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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

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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/

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CFP: Special issue CJIS: contemporary Irish short story

The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies invites submissions for a special issue on the Contemporary Irish Short Story, guest edited by Michael Kenneally. Essays are invited on all aspects of contemporary Irish short fiction, with special preference to be given to writing published since 2000. Essays exploring individual stories, writers, collections or a particular thematic focus are welcome, and should demonstrate an awareness of recent critical writing on the short story genre. Given the commitment of CJIS to highlight Irish visual, material and spatial cultures, submissions that explore the short story as a material or graphic object or as a precursor to physical manifestations on screen, stage or video, for example, would be especially welcome.

The length should not exceed 5,000 words and should follow the submission guidelines on the CJIS website: www.irishstudies.ca/canadian-journal-of-irish-studies

The deadline for submissions is December 2014 but it is advisable to contact the guest editor beforehand: Michael.Kenneally@concordia.ca

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Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 3:2

The new issue of the peer-reviewed journal Short Fiction in Theory and Practice is devoted to the short story cycle. In the editorial, Elke D’hoker gives a critical overview of different conceptualisations of the short story cycle in different literary traditions. Articles by Raphaël Ingelbien, Jennifer Smith, Rob Luscher, Ailsa Cox, Rachel Lister and An Van Hecke offer original analyses of short story cycles by such writers as LeFanu, Hemmingway, Steinbeck, Byatt, Simpson and many others. The issue also contains an interview with Rachel Cusk, who offers interesting reflections on the short story. For the publisher’s link to the journal, click here.

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Special issue on the short story collection

 Interférences Littéraires / Literaire Interferenties: A Multilingual e-Journal of Literary Studies has just published a special issue on the short story collection. It is entitled “Cycles, Recueils, Macrotexts: The  Short Story Collection in Theory and Practice” and is edited by Elke D’hoker and Bart Van den Bossche. It contains articles in English and French and is available on the journal’s website.

 

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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