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CFP The British Short Story Cycle

CONSTRUCTING COHERENCE IN THE BRITISH SHORT STORY CYCLE

15-16 October 2015

Johannes Gutenberg University (Mainz, Germany)

Patrick Alasdair Gill (Mainz) and Florian Kläger (Würzburg)

While the American short story cycle has recently been the object of extensive critical discussion, the same can hardly be said of its British counterpart. Still, thematically unified short story cycles would appear to constitute an established feature of the British literary landscape: recent specimens include Graham Swift’s Learning to Swim, Salman Rushdie’s East, West, Julian Barnes’s Cross Channel, Adam Thorpe’s Shifts, Sara Maitland’s Moss Witch, A. L. Kennedy’s What Becomes, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes. By reference to these and other British examples of the form, this conference aims to explore the generic characteristics of the short story cycle alongside and against those of the novel and the short story collection, pursuing questions such as:

  •  What are specific effects of a story cycle’s coherence as against that of a novel on one end of the spectrum and a story collection/compilation on the other?
  •  How can the construction of coherence in the short story cycle be situated generically vis-à-vis other narrative cycles (e.g., in television, film, comics, web videos, etc.)?
  •  How do readers participate in the production of such coherence? Does reader participation in the short story cycle differ qualitatively from the creation of coherence in other genres?
  •  What aspects, other than recurrent themes or characters, can serve as agents of coherence?
  •  If the cycle relies on recurrent themes and characters, how is their function enhanced by use in a story cycle rather than a novel or other longer narrative genres?
  •  What insights are to be gained from comparisons between the short story cycle in the British Isles and in other literatures?
  •  What are forms and functions of paratextual features in short story cycles?
  •  Which economic or other material aspects have (had) a decisive impact on the development of the genre in Britain?

We invite twenty-minute papers on these or related questions. Please send a 250-word abstract along with your institutional affiliation and a short biographical blurb to <patrick.gill@uni-mainz.de> and <florian.klaeger@uni-wuerzburg.de> before the 15th of May.

 

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Publication JSSE 63 “The 21st Century Irish Short Story”

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 Michelle Ryan-Sautour and Gérald Préher
Foreword

Bertrand Cardin
Introduction

PART ONE: TRACES OF ORAL TRADITION: VOICES, DIALOGUES AND CONVERSATIONS

Marie Mianowski
Skipping and Gasping, Sighing and Hoping in Colum McCann’s “Aisling”: The Making of a Poet

Catherine Conan
Narration as Conversation: Patterns of Community-making in Colm Tóibín’s The Empty Family

Eoghan Smith
“Elemental and Plain”: Story-Telling in Claire Keegan’s Walk the Blue Fields

Continue reading “Publication JSSE 63 “The 21st Century Irish Short Story””

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Cfp ENSFR Conference “Haunting” (Angers 20-21 November 2015)

Call for Papers

Haunting in Short Fiction and Its Adaptations

20-21 November 2015, University of Angers, France (in collaboration with Edge Hill University, University of Leuven, University of Le Mans, and University of Nantes)

There is a long tradition of haunting in short fiction, often appearing in the form of ghost stories, folk tales, fairy tales, and legends. Short narrative indeed appears to embrace the supernatural. Elizabeth Bowen explains, for example, in the preface to A Day in the Dark and Other Stories that while she uses “the supernatural” in her short stories, she considers it “unethical’ to do so in a novel. In “The Flash of Fireflies” (1968), Nadine Gordimer similarly observes how short fiction navigates the uneasy borders of the supernatural and the rational world, explaining how “Fantasy in the hands of short story writers is so much more successful than when in the hands of novelists because it is necessary for it to hold good only for the brief illumination of the situation it dominates.”  Continue reading “Cfp ENSFR Conference “Haunting” (Angers 20-21 November 2015)”

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CFP Lille Conference: Short fiction writers with a theory

Call For Papers: (Deadline 1 March 2015)

Short fiction writers with a theory: re-reading short fiction theory through the lens of new writing and new media

 11-12 June 2015, Université Catholique de Lille, France

(In collaboration with the University of Angers, France and the European Network for Short Fiction Research)

We are all familiar with the writings of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Frank O’Connor, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, and Flannery O’Connor on the short story. Their fiction has often been studied through the lens of their own critical essays, now considered essential elements in the heritage of short story criticism. The history of the short story indeed resounds with authorial declarations, ranging from Poe’s “single effect” to Anthony Burgess’s declared ambivalence about the form when announcing the new Journal of the Short Story in English in 1983 (JSSE 2). Continue reading “CFP Lille Conference: Short fiction writers with a theory”

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CfP first ENSFR conference: ‘Reading Short Fiction in Transnational Contexts’

Reading Short Fiction in Transnational Contexts’

 A conference of the European Network for Short Fiction Research

 School of English, University of Dublin, Trinity College; School of English, Drama, and Film, University College Dublin

 April 17-18, 2015

Much scholarly work has been done in recent years on the idea of transnationalism in literary studies, but the extent to which the term relates to works of short fiction has not yet received sustained scrutiny. This conference aims to address this scholarly lacuna with a series of lectures and panel discussions on a range of issues including (but not limited to) the following:

  • The transnational origins of short fiction
  • Short fiction between nations
  • Short fiction and nation-building
  • Short fiction and the idea of the nation
  • Short fiction as transnational form
  • Short fiction between national cultures
  • Reading short fiction across nations
  • Short fiction authors between states
  • Short fiction and its international audiences
  • Short fiction and issues in translation
  • Short fiction and the nation state
  • Short fiction and the transatlantic world
  • Short fiction in Europe
  • Short fiction and empire
  • Short fiction and the gendering of nation

In addition to papers on these and other topics, the conference will include a panel discussion on the first five years of Best European Fiction, an annual anthology of short fiction in English (and translation into English) published by the Dalkey Archive Press. The conference will also include some readings by contemporary Irish short fiction writers.

300-word abstracts for 20-minute papers should be sent to ensfrdublin@gmail.com no later than midnight on the 1st of December 2014. Contributors should also send a short biographical note indicating institutional affiliation. A provisional conference programme will be announced in early January 2015.

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/

 

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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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Women Writing Across Cultures Conference

WOMEN WRITING ACROSS CULTURES: PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

An international symposium at St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford

Friday 26 September to Sunday 28 September 2014

This symposium aims to foster dialogue among researchers and practitioners dealing with women’s writing in a variety of fields:

  • transnational writing and writing across cultures;
  • writing across academic disciplines, across the humanities and social sciences, across the arts and sciences;
  • encounters between the critical and the creative, the academic and the popular, art and life, history and life-writing, orality and literacy, collective and individual authorship, analysant and analyst;
  • crossing temporal boundaries: women’s writing of the past impacting on the present, imagining futures for women’s writing.

Organized by the ‘What is Women’s Writing?’ Interdisciplinary Research Group, supported and funded by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH).

Speakers include short story writer Kate Clanchy

Home

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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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John Burnside wins Edge Hill Prize

The Scottish writer John Burnside has won the 2014 Edge Hill Prize for a published short story collection from the UK or Ireland for his collection, Something Like Happy.  The other four finalists were Bernie McGill,  Jaki McCarrick, David Rose and Rachel Trezise who won the Readers’ Choice prize, judged by creative writing students at Edge Hill.  The judging panel for the main prize was headed up by last year’s winner, Kevin Barry.

http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/news/2014/07/edge-hill-short-story-prize-2014-winner-announced/