Archives de catégorie : Appels

Captivity and Culpability: The Disciplining Subject in the Literary and Cultural Imagination

Captivity and Culpability: The Disciplining Subject in the Literary and Cultural Imagination

14 December 2012, 10:00 – 15 December 2012 18:00

Organised by: Human Rights Consortium
Event Type: Conference / Symposium
Venue: The Senate Room (Senate House, First Floor)
Venue Details: South Block of Senate House, Ground Floor

Description

Societies often have ambiguous and even conflicting attitudes towards state institutions that fulfil normalising, reformatory, punitive or disciplinary functions. This unease is frequently represented in an ambivalence or a hostility not only towards those disciplined or incarcerated but also, and perhaps paradoxically, towards the agents of those institutions, e.g. state incarcerators, the police, interrogators, soldiers, counterterrorist agents, or staff in mental hospitals. These figures tend to be conceptualised and represented in simplistic and often reductively negative terms. This demonisation reflects an unease towards institutions that are understood to be at once socially and politically necessary and saturated with threatening potential.

Connected to this is a complex social attitude towards state violence. At the same time as societies sanction it, figures such as executioners, torturers, and concentration camp guards are frequently despised. For this reason, while severe state violence is sometimes deemed to have situational or conditional necessity, expedience, or legitimacy, it often must also seek to conceal or disguise its own extreme nature as violence. Much as those perpetrating acts of state-sanctioned violence are disavowed, the violence itself is also surrounded by an apparent uncomfortable double standard.

This conference aims to interrogate literary, filmic, popular cultural and artistic representations of the agents of those institutions, specifically in terms of guilt and culpability. Why, for example, can we observe a tendency to hold at a cautious distance the disciplining subject whilst accepting (or even celebrating) the institutions they represent as socially and politically necessary? Why, when the actions of such agents become extreme, transgressive or criminal, is there a tendency to pathologise such actions in terms of individual perversity – as the actions of ‘bad apples’ – and thereby transfer culpability from the institution to the individual subject, rather than explaining such actions in systemic, structural or institutional terms?

Please see the Call for Papers

The conference is organised by Alex Adams (Newcastle University) and Cornelia Wächter (University of Paderborn, Bielefeld University) in cooperation with the Institute of English Studies (University of London) and the Human Rights Consortium (University of London). Please email 200-300 word abstracts for 20 minute papers to a.t.adams@newcastle.ac.uk and cornelia.waechter@uni-paderborn.de by Sunday, 19th August 2012.

Call for papers – Writers and their Libraries

Writers and their Libraries

15 March 2013 – 16 March 2013

Event Type: Conference / Symposium
Venue: Institute of English Studies
Venue Details: Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU

Description

This conference in the History of Reading will bring together scholars working on the private libraries of some of the major literary figures in world literature. The aim of the conference is to explore reading habits, note-taking practices, marginalia and other traces of reading experience and book collecting in a comparative context. At the same time, the conference will offer a forum for the discussion of theories and methodologies that underpin this kind of research, as well as the problems and challenges of reclaiming, representing and editing the evidence of reading writers and writing readers from the archive.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers that explore writers’ private libraries — regardless of whether the library is real or virtual. We welcome contributions from any world culture, language, field, and period. Interdisciplinary approaches are encouraged.

The following list is meant to be indicative of the possible strands, themes and topics that might be covered

General themes:

  • History of marginalia
  • Marginalia in the Romantic period
  • Bible/scholarly marginalia
  • Newspapers clippings / cuttings
  • Marginalia in the digital era

Characteristics of the Collection:

  • Multilingual libraries
  • Virtual libraries – Reconstructed libraries
  • Bisquing (or bisking) / censorship / infamous titles / banned books
  • Collecting books
  • Reading clubs
  • Early (scholarly) books
  • Typographic ornaments

Marginalia Practices:

  • Writing readers and Reading writers
  • Marginalists and Notetakers
  • Books begun in books
  • Marginal translations
  • Book emendations by the author in his own books
  • Humour and sarcasm in marginalia
  • Reading the visual: doodles and drawings
  • Group marginalia
  • Precocious marginalia

Editorial / Preservation Projects:

  • Digital projects
  • Editing marginalia
  • Recreating libraries
  • Private Libraries in the Rare Books Room / Institutional Collection Policies
  • Conserving and restoring books
  • The Private Library as Book Collection or Archive

Deadline for proposals (300 words): 15 July 2012.

Note: A collection of essays from selected papers will be published.

Inquiries and proposals may be directed to: Patricio Ferrari (Universidade de Lisboa) ferraripatricio@gmail.com
Dr Jerónimo Pizarro (Universidad de los Andes) jeronimopizarro@gmail.com
Dr Wim Van Mierlo (Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London) Wim.Van-Mierlo@sas.ac.uk

For an example of a writer’s private library visit Fernando Pessoa’s Private Library on-line athttp://casafernandopessoa.cm-lisboa.pt/bdigital/index/index.htm

Conference blog: http://writersandtheirlibraries.wordpress.com/

The School of Advanced Study is part of the central University of London. The School takes its responsibility to visitors with special needs very seriously and will endeavour to make reasonable adjustments to its facilities in order to accommodate the needs of such visitors. If you have a particular requirement, please feel free to discuss it confidentially with the organiser in advance of the event taking place.

Enquiries: Jon Millington, Events Officer, Institute of English Studies, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU; tel. +44 (0) 207 664 4859; Email IESEvents@sas.ac.uk

Steampunks and Times Trans-shifters: Histories, Genres, Narratives An essay assemblage (30 juin 2012)

Steampunks and Times Trans-shifters: Histories, Genres, Narratives An essay assemblage

(abstracts for june 30 2012)

full name / name of organization:
Mark Houlahan/ University of Waiakto, Hamilton, New Zealand
contact email:
maph@waikato.ac.nz

Steampunks and Times Trans-shifters: Histories, Genres, Narratives
An essay assemblage
Edited by Mark Houlahan, Kirstine Moffat and Fiona Martin

In these the best of times (and the worst), the age of wisdom (and the age of foolishness), the epoch of belief and incredulity, the season of darkness and light, the spring of hope and the winter of despair, steampunk has flourished. Airships circle the globe; clanking machines haunt the ocean’s deeps. Fractals of history merge and re- combine. Babbage’s quaint math reinvents the computer a century before its prime; of necessity, as the neo-Victorian knows no silicon chip, steampunk computers gleam and creak with wooden stylings and mechanically wrought interiors.

K.W. Jeter coined the term “steampunk” as an offhand phrase in 1987, but the name has stuck, for it evokes well a diverse range of cultural, textual, material practices; there have been many attempts since to rename these formats, but none has supplanted the rhythmically trochaic force of steampunk.

Jeter used his catchphrase to evoke the crossover, transhistorical, mechanical and mythical fictions he, among many others, had been concocting. His Morlock Nights for example, flinging Merlin reborn against the Morlock’s from The Time Machine, is strongly influenced by 1970s precursors, such as the apocalyptic Londonist fantasies of Michael Moorcock. The burgeoning steampunk archive traces these energies further back, claiming the sci fi of H.G. Wells and, in particular, Jules Verne as proto-steampunk. Their machines are weirdly credible, described with loving detail (the time machine is as seducing as the Tardis to enter), and yet the futurist past in Verne and Wells is high fantastical. The 2012 film Mysterious Island visualises this beautifully. The battery of Captain Nemo’s sunken Nautilus has gone flat after 150 years in the sea. Throw a spear in to the mouth of a galvanic electric eel, and, huzzah, the re-energised ship will take you home.

Steampunk fantasies are intricate and beguiling, throwing adventure, wonder, industrial age grime and glamour into the history blender. Often these are remade Victorian worlds, but need not be. In Link and Grant’s exuberant 2011 anthology Steampunk!, M.T. Anderson describes a fate machine with a computer’s number crunching powers, and then sets it loose on the violent history of Ancient Rome.

Steampunk clothing and texts, websites and anthologies, steampunk conventions and capitals (such as Oamaru in the South Island of New Zealand) have been with us for decades; yet steampunk is just now emerging as a subject of academic interest, intertwining cultural, historical, textual and media studies approaches. There are numerous essays on steampunk writers, and in 2010 Neo-Victorian Studies devoted a whole special issue to the field. Much of this focuses on canonical texts, such as Gibson and Sterling’s Difference Engine, and such is the speed with which steampunkers have recreated various pasts, that any one snap shot needs rapid updating.

We propose then a new collection reframing the field, and invite abstracts on any aspect of steampunk. Who are the texts and who the authors that really matter? If it’s not neo-Victorian, does it still count? Tell us about steampunk in other media and other ages, in machinist art and machinist clothes. Steampunk on screen and on the page. Are steampunk stories good beginnings that can never quite finish, like the long tales of H.G. Wells, which dwindle to feeble conclusions after tremendous beginning?

If you are keen, please contact us: by cyber age computing is best. We need your abstracts by July 1, 2012. We will package the best of these for an international publisher—there are several who are keen to see the collection. We’d then like final copy of the chosen essays by February 1, 2013. If we all survive the Mayan apocalypse, you should have plenty of time to frame your piece.

Send further inquiries, great new reads and of course your abstracts by July 1, 2012 to:

Mark Houlahan (maph@waikato.ac.nz)
Senior Lecturer, English Programme
School of Arts
University of Waikato
Hamilton, New Zealand

&/or
Kirstine Moffat (kirstine@waikato.ac.nz)
Senior Lecturer & English Programme Convenor,
School of Arts
University of Waikato
Hamilton, New Zealand

Huxley’s Brave New World and its Legacies

Huxley’s Brave New World and its Legacies

Friday 12 October 2012

Institute of English Studies, London University

When Brave New World first appeared in 1932 it caused a sensation. It was obvious that Aldous Huxley was intent on testing the boundaries of propriety (sailing especially close to the wind in terms of sexual and religious obscenity), but what kind of novel had he published? A satire, like his earlier novels; a horrified warning of things to come, or a vision of how things might be, for better or for worse, following a number of scientific, political and social adjustments to the Britain of his day?

While the novel’s title has become embedded in the English language as a catchword for anything that is far-fetched, faddish, futuristic or forbidding, the possible meanings Brave New World have only proliferated over the past eighty years and its relevance to our own world has only increased with time. Certainly, the novel’s significance for our own concerns with eugenics, globalisation, dystopias, urbanisation, population issues, technological innovation, authoritarianism, anarchism, educational theory, mass society, liberty, control, Americanisation, constructions of culture, and the ongoing crisis of capitalism, could not be more obvious. Proposed papers that are keyed to any of these categories are encouraged, but we also look forward to receiving proposals that engage with any of Brave New World’s historical contexts, contemporary resonances and manifold legacies.

Please send proposals of up to 300 words for 20-minute papers to david.bradshaw@worc.ox.ac.uk by 15 June 2012.

http://www.ies.sas.ac.uk/events/ies-conferences/BraveNewWorld

The School of Advanced Study is part of the central University of London. The School takes its responsibility to visitors with special needs very seriously and will endeavour to make reasonable adjustments to its facilities in order to accommodate the needs of such visitors. If you have a particular requirement, please feel free to discuss it confidentially with the organiser in advance of the event taking place.

Enquiries: Events Officer, Institute of English Studies, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU; tel +44 (0) 207 664 4859; Email: IESEvents@sas.ac.uk.

Call for papers : Cinéma&Cie – European TV series

Special Issue no. 19

European TV series

Call for Essays

This monographic issue of Cinéma & Cie will deal with the audiovisual serial production within the European Union.

In the past years, television serial narratives have gone through some severe changes in the way they are organised from a narrative point of view, as well as in the way they are perceived and “used” by audiences. This new wave of serial production has been quite well analysed by scholars from different countries; several books and essays focused on different aspects of serial productions, from the narrative construction to audience reception. However, the main focus of these studies seems to always be on US productions. This issue of Cinéma & Cie aims to draw attention to EU TV series, trying to answer the following question: does a European television market exist?

The European Community is nowadays working in the direction of a more inclusive society, a goal that implies the understanding of the social transformations in Europe through a variety of tools, not least the study of the circulation of audiovisual cultural products in Europe. Since technological advances in the field of audiovisual media are affecting the consumer and user behaviours, as well as the structure of production, it is quite relevant to focus on the role and influence of cultural products from a transnational perspective.

Several factors warrant the focus of this issue on television series produced in Europe.

First, serials have become one of the most successful formats among transnationally distributed media products, benefiting both producers and distributors. Second, these cultural products appeal to a wide range of consumers: they are a common factor across European markets (otherwise differing in many significant aspects) and are designed to be enjoyed through different devices (from conventional broadcast television to the Internet). These factors make audiovisual serialized formats suitable for investigating potential transformations/trends and the construction of the cultural imagery of media convergence in Europe. The digital production, distribution and consumption of contemporary television series permit a continuous reshaping of content; this modularity, flexibility and fast-paced adaptation offers the opportunity for serialized content to engage directly with European communities, and to better suit their needs and values.

In a media landscape characterised by an overabundance of entertainment offers, audiovisual serialized products and formats must deal with problems arising from information overload and the “attention economy”. Today, Europe is facing an important paradigm switch: the prominent role taken by consumers and users in the media industry has put them in the first position in the value production chain. The scarcity of spectators’ attention has become a crucial factor in the creation of the value connected to cultural products, as well as in the creation of products capable of exploiting all the possibilities of the newly converged media landscape. Finally, serialized audiovisual contents now represent a large percentage of media industry production, so that they might constitute an urgent opportunity for European audiovisual industries.

Essays on the following topics are welcome:

  • State of the Art – How is the situation of the scientific literature on this topic in EU countries? Are research and studies on the production of European TV dramas and series only popular within the context of national studies? How much of the scientific production on TV series is monopolized/dedicated to studies on US productions?
  • Circulation of European TV dramas within the EU as well as outside of the EU
  • Case studies: national productions of TV dramas and series mostly relevant (with regard to their production modes, narrative, themes, style…) to enlighten the features of the European TV market
  • Domestic and American characteristics of EU TV dramas (formats, genres…)
  • Does a European identity exist within the narrative construction of EU serials? Can European series contribute to the creation of a European identity, and how? Are there exemplary case studies with reference to this topic?
  • European production modes: different productions for different channels (free, pay, broadcasting, narrowcasting). How relevant is the production of TV dramas in each national entertainment market?
  • Serial formats for the WWW: do web series aim to go beyond the national borders to reach a wider audience, and how is that achieved?
  • Consumption modes: do transnational modes of consumption exist? How much are they affected by the TV scheduling and programming pattern of each country? Does file sharing contribute or prevent this kind of circulation?
  • Do cult series exist within the European context? Are these national or transnational phenomena?
  • Does European quality TV exist? If so, does it coincide with TV drama productions or with other formats? Do common indicators for quality definition and evaluation exist?
  • How do co-productions with the US or among different EU member states work? What are features of runaway productions (America in the EU)? How co-productions affect training of professionals and can contribute to the creation of a domestic production/market? What are the institutions involved in the training of professionals?

Submission details

Please send your abstract (300-500 words in English, French or Italian) and a short bio to submissions.cinemaetcie@gmail.com by May 31, 2012.

All notifications of acceptance will be emailed no later than June 15, 2012.

http://cinemaetcie.net/cfe

Call for papers – The Marginalised Mainstream: Literature, Culture & Popularity

The Marginalised Mainstream: Literature, Culture & Popularity

08 November 2012 – 09 November 2012

Event Type: Conference / Symposium
Venue: Institute of English Studies
Venue Details: Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU

Description

Keynote Speakers include: Professor Phillip Tew (Brunel University), Professor James Chapman (University of Leicester), Christoph Lindner (University of Amsterdam)

The Marginalised Mainstream seeks to discuss the growing interest in and importance of mainstream culture and the popular as ways of engaging with cultural products of the late nineteenth to early twenty-first centuries, the long twentieth century, 1880–2010. Specifically, we seek to bring together postgraduate students, early career academics and established researchers working in the fields of Literature, Cultural Studies and elsewhere in the Humanities, to explore why mainstream culture and objects of mass appeal are so frequently marginalised by the academic community.

CLICK HERE FOR CALL FOR PAPERS.

Abstracts of no more than 350 words are invited by 1 June 2012 . They must include:

  • 350-word abstract, including title,
  • your name,
  • affiliation,
  • contact information,
  • a brief biographical paragraph about your academic interests,
  • any technical support that might be needed

Please email submissions, in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, to organisers Brittain Bright, Sam Goodman and Emma Grundy Haigh at marginalisedmainstream@gmail.com . Acceptances will be sent out by no later than 16 July 2012.

Conference website: http://marginalisedmainstream.wordpress.com

Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Marginalised-Mainstream-Conference-2012/259522867458369

Please note: we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.

CFP: (Re)Locating the Frontier: International Western Films (publication) (15 août 2012)

(Re)Locating the Frontier

International Western Films (publication)

Cinematic representations of the North American West, from the silent era to the present, have played an important role in one of the United States’ core cinematic genres and in the viewing lives of generations of North Americans. The Western tradition, however, with its well-worn tropes, readily identifiable characters, iconic landscapes, and evocative soundtracks, is not limited to the United States. Western, or Western-inspired films have played a part in the output of numerous national film traditions, including Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, and Latin America. Considerations of these films, however, have been decidedly U.S.-centric, with discussions of international Westerns typically limited to a small number of Eurowesterns and their directors.

This collection of essays seeks to broaden the scholarly conversation about Westerns by considering films beyond the Hollywood and Spaghetti Western traditions. The editors seek contributions that address a wide range of international Westerns, including their significance, meanings, and reception in their the national industries which gave them form. How do Westerns not made in the U.S. use the genre for their own purposes? Through what innovations or adaptations is that achieved? In what ways do these films challenge or support the idea of national literatures and cinemas? How do their narratives negotiate nation, narrative, genre, and their intersection?

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• El Topo and the Mexican Weird West
• Filming The Devil’s Backbone: The Border Frontier
• Genre Mash-ups in Asian Westerns: Dynamite Warrior
• The Good, the Bad, and the Samurai Tradition
• Sounds of the Frontier: Eurowestern Soundtracks
• Eurowestern Film Cycles: Django Rides
• Exploring the Ostern: White Sun of the Desert
• Karl May on Screen: The German Frontier Tradition
• Her Majesty’s West: Carry On, Cowboy
• Sholay and Frontier Independence
• The “Northern”: Hollywood North, or Something Else?

Please note: Essays dealing with the Spaghetti Western tradition should approach it from a fresh perspective, not yet represented in the substantial scholarly literature.

Acceptance will be contingent upon the contributors’ ability to meet these deadlines, and to deliver professional-quality work.

Publication timetable:

Aug 15, 2012 – Deadline for Abstracts

September 30, 2012 – Notification of Acceptance Decisions

Feb 1, 2013 – Chapter Drafts Due

April 30, 2013 – Chapter Revisions Due

May 30, 2013 – Final Revisions Due

July 1, 2013 – Delivery to Publisher

Please submit your abstracts of 500-1000 words and a brief (1-page) CV via email to both of the editors by August 15, 2012:

Cynthia J. Miller – cynthia_miller@emerson.edu
A. Bowdoin Van Riper – bvanriper@bellsouth.net

CFP: A New Look at the Gothic Monster (SAMLA, Durham, North Carolina. Nov. 9-11, 2012)

A New Look at the Gothic Monster

(SAMLA, Durham, North Carolina. Nov. 9-11, 2012)

South Atlantic Modern Language Association
contact email:
shutchis@fhsu.edu

A New Look at the Gothic Monster

This panel explores the cultural roles that monsters inhabit in Gothic fiction. Since the late-Victorian period, popular fiction has featured a panoply of monsters—vampires, werewolves, ghosts, zombies, mummies, shape-shifters, unknowable, and amorphous “things,” and a variety of other undeads. The evolution of monsters, what they represent, and why audiences need them are subjects of interest for this panel. Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following areas: psychology and the monster; the abhuman; the post-human and the monster; the monster in imperial Gothic fiction; popular fiction and the monster; cultural transformations of the monster.

By May 30, 2012, please submit 300-word abstracts to Sharla Hutchison, Fort Hays State University, at shutchis@fhsu.edu.

Call for paper Undead in the West II: They Just Keep Coming (Publication)

Call for paper

Undead in the West II: They Just Keep Coming (Publication)

The frontier has long been framed as a landscape of life and death, but few scholarly works have ventured into the realm where the two become one, to explore portrayals of the Undead in the West – the zombies, vampires, mummies, and others that have lumbered, crept, shambled, and swooped into the Western from other genres. This sub-genre, while largely a post-1990 phenomenon, traces it roots to much deeper hybrid traditions of Westerns and horror or science fiction, and yet, also shows ties to the recent Western renaissance.

This volume, a companion to our forthcoming Undead in the West: Vampires, Zombies, Mummies and Ghosts on the Cinematic Frontier, will focus on the blending of the Western genre and the undead in media other than film: comics, graphic novels, gaming, new media, and literature. Scholarly explorations of material culture and fandom will also be considered.

Some questions to consider:

– What happens when traditional frontier figures, settings, symbols, and ideologies encounter these characters that defy the laws of nature?
– How are Western archetypes subverted or accentuated when confronted by the undead?
– How do zombies, vampires, and the like, affect our understandings and interpretations of the West, and vice-versa? Might these hybrid Westerns function as the new anti-Western, or do the undead facilitate a return to tradition?
– In what ways do undead Westerns consciously use the undead elements of the plot to comment on the nature of traditional Western heroes and villains?
– In what ways do these genre mash-ups revitalize the Western for a new generation of audiences and fans?

Please send your 500-word abstract to both co-editors, Cindy Miller (cynthia_miller@emerson.edu) and Bow Van Riper (bvanriper@bellsouth.net).

Publication timetable:

June 15, 2012 – Deadline for Abstracts
July 15, 2012 – Notification of Acceptance Decisions
Dec. 1, 2012 – Chapter Drafts Due
March 15, 2013 – Chapter Revisions Due
April 15, 2013 – Final Revisions Due
May 1, 2013 – Delivery to Publisher

Acceptance will be contingent upon the contributors’ ability to meet these deadlines, and to deliver professional-quality work.

Call for papers, The ethics and poetics of genre literature, Montpellier

The ethics and poetics of genre literature
Université Paul Valéry- Montpellier 3, France  –  15-16 March 2013
Deadline for proposals: 15 September 2012

An international conference organized by EMMA (Etudes Montpelliéraines du Monde Anglophone) with the support of the Société de Stylistique Anglaise (SSA).

This interdisciplinary international conference, the second  section of the project ‘Ethics & Rhetoric’ within EMMA’s line of research ‘Ethics of Alterity’, will focus on language and ethics in literary genres that depict encounters with alterity.

The situations in which the subject is faced with different or alien beings will be studied namely in novels belonging to the genre of utopia/dystopia, science fiction, fantasy, etc., as the so-called ‘genre literature’ embodies a heuristic model that dramatises and exacerbates encounters with alterity, featuring exotic, subhuman or posthuman beings that defy human knowledge (in SF and fantasy especially). Genre literature has often been regarded as an entertaining or escapist field that does not lend itself to ethical and poetical reflections, limiting itself to a hollow and servile repetition of the genre codes.

Nevertheless, theoreticians of these genres that have not been sufficiently studied highlight their defamiliarizing power through which things can be ‘seen’. This process of defamiliarization is often associated with the stylistic, poetic and ethical force inherent in fiction, but in its attempt at meta-conceptualizing the relationship between language and reality, genre literature seems to problematize and enhance these phenomena by making them more easily perceivable. Thus not resting content with merely questioning the mechanism of estrangement, genre literature explores the confines of readability and the break-point between the readerly and the writerly.

In their desire to represent the Other in all its complexity, writers are indeed confronted with an ethical and poetical aporia: how to describe what escapes Humanity in Human language? In the eyes of its critics, Science Fiction (SF) seems to lean towards the side of the readerly. On the border between total defamiliarization and cognition (Darko Suvin speaks of ‘cognitive estrangement’), SF seems to embody a genre that cannot afford to lose its readers. That may be the reason why extra-terrestrial languages are often filtered by English — crushing down linguistic difference under the weight of a single language that everybody can understand — as in Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle in which the creole form of English is ironed out through translation. How to represent a world in which the classical pronominal references (she/he) are not relevant anymore since ontology no longer relies on binary distinctions (as in The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin)? Yet certain SF or dystopia writers do manage to stretch out language and readability in their description of an alien situation (Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker might be the best example here). But fantasy can perhaps be construed as the most subversive genre in that matter as it wallows in undecidability and interpretative wavering. In its attempt to reconcile the inexpressible, what is without a name, and the speakable or visible, according to Rosemary Jackson, fantasy delimits a zone of non-signification where the Other cannot be reduced to the self. Should we thus conclude that reaching the breaking point of intelligibility can guarantee the birth of the other in its radical alterity?

Todorov brought to light the difficulty of apprehending alterity in schemes other than the ones we are familiar with, questioning the possibility of mapping the other’s radical difference. The narratives about the Aztecs are among the first illustrations of this tendency to project pre-conceived expectations onto the other: ‘One would seek to transpose it into a familiar cognitive scheme in order to make it understandable and thereby at least partially acceptable’ (Tzvetan Todorov, Les Morales de l’histoire, Paris, Grasset, 1991, p. 41, our translation). Can reducing alterity to the categories of the same or resorting to the other as a foil to reinforce the self (the other being then everything the self is not) be said to be part of the more conservative trend in SF as opposed to more subversive trends of the genre (what Broderick calls allographers along Terry Dowling’s coinage ‘xenographies’) or of fantasy?

Are we condemned to a certain ethno — or anthropo-centrism — an accusation that is launched against the socio-constructionists that contend that our beliefs, desires or intentions are mediated by shared social and normative conventions that have been learnt and internalized in the specific discourse community we belong to — or can the other be ‘known’ to a certain extent while preserving its radical difference? Do tropes have a heuristic power able to change our conception of the world and of others? Is there such a thing as ‘rhetorical ethics’ that could give us access to the other? If, according to Broderick, zeugma and syllepses are characteristic of the poetics of SF, what relationships do these tropes of fusion entertain between self and other? How effective are other figures of speech in their depiction of the Other? Can they be said to be a product of an all-powerful Reason reducing alterity to the same? In La Raison classificatoire, for example, Patrick Tort indeed recalls that the two major classifying systems of human thoughts rely on metaphor and metonymy. Or, on the other hand, can tropes be said to ensure a speculative and prospective exploration, producing ‘scandalous or non-sense effects’ (Rosolato) that are capable of upsetting the classifications through which we have been trained to perceive the world? Can stylistic problems like focalisation or reported speech — that are often a privileged way to access the other’s conceptual schemes — be seen as anthropocentric blows dealt to alterity? Can the other be sketched out through lexical and syntactic inventiveness without its portrait being entirely tamed or harnessed?

The focus on this conference will thus be on the linguistic and poetic means writers resort to in their description of others (rather than be merely thematic). The point is to bring under scrutiny how fiction succeeds (or fails) in its discursive mapping of otherness and what the dialogue it imagines with the other teaches us on language and the human self. What will be explored are the limits of language and the linguistic strategies that are displayed by genre literature to get around this predicament.

This interdisciplinary international conference wishes to attract both literary critics, linguists and stylisticians working on the literature of the English-speaking countries from the 19th to the 21st centuries.

The following themes could be addressed but they are in no way restrictive:

  • linguistic representation of alterity
  • tropological ethics
  • stylistics and genre
  • intelligibility and linguistic experimentation
  • the speakable / unspeakable
  • representation of cognitive structures through focalisation, reported speech, pronominal identification, etc.

Deadline for submission: September 15 2012
Notification of acceptance: November 30 2012

Proposals of around 300 words to be sent to both:

  • Maylis Rospide <maylis.rospide@univ-montp3.fr>
  • Sandrine Sorlin <sandrine.sorlin@univ-montp3.fr>

Language of the conference: English

Source : The European Society for the Study of English