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/.

Conference program: Short Fiction Writers With a Theory: Re-Reading Short Fiction Theory Through the Lens of New Writing and New Media

Poster Short Fiction Writers

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

Room RS 248 — 58 rue du Port — 59000 Lille

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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.

 

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””

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)”

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”

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 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/