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CFP Blue Short Stories — Special Issue N° 85 of the Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE) — Deadline for proposals 15 December 2024

Painting by Julia Himmelstein, “3 a.m”, from her Portland exhibit Bodies of Water

Blue Short Stories

Special Issue N° 85 of the Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE)

 Guest editors : Bénédicte Meillon, Université d’Angers, and Frédérique Spill, Université Jules Vernes Picardie

Since the turn of the century, the stakes inherent in climate change have turned out to be indissoluble from the threats affecting coastal and marine ecosystems. Scientists around the world have provided evidence that global warming is interlinked with rising sea levels, with the warming and acidification of the ocean, with the dwindling of fish populations, the bleaching of coral reefs, and with an increasing number of endangered marine species. As a matter of fact, we have come to realize that the future of our predominantly blue Earth and its myriad co-dwellers hinges in great part on the blueing of our minds. Following the recent “blue turn” in the humanities and ecocriticism, which seeks to remedy the rampant “ocean deficit disorder” diagnosed by Dan Brayton and to draw our attention beyond “green,” land-based issues to “blue” ones, the call for papers for this volume arises from the awareness that blue short stories deserve more attention that they have been getting. This special issue of the JSSE will consequently focus on blue short stories, i.e. short stories dealing with marine matters and, more largely, aquatic and terraqueous beings and places in ways that depart from anthropocentric land-based studies and frameworks. The overall aim is to explore short stories that help us venture into largely uncharted dimensions of experience and knowledge, and that may thus promote urgently needed ways of blueing our perception, worldviews, and ways of life. Continue reading “CFP Blue Short Stories — Special Issue N° 85 of the Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE) — Deadline for proposals 15 December 2024”

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17th International Conference on the Short Story in English

The 17th International Conference on the Short Story in English   directed by Dr Maurice A. Lee will take place in Killarney, Ireland, in June 2025.

Theme: “How it Works: The Uniqueness of the Short Story.”
Often, the short story is defined by what it is not: the novel. Yet perhaps the better question to ask is what does it uniquely offer that other forms of fiction cannot? What effect does the concentration of story and human experience into a few thousand words have on the reader? The shortness of form puts focus on individual experience, containing ‘an intense awareness of human loneliness’ (Frank O’Connor). It is a form that insists on removing everything non-essential and demands a ‘large deal of detection’ (Mary Lavin). This spareness requires total concentration from its reader to understand its profound wordless elements. Most importantly it seduces, with seeming simplicity, calling on our empathy; it creates a ‘transference of emotion’ (James Joyce) with a few carefully crafted lines. It is a form that is effortful, in some respects, for the reader, yet maintains a keen focus and is unmatched in its precision. What is so unique about this conference is that writers of fiction in English (Irish, British, American, Canadian, Australian, Caribbean, South Africa, Indian, Sri Lankan, Indonesian, etc.) and writers who have had their work translated into English, together with scholars of the genre will all come together to discuss that seductive unmatched precision.

Further details on the conference website.

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Special issue, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, ‘Materiality in the Short Fiction of Alice Munro’, deadline extended to November 15th.

Short Fiction Theory and Practice

‘Materiality in the Short Fiction of Alice Munro’, guest edited by Corinne Bigot, University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès, and Christine Lorre, Sorbonne Nouvelle University

“People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable—deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.”

(Munro, Lives of Girls and Women, 1971. ShrThroughout her fourteen collections of short stories, Alice Munro has shown a clear interest in how her characters’ inner life and perception of the world are defined by the material things most immediate to them, as exemplified in the epigraph, a well-known quotation from Lives of Girls and women. Materiality is an integral dimension of culture (Tilley et al., 2006), and in Munro’s work, it is central to an understanding of social, gendered and individual existence, as the two are interconnected. Material things nurture the imagination, where they stick and develop as significant, unfathomable images. They embody the mystery of life, being paradoxically, like landscape, both “touchable and mysterious” (Munro, 1974). They physically anchor characters in the here and now, but they also speak to mind and spirit. They can embody connections as well as disconnections. Whether they are kept or discarded, over time, they haunt the protagonist and lead on to chains of memories, repeatedly re-membered, and with variations. They may become symbols of something larger than themselves, but more often than not they remain images stored up in memory, as so many active links to the past that transform the perception of the present. Objects act as signs that relate to the signified – and often as an index of atmosphere – but also, beyond that, to coded concepts, in a dual dynamic that binds surface and depth, that fuses realism and myth.

 

The international, peer-reviewed journal, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice (Intellect Books) is inviting original submissions for a special issue to be published in Spring 2025, that will explore material culture in Alice Munro’s work. We welcome critical articles, short fiction, and reflections on practice that investigate any aspect of the question of materiality in Munro’s short fiction.

 

Suggested topics might include, but are not limited to:

  • Material domains: architecture, home furnishing, technology, food, clothing, style.
  • Everyday materiality: houses and their contents, the materiality of domesticity.
  • Materiality and social class: class markers, social distinction, social belonging, Marxist theory.
  • The lifecycle of things: things made, exchanged, consumed.
  • Things and their meanings: performance, transformation, obsolescence.
  • Things and social identity: politics and poetics of displaying, representing, conserving material forms.
  • Material forms and the (gendered) body: embodied subjects, body care, role of the senses, phenomenology.
  • Material forms and sociality: subjectivities, intimacies, social and familial relations, worldviews.
  • Materiality and remembrance: signs of time passing, change, transformation, evolving interpretation.
  • Materiality and circulation: exchange and consumption, technology.
  • Materiality and discards: remains, junk, waste.
  • Archeological or ethnographic situations: materiality in alien settings.
  • Material memory: cultural memory, monuments and memorials.

 

Articles should be 4,000–8,000 words long and must not exceed 8,000 words including notes, references, contributor biography, keywords and abstract. All submissions are peer-reviewed. Contributions should be submitted electronically through the journal webpage, by clicking the submissions tab here https://www.intellectbooks.com/short-fiction-in-theory-practice.

 

For style guide and submission details, please see https://www.intellectbooks.com/short-fiction-in-theory-practice.

For further enquiries, please contact the editor, Professor Ailsa Cox, coxa@edgehill.ac.uk. The deadline for submissions is extended to 15 November 2024.

 

NB: This call for papers was produced before Andrea Robin Skinner, Alice Munro’s daughter, made public revelations about her stepfather in the summer of 2024. The guest editors will pay due attention to this event and its repercussions in their editorial to the issue.

 

 

 

 

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Symposium: “The Persistence of the Short Story: Traditions and Futures” — 10-12 July 2024, University of Mainz, Germany

“The Persistence of the Short Story: Traditions and Futures” — 10-12 July 2024, University of Mainz, Germany

The Society for the Study of the American Short Story, The American Literature Association, and the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies, in collaboration with the ENSFR, have organized a three-day seminar series on the short story.

Here is the link to the programme: https://www.obama-institute.com/shortstoryconferencemainz2024/