weeklies, fortnightlies, monthlies and quarterlies of British cultural life in the pre-Internet twentieth century. The focus of the discussion will be on the producers and consumers of these ephemeral products, to attempt to map out their networks. By focusing on both words and images, this conference aims to bring the specialist collector and the art historian to the table, to share knowledge of commercial and artistic figures and movements with publishing and book historians.

We invite abstracts relating to these topics:

• publishers
• editors
• illustrators
• photographers
• graphic design, art direction, advertising and publicity
• columnists
• magazine fiction
• the sporting pages
• the children’s comic and the teen magazine
• fashions on the page
• monthly domestic instruction
• freelance writing
• the reviewer and the reviews
• ephemerality and collectability
• pre- and post-war periodicals
• the bibliographers and the academy

Please send abstracts of 300 words or less, plus a brief account of your teaching, publications or research in these fields, by 31 January 2017, to k.macdonald@reading.ac.uk.

* If enough abstracts are received to warrant a second day, we will extend the conference to 5 July.

The Fifth Biennial John Updike Society Conference

Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade, Serbia – June 1 – 4, 2018

THE FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

The Fifth Biennial John Updike Society Conference will be the first one outside the United States of America, and it will take place in Serbia. John Updike visited Belgrade in 1978—it was then the capital of Yugoslavia and now it is the capital of Serbia. Updike also visited Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, which was then one of the six constitutive republics of Yugoslavia. In both cities Updike gave important interviews for magazines and TV stations.

Papers on any aspect of John Updike’s work or life will be considered, but topics that are especially appropriate can be found on the society’s website: http://blogs.iwu.edu/johnupdikesociety. One-page proposals for 15- to 20-minute papers on all aspects of Updike’s life and work and especially suggested topics should be sent, along with a brief one- or two-paragraph bio, to conference director Biljana Dojčinović – jus5thconference@gmail.com – by the 31^st of January 2018.

The American Short Story: New Horizons

Johannes Gutenberg-University, Mainz, Germany

October 5-7, 2017

 Program coordinator: Oliver Scheiding

 Organizing Committee: James Nagel, Olivia Edenfield, Elke D’hoker, Jochen Achilles, Dustin Anderson, Damien Schlarb

Throughout its history, the American short story has been praised either as a highly polished gem or condemned as literary fast food. Despite such rise-and-fall predictions, the short story has always been a demanding form. Its narrative economy in terms of time and space records decisive, intimate moments of life that give the American Short Story a broad social resonance. As such, the short story offers a vibrant field of research. There is a renaissance in progress not only in terms of the short story’s productivity but also in terms of innovative theoretical questions. The current state of research is, however, probably best described as “ripening.”

The conference “The American Short Story: New Horizons” invites both panels and papers that address fresh and original questions relevant to studying the American short story: how the genre works as performance in itself; how it conveys a theory of culture in which aesthetic structures and the presentation of cultural problematics interrelate; how the short story and the practices of text-making are related to the cultures of print in which textual circulation and economic exchange are homologues; how we can read the short story as an expressive form alongside its material dimensions, its vitality of forms (i.e., short-short fiction, flash fiction), and the multiple meanings of such concepts as authorship and genre; how we can reassess the short story as a field to map out exchanges not just among authors, but also among editors, publishers, reviewers, readers, and the physical text, with its advertisements, illustrations, and editorial changes. The conference thus seeks to explore the American short story as a coming together of the enduring narrative practice of compression and concision in American literature, presently culminating in a digital culture in which brevity rules.

Suggested Topics:

• History of the American Short Story
• American Short Story and Ethnicity
• Gender/Sexuality Studies and the American Short Story
• American Short Story and Literary/Cultural Theory
• American Short Story and Linguistics
• American Short Story and Psychology
• American Short Story and Religion
• Early Short Narratives prior to 1800
• American Short Story and Periodicals
• American Short Story and Graphic Narratives
• American Short Story and Print Culture/Material Culture
• American Short Story and Translation/Translators
• American Short Story and Storytelling
• New and old Forms: Short and Short-Short Stories
• American Short Story Cycles
• The American Short Story and Life Writing
• American Short Stories and Authors
• Flash Fiction and Microfiction
• American Short Story and Visual Arts/Film
• American Short Story and Digital Research
• American Short Story and the Digital Age
• American Short Stories and Globalization
• American Short Stories and Transnationalism
• American Short Stories and Medical Humanities
• American Short Story and Literary Periodization/Movements
• American Short Story and MFA Programs
• American Short Story and Music/Theater
• Editing and Anthologizing the American Short Story
• Publishing and Reception of the American Short Story
• American Short Story and Pedagogy
• American Short Story and Genres (Novel, Novella, Essay etc.)
• New Literary Histories on American Short Stories (1980s to the Present)

Please submit all proposals and abstracts to Oliver Scheiding (scheiding@uni-mainz.de) by June 30, 2017.

•  The organizing committee screens all proposals and abstracts, issues acceptances, and arranges the presentations on the program.  It will form panels to accommodate papers not included in pre-arranged groups.
• All persons wishing to give a paper at the conference, including all members of pre-arranged panels, should give a one-paragraph abstract of the paper to be presented along with a biographical paragraph giving the credentials of the presenter to address this topic. Individual papers should be scheduled for 20 minutes.
• Panels and roundtables have three presenters, although some may have more. Proposals for pre-arranged panels should include a 250-300-word description of the topic and full contact information for all members of the group. The person submitting the proposal is the chair of the session. He or she may also be a presenter, but need not be.