16.4.15
12.3.15
CFP: Women and Ageing: New Cultural and Critical Perspectives
University of Limerick, Ireland · 20-22 May 2015
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University of Limerick, Ireland
20-22 May 2014
A conference engaging with the symbolic aspects of women and ageing in culture and society, and the power these constructions exert over old age.
Conveners: Dr Cathy McGlynn, Dr Maggie O’Neill, Dr Michaela Schrage-Früh (University of Limerick)
Plenary Speakers: Prof Germaine Greer; Prof Margaret Harper
Events: Poetry reading by Medbh McGuckian; Roundtable on Women and Ageing
In a time when even Bridget Jones finds herself in her early fifties, it may at first glance seem unwarranted to speak of the invisibility of ageing women in literary and cultural contexts. In fact, in a review of Mad about the Boy in The Times, Sarah Lyall writes that, “Bridget’s amorous adventures … make the prospect of middle age not so bad at all”. Constructions like this open up questions about representations of women and ageing. What types of images of the “ageing woman” are created in cultural texts? Do women in later life, in order to become visible, need to find ways to “pass” as younger so that “age shall not wither them” as Kira Cochraine puts it in an article in The Guardian? Are these legitimate strategies or should women embrace the menopause as a new phase of life and liberation as advised by Germaine Greer? What impact do dominant representations of ageing women have on the sociocultural realities of women in their later years? And in what ways do they compare to earlier representations?
The rise of the new interdisciplinary field of ageing studies / cultural gerontology testifies to the need to reassess cultural representations of ageing and to view ageing not only as part of the life course but as a social and cultural construct. It is all the more surprising that ageing is a topic still marginalised in feminist theory, despite Simone de Beauvoir’s testimony to her dismay at ‘society’s secret shame’ in The Coming of Age in 1970. There are some notable exceptions, such as Germaine Greer’s work on the postmenopausal woman, Susan Bordo’s work on the body, or Lynne Segal’s recent reflection and analysis of the process of growing older. This conference will engage with the symbolic aspects of women and ageing in culture and society, and the power these constructions exert over public and private conceptions of old age.
The aim of this conference is to provide an opportunity to discuss intersections of the cultural, social and medical dimensions of women and ageing. It will engage with discourses on ageing in their various cultural manifestations through the ages but also across different cultures, genres and media. We invite papers from diverse disciplines such as literary and cultural studies, film and media studies, philosophy, anthropology, linguistics and the medical humanities.
Possible topics can include but are not limited to:
- Ageing, autobiography and lived experience
- Technologies, medicine and ageing
- Ageing and popular culture
- Ageing and neoliberalism
- Visual images of ageing
- Age and performance
- The ageing body as text
- Ageing and memory
- Stigma
- Myths about ageing, women in myth
- Age and creativity
- Queer ageing
- Love, loss and mourning
- Health, menopause, the post-maternal body
- Male representations of women and ageing
- Older and younger mothers
- The ageing spinster
- The cult of youth and perceptions of beauty
- Ageing, recession and dependency
- Ageing and women minorities
- Age, race, and colour
Queries may be directed to the conference organisers at ageing.women@gmail.com. Please submit proposals for papers or panels by 15 March 2015. Proposals should be 250 words and should include a 50-word biography.
Website: womenandageing.wordpress.com
11.3.15
CFP: Scale: Malta, 2015
European Society for Literature, Science and the Arts · Malta · 15-18 June 2015
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| A still from Terrence Malick's Tree of Life (2011) |
This year’s conference is dedicated to the theme of Scale. In one way or another, scale is an issue deeply embedded in every discipline and every aspect of scholarly and scientific research. As the Call for Papers puts it, in the grand scheme of things Scale is the scheme of things itself. We do very much hope, therefore, that you will be as excited by the prospect of an interdisciplinary conference on Scale as we are. We are very pleased that the location of the conference will be Malta, an island in the middle of the Mediterranean with a rich history and culture, where effects of scale have exerted intriguing and complex energies for centuries, and which provides a particularly fitting and appealing venue for this year’s event.
The Call for Papers sets out a number of scale-related topics that cut across disciplines, with six threads identified that should themselves help to provide further prompts for thought. You will see that there is a distinguished group of keynote speakers – Bruce Clarke (Texas Tech), Marcus du Sautoy (Oxford) Gaetana Marrone-Puglia (Princeton), Tom McCarthy, Franco Moretti (Stanford) and Cary Wolfe (Rice) – which can only help to enrich intellectual and academic exchange when we meet in Malta in June. ‘Scale’ therefore promises to be an event that provides rich and rewarding interdisciplinary debate.
We very much look forward to receiving abstracts exploring scale and its various aspects and effects within and across disciplines. The conference will be particularly attractive to academics and researchers working in SLSA’s main areas of focus – literary studies, the sciences, the arts and the spaces (and scales …) in between, but we also hope to hear from delegates from other fields, who are most welcome to attend and participate.
This SLSAeu conference is organised in collaboration with the Humanities, Medicine and Sciences Programme at the University of Malta, and with the further support of the University’s Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Science and the Department of English, whose help is here warmly acknowledged.
Looking forward to scale-related conversations in June, in Malta. [Read More]
27.2.15
Beckett’s Bodies: Affect, Disability, Performance
SAMLA 85: Durham, NC Nov 13-15, 2015
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| Samuel Beckett rehearsing with the San Quentin Drama Workshop |
Conference of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA)
Chair/contact: Michelle Rada, Brown University
Beckett’s Bodies: Affect, Disability, Performance
This panel seeks to explore the ways in which bodies are figured and disfigured in Beckett’s work. On their own constituting an expansive “body of work,” Beckett’s prose texts, poems, plays, radio, television, and film works posit human, non-human, and inhuman bodies in different and often surprising forms. What kinds of bodies are incorporated, disembodied, or stripped bare in Beckett’s work? How can we trace the life, vulnerability, and survival of the body in single texts and across works? Are Beckettian physical and textual bodies susceptible to or immune from affect? Which bodies, metaphorical or otherwise, are excluded from consideration and care in a quite prolific archive of Beckett criticism? How does the body function and dysfunction across genre and media, prose and performance? The purpose of this panel is to provide a multidisciplinary platform for thinking about the body in Beckett’s work through emerging reading practices, which could engender new connections and ideas for such an extensively critiqued range of texts. In keeping with SAMLA’s theme for the 2015 conference, “In Concert: Literature and the Other Arts,” emphasis placed on thinking across genre, media, and theoretical approaches is encouraged, and will be a significant part of our conversation at this panel.
Possible approaches and topics may include, but are not limited to:
Queer bodies in Beckett’s work
Beckett and disability studies
Bodily capacity and its limits in performance
Affect and its embodied forms
Gendered bodies and feminist approaches to Beckett
Abject and aging bodies, dead bodies, and animal bodies
Material bodies and the life of the object
Beckett’s body of work and its sustained life in/through/as Beckett criticism
The precarious body, vulnerability, and the pains of survival
Ill-sensing: perception and the phenomenological body in Beckett
Food studies, consuming bodies, oral fixations, sucking stones
Sex and reproduction in Beckett
Adaptations of Beckett and the political, gendered, and racialized body
Dance, stage directions, choreography, and demands on the performing body
Please send a 250-300 word abstract, a brief bio, and any questions to: michelle_rada@brown.edu by 1 June 2015.
Also at A Piece of Monologue:
16.11.14
Hotel: A New Journal for Literature and the Arts
Call for submissions
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A Hotel is defined by its inhabitants: Commenting on the role of the novelist at mid-Century, Alain Robbe-Grillet would declare that the genuine writer “has nothing to say” but rather “only a way of speaking.” Whilst his conceit is here broadly prevalent as an exploratory view of the formalist interests that help us, as readers, discern a view of the Modern work of fiction and its largely self-reflexive interests, its implicit declaration is the apparent “otherness” of the work of art in the contemporary age. This is, of course, a point of contention that secures innovation, experiment, and the avant-garde a subsidiary status that allocates its significance as something only tangible amongst a group of readers privy to a sense of the novel’s history and as such, subsequently, conversations regarding the futurology of the novel’s form are then questions only accorded in the annals of academic culture. HOTEL would take this interest as central to its observations. Robbe-Grillet’s “genuine” writer here equivocates with a “genuine” reader, and this is the key notion that HOTEL would seek to explore. HOTEL seeks to accommodate fiction, poetry and contemporary thought on form, medium and authorial intentionality.
Contact: hoteleditorial@gmail.com
27.10.14
Staging Beckett and Contemporary Theatre and Performance Cultures
Minghella Building, University of Reading 10-11 April 2015
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| Samuel Beckett. Photograph: Reg Lancaster/Getty Images |
Minghella Building, University of Reading 10-11 April 2015
Conference Call for Papers
The Staging Beckett team is pleased to announce the project’s third and final conference, Staging Beckett and Contemporary Theatre and Performance Cultures. Building on the conversation begun at the first two events which addressed national and international performance histories and productions at the cultural ‘margins’ respectively, this conference aims to address how we can locate productions of Beckett’s theatre or the staging of any Beckett text within the wider landscape of contemporary theatre and performance in different cultural contexts. What are the legacies of productions of Beckett’s theatre or stage adaptations of other texts for contemporary theatre and performance practitioners? How can we best document and record those legacies? We are keen to hear from academics and practitioners (whether UK, Irish or international) interested in the legacies of particular performances, the documentation and analysis of Beckett in performance, and in the dialogues between Beckett’s theatre and wider theatre and performance practices and cultures. Issues to consider might be, but are not limited to, the following:
- Recent productions of Beckett’s drama
- The ‘Festivalisation’ of Beckett
- ‘West End’ Beckett
- Beckett and Contemporary Live Art / Experimental / Intermedial performance
- Beckett and Censorship
- International touring productions to the UK and Ireland (e.g. Robert Wilson and Peter Brook) or from the UK and Ireland (e.g. the Dublin Gate Theatre’s Beckett Festival)
- Beckett and contemporary stage design / dramaturgy
- Beckett, performance and the digital
- The adaptation / appropriation of Beckett’s non-theatre texts for performance
- Beckett and music in performance
- Beckett’s legacies for performance
Please send proposals of c. 300 words to p.mctighe@reading.ac.uk by December 1, 2014.
More information on Staging Beckett project events and activities can be found at http://blogs.reading.ac.uk/staging-beckett/
Staging Beckett team: Matthew McFrederick (Reading), Anna McMullan (Reading), Trish McTighe (Reading), David Pattie (Chester), Graham Saunders (Reading), David Tucker (Chester).
Also at A Piece of Monologue:
Samuel Beckett Society Inaugural Conference (2015)
How to get involved
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| Design: Rhys Tranter |
Conference Registration
We have set up an easy online registration system for the conference. Please navigate to our Reg Online site and sign up ($175 for faculty; $100 for students) at your earliest convenience.
Samuel Beckett Society Membership
All non-ASU affiliated attendees must be current members of the Samuel Beckett Society ($35 per year faculty; $20 per year students). If you are not a member, please visit the SBS Membership Page.
Accommodations
We have secured a discounted conference rate of $139 per night at the Clarendon Hotel. February is peak season in the Phoenix area, so please reserve your room as soon as possible. Space is limited. For more information, please visit the accommodations page of the official conference website.
Facebook Page
Like us on Facebook and receive updates regarding conference programming, meal menus, area tours, and more.
Questions
If you have any questions about the conference please contact us at beckettconference2015@gmail.com.
Also at A Piece of Monologue:
10.9.14
Metamorphoses: The Third International Flann O’Brien Conference
Charles University, Prague, 16-19 September 2015
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| Prague |
Charles University, Prague, 16-19 September 2015
Keynote Speakers
Joseph Brooker (Birkbeck, University of London)
Catherine Flynn (University of California, Berkeley)
Brian Ó Conchubhair (University of Notre Dame)
Guest Writer
Kevin Barry (City of Bohane; winner of the 2013 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award)
Written at a time of profound transformation in post-independence Ireland and war-torn Europe, and displaying an acute awareness of the epochal changes bearing on modern notions of literature and the self, Flann O’Brien’s oeuvre offers a sustained engagement with the representation of cultural, political, and personal metamorphosis. This is a body of writing in which the human always bears the potential to be radically remade in the forms of horses, bicycles, and trains; in which genre, language, and literary form are constantly reorganised and refashioned; in which a programme of pseudonymity presents the comic writer as a master of disguise and identity as a matter of constant flux.
At Metamorphoses: The III International Flann O’Brien Conference (Charles University, Prague, 16-19 September 2015), the organisers propose to build on the current sea change in O’Brien studies to foster a scholarly and critical debate dedicated to these themes of metamorphosis in the writer’s work. At stake will be the ways in which O’Brien’s English and Irish language novels, short stories, column-writing, non-fiction, teleplays, and theatrical work:
- Test the limits and possibilities of identity, hybridity, & concepts of post-humanity;
- Engage and transform cultural, political, & economic upheaval at home and abroad;
- Process radical paradigm shifts in the sciences, from Darwinian evolution theory to the “Mollycule Theory” of quantum physics;
- Explore (anti-)modernist reconstructions of myth, whether Irish or Ovidian;
- Attend to linguistic, generic, and formal mutations, as well as the resonances between metamorphosis, metaphor, and metafiction;
- Present shifting views of himself, his own writing, and the figure of the Author;
- Are transformed in the acts of reception, rewriting, translation, & adaptation;
- Are opened up for new readings by genetic analyses of the vast and critically under-analysed collections of his works in progress (correspondence, manuscripts, drafts) housed at Boston College, Southern Illinois University, & University of Texas at Austin;
- Are amenable to new comparative readings with Prague’s sons Franz Kafka and Karel Čapek, as well as other modernist writers and movements of transformation, from Jarry & Joyce, Borges & Beckett, to the Absurdists, Futurists, & Surrealists.
Find Flann O'Brien on Amazon: US | UK
Also at A Piece of Monologue:
4.9.14
CFP: The Turn into the Twentieth Century and the Problem of Periodization
Critical Essays on American Literary History
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| New York: Fifth Avenue Looking North. 1913. |
Despite the substantial reconceptualization of the field of American literature in recent decades, century-based constructs typically remain in place throughout the field, particularly in relation to “nineteenth-century American literature” versus “twentieth-century American literature.” Courses are taught, textbooks sold, and academic jobs are constructed around such distinctions. Such logic particularly limits scholarship on the turn into the twentieth century, often characterized as a midpoint on a teleological trajectory culminating in literary modernism. This collection of essays aims to complicate and challenge the conceptual divide between the 19th and 20th centuries by exploring turn-of-the-century works (“T-20” works) in light of the particular negotiations engaged in by writers from the 1880-1920 era, or those that render writing from this period irreducible to a clear periodization by century. We are especially interested in essays that rethink boundaries denoted by century and in those that create models for extending both “19th c thought” and “modernity,” so as to interrogate the meeting of a long, late 19th century and an extended, emergent modernity.
Proposals for 25-page essays might consider the following:
- What constructs, authors, and texts are particularly useful in exploring the unique historical and ideological assumptions about literature from the century’s turn?
- In what ways does the language we use to describe cultural and literary movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reinscribe the logic of periodization by century? How, for example, might rhetorics of progress and teleology reveal assumptions that undergird our approach to turn-of-the-century American literature? In what ways might these assumptions/terms be reconsidered?
- In what ways does the idea of the “turn of the century” emerge as a useful category through which to explore continuities across centuries rather than stark divisions between them? If there is a “long nineteenth century,” where might it end? If there is an “emergent modernity,” at what point(s) might it begin?
- In what ways does the profession of literary studies—the job market, academic conferences, scholarly journals, and book publishing—reproduce or challenge these divides in regard to specific authors or works? In what ways can scholars and students take a less temporally restrictive view of the field?
7.4.14
Staging Beckett at the Margins
University of Chester, 11-12 September 2014
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| Samuel Beckett. Photograph: Reg Lancaster/Getty Images |
Staging Beckett is a three year collaborative research project undertaken by the universities of Chester, Reading, and the Victoria & Albert Museum which started in September 2012, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The project explores Beckett’s impact on British and Irish theatre practice and cultures while also looking at how Beckett has been staged internationally, and it is compiling a database of professional productions of Beckett’s plays in the UK and Ireland.
Our second conference, to be held at the University of Chester, 11-12 September 2014, will focus on perceived notions of Beckett at the margins, on productions staged outside London and other major theatrical centres. What has the impact of Beckett’s drama been upon regional, small national, touring and marginal theatrical practices and cultures? What is at stake when staging Beckett in marginal cultures or lesser-known geographical areas? How does Beckett’s work move from a country’s capital city to its regions? Does Beckett’s work speak to national, or local, cultural contexts? How does it fit within established theatrical, cultural and economic infrastructures?
We are keen to hear from academics and practitioners interested in how Beckett has been, or might be, staged in areas beyond the major theatrical centres of London, Dublin, Paris, New York, Sydney, Tokyo, etc. Issues to consider might be, but are not limited to, the following:
- Theatre and local politics
- Cultural marginalisation
- Small-scale productions
- Amateur productions
- Planned productions that failed to be realised
- Festivals
- Beckett in Scotland
- Beckett in Wales
- Beckett on tour, nationally and internationally
- Beckett as a marginal author
- Beckett and subaltern cultures
Also at A Piece of Monologue:
2.4.14
David Jones: Christian Modernist?
Oxford · 10-13 September 2014
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David Jones: Christian Modernist?
‘Modernism’ in literature and the arts is associated with cultural and political rebellion, ‘making it new’ through formal experimentation, and a widespread drive towards a regenerated New Era of human history. For many modernists, Christianity stood for a bygone era to be overcome; the reactionary, dead hand of the past.Yet David Jones’s art, poetry and cultural theory subvert this neat dichotomy. He was a Catholic convert with a deep appreciation of the Church’s ancient liturgy and tradition; but he also conceived his Catholicism as a mode of cultural ‘sabotage’ and a sign of ‘contradiction’. His art and poetry is palimpsestic and fragmentary, inspecting ruins and traces, endlessly fascinated by dense, half-inaccessible layers of meaning stretching back through past cultures into the pre-history of human sign-making. Yet his theory of human culture as sign-making centres on Christ’s entry into the world of signs, epitomised in the Eucharist. Jones saw himself as living in an epoch in which man’s vocation as artist was being twisted out of shape by a technocratic, capitalist civilization obsessed with utilitarian means and ends. The modern artist therefore was a Boethius, shoring up the surviving fragments of the past to make a bridge into a different, regenerated future; a vision which helped Jones to assimilate a wide range of experimental modernist work which, like his own, looked both backwards and forwards at the same time.
This conference will examine the paradox of Jones the ‘Christian modernist’. Does the very concept of cultural ‘modernism’ perhaps need reassessment when confronted with his example? How is his experimental art, poetry and cultural theory relevant to theology? How does his work relate to the theological controversies of his day, especially the ‘modernist crisis’ within the Catholic church and beyond? How does the influence of other modernist art, theory and literature interact with Christian influences (whether theological or artistic) in his work? What was Jones’s influence upon other thinkers and creative artists, both those who shared his religious views, and those who did not? And is his complex vision of human beings as makers and artists who participate in divine creativity through their sign-making – while also hiding this from themselves – still relevant today? Or should it rather be analysed as a product of its time, an unfortunate idealisation that at one point even led Jones to affirm a limited sympathy for the ‘fascist and Nazi revolutions’?
It is the aim of this conference to confront the paradoxes and pleasures of reading and studying Jones head-on, in order to refine and extend our critical vocabulary to encompass an artist, poet and thinker who continues to challenge our preconceptions. Finally, perspectives that challenge the fruitfulness of the whole idea of Jones as ‘Christian modernist’ are also welcome. Are there reasons for steering clear of both terms? Is Jones’s work perhaps better seen as transcending or collapsing such categories?
Contributions are welcome not only from Jones specialists, but also from across modernist studies, theology, religious studies, philosophy, art history, intellectual and political history, aesthetics, poetics, and genetic manuscript studies.
Papers should be timed at 20 minutes, with 10 minutes for discussion.
The deadline for registration is 15 June 2014. Registration after this date is not guaranteed and will raise the registration fee by GBP 50. Please register as soon as possible: we need at least 50 resident participants to run this conference.[Read More]
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17.2.14
Realist Film and Television After Alan Clarke: One-Day Symposium
University of York · 11 June 2014
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| Alan Clarke |
Realist Film and Television After Alan Clarke: A One-Day Symposium
Speakers: Dr. David Rolinson (Stirling), Dr. David Tucker (Chester)
The films of Alan Clarke remain among the most controversial and important examples of British ‘cinematic realism’. Those for which he remains best known, such as Scum (1979), Made in Britain (1982) and The Firm (1988), depict a complex vision of the working classes under Conservative rule in the 1980s. Portraying borstals, neo-Nazism and football hooliganism, the films would come to be at once maligned and censored by the same kind of moral authorities represented in many of Clarke’s works as violent and ineffective power structures.
This year will mark a quarter century since Clarke’s landmark Elephant (1989), a depiction of the ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland that speaks across the borders of testimony, journalism and political narrative. Clarke’s uncompromising concern with social violence, however, has led to a neglect of his cinema. This neglect has played out primarily in assessments of his importance to British cinema, which have mostly delimited the director’s work firmly within the boundaries of social realism. His work demands to be reconsidered beyond this easy narrative.
Notably, Clarke proved the most significant populariser of the dramatist Bertolt Brecht on British television, adapting Brecht’s play Baal (1982), in which he would cast David Bowie in the lead role. Clarke’s work more generally formed close ties with the theatre, as well as with the BBC. Throughout the 1960s, he was responsible for directing both stage and television adaptations of classical and avant-garde theatrical productions, often at odds with the emerging taste for cinematic realism he remains associated with, epitomised by works such as Ken Loach’s BBC television play Cathy Come Home (1966) and feature film Kes (1969), as well as Alan Bleasdale’s BBC television series Boys from the Blackstuff (1980-1982).
Furthermore, many of today’s most important and popular film-makers have acknowledged their debt to Clarke, from Danny Boyle and Paul Greengrass to Gus van Sandt. How, we should ask, does this violent, politicised body of work produce such diverse responses? Would a reassessment of Clarke’s place within British and American film move him from the margins to the centre, or does the value of his film lie in its marginal, resistant status?
We would welcome proposals for papers related, but not limited, to the following:
- The growth and the role of drama at the BBC.
- The role of journalism and testimony in dramatic productions.
- Clarke’s importance to socially-conscious filmmaking.
- Clarke’s film as an intersection between avant-garde and realist forms.
- Observations of affinities with, and re-readings of, Brechtian and Marxist theatre.
- Technological innovations (eg. the use of a steady-cam).
- The response of British media to the Northern Irish troubles.
- The penal code, law and power as articulated in Clarke’s films.
- Assertions of institutional power against Clarke’s film, in particular through censorship.
- The legacy of Clarke’s film in contemporary British cinema and beyond.
- Responses to Thatcherism.
- What does “realism” mean in the wake of Clarke’s challenge to the acceptability and range of the medium?
Conference organisers: Tim Lawrence, Jay James May and Andy Munzer.
Also at A Piece of Monologue:
16.2.14
Modernism Now! International Conference 2014
Call for Papers from the British Association for Modernist Studies (BAMS)
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| Design: Rhys Tranter |
26–28 June 2014
Institute of English Studies
Senate House, London
Keynote Speakers
- Tyrus Miller (University of California, Santa Cruz)
- Jacqueline Rose (Queen Mary, London)
About the Conference
Modernism Now! is a three-day international, interdisciplinary conference organised by the British Association for Modernist Studies, designed to explore modernisms throughout the late nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The conference aims to discuss the past achievements of modernism, its possible futures, and to provide a review of current activity in the field. In Modernism and Theory, Neil Levi has recently suggested that in thinking about modernism we consider ‘the idea of a contemporary perpetuation of artistic modernism’ and that we see ‘modernist works as events whose implications demand continued investigation.’Modernism Now! will explore these issues in three distinct ways:
- The conference aims to represent the diversity of modernisms, and calls for papers assessing modernist writers, artists, texts and performances from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, methodological standpoints, and theoretical perspectives.
- The conference will explore the ongoing use of ‘modernism’ as a cultural, philosophical, and artistic category, analysing how and where modernism functions as a continuing aesthetic in the twenty-first century, across multiple disciplines, geographies, and traditions.
- The conference hopes to provide a review of current research in modernist studies, inviting panels and papers (joint or individual) that report on the work of research projects, editions, exhibitions, societies, and institutions.
- Modernist futures and legacies
- Past and previous modernisms
- The idea of a contemporary modernism e.g. how modernism informs the practice of contemporary artists/ writers/ performers
- Modernism as a continuing event
- Issues in presenting modernism today (new editions, exhibitions, etc)
- Current debates in world literature and global modernist studies that stretch the historical/geographical framework of modernism
- The ‘nowness’ (Jetztzeit) of modernism; the new and the now
- Assessments of individual writers, artists, performers, texts, works of art that explore their status and relevance today
- Historical assessments of the term ‘modernism’
- New trends in modernist studies
- Anachronism
- Disciplinary borders and boundaries around modernism today
- ‘Early’ and ‘late’ modernisms; periodizing modernism
- Current theorisations of modernism as a social/ cultural/ philosophical/ political category
- Modernism and the tradition of the avant-garde
- Singular and plural modernism(s)
We will be offering some bursaries to enable postgraduate members of BAMS to attend the conference.
Proposals are welcomed for individual 20 minute papers, or panels of 3-4 speakers. Proposals for papers should be 250 words long. Panel proposals should include a short paragraph naming the organiser of the panel and explaining its rationale as well as a 250 word abstract for each paper. Panels from single institutions are acceptable. For all proposals, please also include a short biographical statement in the same document. Word format preferred.
Proposals should be emailed to modernismnow@bams.ac.uk by 28 February 2014. The organising committee will be in touch with delegates by mid-March.
Conference Organising Committee
Sarah Chadfield (Royal Holloway, University of London)Suzanne Hobson (Queen Mary, University of London)
Chris Mourant (King’s College London)
Sophie Oliver (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Cathryn Setz (University of Oxford)
Andrew Thacker (Nottingham Trent University)
[Read More]
15.2.14
Roland Barthes at 100: An International Centenary Conference
Cardiff University, UK · 30-31 March 2015
Plenary Speakers
Diana Knight (Nottingham University)Jürgen Pieters (Ghent University)
Michael Wood (Princeton University)
Call for Papers
Proposals for papers in English on any aspect of the work or legacy of Roland Barthes are invited. Proposals should be no more than 200 words long and should be sent by 30 June 2014 to BarthesConference@Cardiff.ac.ukThe conference will be hosted by the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University, and the conference organiser is Neil Badmington. [Read More]
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13.2.14
Samuel Beckett Summer School 2014
Trinity College Dublin · 10-16 August 2014
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| Design: Rhys Tranter |
Preliminary list of speakers:
- Elizabeth Barry
- Gerald Dawe
- Lois More Overbeck
- Laura Salisbury
- Anthony Uhlmann
- Dirk Van Hulle
- A Roundtable discussion, ‘Beckett beyond the Humanities’, chaired by Jonathan Heron
- Samuel Beckett’s Letters (Lois More Overbeck)
- Beckett and Brain Science (Elizabeth Barry & Laura Salisbury)
- Beckett’s Manuscripts (Mark Nixon & Dirk Van Hulle)
- Performance Workshop/Samuel Beckett Laboratory (Jonathan Heron & Nick Johnson)
- Reading Group (Sam Slote)
Also at A Piece of Monologue:
31.1.14
Samuel Beckett and the Archive: Rewriting the Beckett Canon
Call for submissions to a Palgrave Macmillan collection of essays
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| New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century |
Samuel Beckett and the Archive: Rewriting the Beckett Canon
(Part of the 'New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century' series)Edited by Jennifer M. Jeffers
As the leading literary figure to emerge from post-World War II Europe, Samuel Beckett's texts and his literary and intellectual legacy have yet to be fully appreciated by critics and scholars. The goal of New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century is to stimulate new approaches and develop fresh perspectives on Beckett, his texts, and his legacy. The series will provide a forum for original and interdisciplinary interpretations concerning any aspect of Beckett's work or his influence upon subsequent writers, artists, and thinkers.
Jennifer M. Jeffers is a Professor of English at Cleveland State University. In addition to numerous articles, she is the author of The Irish Novel at the End of the Twentieth Century: Gender, Bodies, and Power; Britain Colonized: Hollywood's Appropriation of British Literature; Uncharted Space: The End of Narrative, the editor of Samuel Beckett, and co-editor of Contextualizing Aesthetics: From Plato to Lyotard.
Call for Papers
Call for contributors to the proposed edited collection 'Samuel Beckett and the Archive: Rewriting the Beckett Canon':This collection will explore the impact of the availability of Beckett archival materials in the last generation of Beckett scholarship. Will archival research permanently alter what we now consider Beckett's "canonical," or most important texts? Please submit 500 word abstracts for papers that address the short-term and long-term impact of archival scholarship on the reading and production of Beckett's texts.
Deadline for Submissions: 30 July 2014
Contact
Brigitte Shull, Editor:Brigitte.Shull@palgrave-usa.com
Jennifer M. Jeffers:
j.m.jeffers53@csuohio.edu
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15.1.14
Reading Brian O'Nolan's Libraries
The International Flann O'Brien Society issues a call for papers
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| Flann O'Brien at the Palace Bar in Dublin. Photograph: Getty Images. |
Call For Papers: ‘Reading Brian O’Nolan’s Libraries’
The Parish ReviewOfficial Journal of the International Flann O’Brien Society
The expanding field of Brian O’Nolan (Flann O’Brien/Myles na gCopaleen) scholarship has undergone a remarkable transformation in the wake of the writer’s 2011 centenary. This renewed scholarly interest has given rise to a range of Cultural Materialist, Deconstructionist, and Genetic approaches, amongst others, that have explored the representation, and indeed the limits of, knowledge within O’Nolan’s oeuvre. His writing continues to resonate within the public sphere, as is attested by the many reissues, adaptations, and collections of his works, including the recent publication of his dramatic works and short stories by Dalkey Archive Press. As Flann O’Brien (At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman) and Myles na gCopaleen (Cruiskeen Lawn, An Béal Bocht), O’Nolan is celebrated, in part, for his savage parodies of academic institutions, erudite individuals, and pedagogical methods; a reputation that appears to rest uneasily alongside this increasing scholarly attention.
The John Burns Library at Boston College acquired Brian O’Nolan’s papers and personal library in February 1997, yet a complete inventory of the latter has only just been compiled and published for the first time in the most recent issue of The Parish Review (2.1, Fall 2013), guest edited by Maebh Long. (A copy of the issue, including the full inventory, is available from the International Flann O’Brien Society by contacting the general editors at viennacis.anglistik@univie.ac.at). This is an important and exciting resource for O’Nolan scholars: the library contains over four hundred books, periodicals, and newspapers in French, German, Greek, Irish, and Latin on subjects as diverse as archaeology, philosophy, politics, psychology, science, and theology. Additionally, there are literary texts from the Classical, Renaissance, Romantic, Victorian, and Modern periods. Due to the complexity of this collection, its potential as a resource for scholarship is only beginning to be examined.
A forthcoming issue of The Parish Review (October 2014) will take up the question of how to assess Brian O’Nolan’s personal library, particularly in light of the representation of archives, marginalia, and scholarship across his oeuvre. We will encourage dialogue between frequently polarized critical approaches, asking which O’Nolan we might find between these shelves. Is O’Nolan’s work invigorated or exhausted by questions of influence? Does the representation of scholarship within his work mark a point of potential or resistance for archival approaches? What might be gathered from the annotations and marginalia within this wide-ranging collection of texts? Or should O’Nolan scholarship be spared from such lines of inquisition? The editors invite proposals on any aspect of O’Nolan’s writing, but are especially interested in papers that explore the holdings at the Burns Library and/or investigate the wider epistemological issues that arise within his work.
Potential topics for papers include, but are by no means limited to:
- How models of influence are sustained by and/or undermined by O’Nolan’s work
- The complexities of O’Nolan’s national and intellectual contexts
- The representation of libraries and/or scholarship within modernist and post-modernist texts
- O’Nolan’s engagement with, or response to, specific literary movements
- How emerging methodologies and technologies might inform our use and understanding of O’Nolan’s library
Essays will be limited to 5,000 words and adhere to the MLA style guide. They will be submitted for peer-review to the editors by 31 May 2014. Contributors can expect to receive feedback by 31 July 2014. [Read More]
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17.12.13
Modernism and the Moral Life: A Symposium
Manchester, 30 May 2014
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The conference is designed as an opportunity for rigorous interdisciplinary exchange between the spheres of critical theory, cultural studies, philosophy, politics, literature, sociology, history, theology, the visual arts, architecture and music. We invite proposals for papers from scholars whose work looks to analyse the connections between aesthetics, ethics and politics in any and all of these fields. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- the relation between style, form and ethics in modernist cultural production
- the extent to which ‘life’ entails or excludes the ‘moral’ in modernist thought
- theory and/as ethics
- ethics and langauge
- modernism and revolution
- utopia
- gender, ethics and critique
- modernism, vision and ethics
- violence and war
- after ‘otherness’
- the limits of liberal humanist approaches to literature and ethics
- perfectionism, authenticity, sincerity, bullshit, narcissism, hedonism, elitism, virtue, duty, commitment, loss of sensitivity, happiness, loneliness, anxiety, inequality, humanism and anti-humanism in the discourses of modernism
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6.12.13
Samuel Beckett Working Group: Warwick 2014
University of Warwick · 28 July – 1 August, 2014
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| Samuel Beckett in London, taking a break with the San Quentin Drama Workshop. Left to right: David Hare, Alan Mandell, Samuel Beckett and friend. |
Samuel Beckett Working Group
University of Warwick
28 July – 1 August, 2014
The Samuel Beckett Working Group (SBWG) will be meeting at the FIRT/IFTR International Federation for Theatre Research World Congress
Papers to be presented at the SBWG are distributed and read by all the participants ahead of the meeting. At the SBWG session presenters give short resumes of their work, followed by a lengthy discussion period (each presenter has 45 minutes in all). This is an extremely effective method, which allows ideas to be discussed, debated and evaluated, with participants suggesting directions for presenters’ works-in-progress. There is limited space for presenters, so do get in touch as soon as possible to guarantee a place; there will also be a limited space for auditors, who would also be sent the papers to read and encouraged to engage in the discussions during the sessions.
The Working Group topic will be:
‘Levels of Imagery (audio and/or visual) in Samuel Beckett’s Drama.
Some ideas on how to approach the topic:
- Levels of interpretation and/or levels of audience response to performance images;
- Levels of conformity with or deviation from stage directions;
- Images that respond to pre-existing performances, such as those in earlier productions of Beckett’s drama, to other theatre genres, to other playwright’s work or to other mediums (e.g. from adaptations from page or radio to the stage).
If you are interested in joining the Working Group you need to upload your abstract to the Cambridge Journals Online pages http://journals.cambridge.org/iftr where you will also be prompted to join or renew your membership of IFTR. This has to be done by 15 January 2014, otherwise their paper cannot be accepted for the conference. For more information: http://iftr2014warwick.org/
Deadline Extended: 31 January 2014.
Warwick will send acceptance emails by 21 February. The reason for the early deadline is a) so that all delegates have a fair chance of getting their preferred accommodation on campus which opens (along with registration) on 1 March 2014 b) to ensure there is adequate time for delegates to apply for Visas, as the UK Visa system can take several months for these to be processed.
Papers (length 5,000 words) are to be distributed by the end of May, 2013.
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16.11.13
Staging Beckett: Constructing Performance Histories
Academic Conference · University of Reading, 4-5 April 2014
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| Design: Rhys Tranter. Photograph: Reg Lancaster/Getty Images |
Staging Beckett: Constructing Performance Histories
Minghella Building, University of Reading, 4-5 April 2014
Call for Papers
Staging Beckett is a three year research collaboration between the universities of Chester, Reading, and the Victoria & Albert Museum, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The project started in September 2012, and is exploring the impact of productions of Beckett’s plays on British and Irish theatre practice and cultures while also looking at how Beckett has been staged internationally. It is compiling a database of professional productions of Beckett’s plays in the UK and Ireland.
The project’s first conference (4-5 April 2014) will focus on the history, documentation and analysis of Beckett’s theatre in performance: while Beckett’s directing practice has been much discussed, and critical attention has been paid to selected premiere productions (the French, British, Irish or US premieres of Godot, for example), or ‘deviant’ productions such as the 1984 American Repertory Theatre production of Endgame, there is a great deal of work to be done in researching the diversity of productions of Beckett’s theatre in the UK, Ireland and internationally. Questions we are asking include:
- How did approaches to staging Beckett’s theatre change from the 1950s to the twenty-first century?
- Have there been distinct approaches to staging Beckett at particular moments and in particular theatre cultures?
- How have productions of Beckett’s plays commented on or reflected wider political / economic contexts?
- What kinds of dialogues can we trace between productions of Beckett’s plays and local, national or international theatre histories?
- Can we trace cross-influences in approaches to staging Beckett across productions?
- What can particular case studies of individual or comparative productions contribute to constructing performance histories of Beckett’s theatre?
- How can future performance practice of Beckett’s theatre be informed or inspired by previous productions?
- We are also interested in methodological issues around Beckett, performance and the archive, and around Beckett, performance and the digital.
- How particular directors / performers have approached staging Beckett.
- How particular economic, funding, and / or political contexts have influenced productions of Beckett’s plays
- Beckett and stage design / scenography
- Technical innovation in productions of Beckett
- ‘Deviant’ or ‘alternative’ productions (ie that have flouted Beckett’s stage directions)
- Productions that were planned and didn’t happen (refused permission, for example)
- Beckett and particular local, national or international theatre cultures
- The ‘festivalisation’ of Beckett
- International touring productions to the UK and Ireland
- UK and Irish productions that have toured (such as Dublin Gate Beckett Festival)
- Digital archives of Beckett in performance / Beckett performance on the web
Informal enquiries can be sent to Anna at the above email address, or to Graham Saunders (g.saunders@reading.ac.uk) or Trish McTighe (p.mctighe@reading.ac.uk).
Future Staging Beckett conferences are: Staging Beckett in the Regions (University of Chester, September 2014), and Beckett and Theatre and Performance Cultures (University of Reading, April 2015).
Staging Beckett team: Matthew McFrederick (Reading) Anna McMullan (Reading), Trish McTighe (Reading) David Pattie (Chester), Graham Saunders (Reading) David Tucker (Chester). [Read More]
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