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Time
Études Médiévales Anglaises nr 100
Deadline for papers: 10 January 2022

The French Journal of Medieval English Studies Études Médiévales Anglaises is seeking submissions for its 100^th anniversary issue focusing on the notion of “time”. The papers, written in French or English, should be submitted to Fanny Moghaddassi and Martine Yvernault by 10 January 2022 (see more information below). Authors who wish to submit a paper are advised to get in touch and submit a title with a brief description of content as soon as convenient.

As the foundation of human experience, time unites natural and cultural phenomena. In 1977, Jacques Le Goff (Pour un autre Moyen Âge, 75) posited that “time related to natural cycles, agrarian activities and religious practice was the essential medieval timeframe”. Medieval societies organized working hours and prayers and liturgical celebrations – Church time – in connection to, and sometimes in contrast with, the necessities of natural and agricultural temporalities. Medieval time – unlike Early Modern time – was not constrained by measure and accuracy, but experienced as a flow, marked by cyclical agricultural activities, and the articulation of daily life with exceptional events, in the form of rituals and celebrations, which often included music and its both specific and complex relation to the measuring of time.

Yet Le Goff also stressed that the rise of “commercial capitalism” (Pour un autre Moyen Âge, 47) led to a partition in the medieval conception of time: Church time, “ruled by God only” spread in linear fashion towards God (Gourevitch defines such a movement as “fusion with eternity”, Catégories de la culture médiévale, 96), became distinct from merchant time, structured by dates, deadlines, context, anticipation, or, reversely, economic and weather accidents. From an ecocritical perspective, the desired, actual or dreaded domestication of natural environments acted as temporal landmarks, namely reflected in medieval literature.

In pagan polytheist cultures before the advent of Christianity, a mythological approach to the world structured conceptions of time and space, which were centered on the past and organized in cycles (Gourevitch). Christianity, grounding time on an only God, introduced the notion of eternity while still preserving some of the forms and landmarks of pagan time. Both Le Goff and Gourevitch showed that merchant time and productive time stemmed from the rise of cities and the development of a new approach to the world, and to time. Townhalls started to display clocks as secular time, anchored in activity and production, started to challenge theological time, regulated by churches. Now partition and measure came to draw a clear line between material and theological times (Schmitt, « Le temps. ‘Impensé’ de l’histoire ou double objet de l’historien ? », 46-7). The growing gap between these conceptions of time induced by galloping industrialization in the 18^th and 19^th centuries led thinkers, artists and writers to invent and romance a pre-productive medieval period.

Gourevitch also pointed to the links that exist between space and time, as experienced both objectively and subjectively. According to him, man’s relation to time and space evolved dramatically from ancient times to the medieval period, from the Early Modern age to modern day, as life rhythms accelerated and the world seemed to narrow in the context of its discovery and exploration (Catégories, 34-5). Paul Ricoeur stressed a similar correspondence between (“experienced, geometric, lived-in”) space and time, which for him was equally dialectically divided in “lived time”, “cosmic time” and “historical time”, as the effort at dating mirrored a corresponding need for localization (Ricœur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, 191).

Medieval conceptions and practices of time have always been the focus of critical attention, in historical, theological, philosophical and literary fields alike. Recent publications testify to an interest for gender-related practices of time and to an effort at tracing specifically female experience of time, for instance in childbirth rituals and daily life (E. Cox, L.H. McAvoy & R. Magnani, 2015). The reconstruction of the historical past in the medieval period (Rouse, 2005), the complex articulation of memory and the future (Critten, 2019), and conceptions of the future (Boyle, 2015) have also been scrutinized by recent criticism.

On the occasion of its anniversary issue, Études Médiévales Anglaises invites papers on the measuring of time, as well as on the marginal treatment of time in ritualized celebrations which punctuate daily life, sometimes subverting its usual hierarchies, as in the case of carnival and misrule. Papers can consider material representations of time and its measure, as well as the subtle representation of past, present and future in medieval literature: romance worlds often conflate several layers of time which coexist in the mind of the reader. (Rouse, 2019, 163). 

Études Médiévales Anglaises invites papers from all disciplinary backgrounds on time in the medieval British Isles, including:

• Conceptualising time
  • Measuring time, technical approaches to time.
  • The ages of man.
  • Seasons and nature.
  • Academic divisions of medieval time: defining the medieval period in Anglo-saxon and French historiographies.
• Expressing Time
  • Time-related formulas.
  • Expressing memory, scrutinising traces. Conversely, observing the ephemeral and the forgotten, and the future.
  • Narrated time.
• Medieval practices of time
  • Contrasting practises of time in daytime and night-time, for instance in mo- nastic and urban contexts.
  • Escaping daily time through rituals and celebrations.
  • Contesting time, marginal time (carnival, disorder and misrule).
  • Time and the otherworld.

The papers, written in English or in French, must be sent before 10 January 2022 to Fanny Moghaddassi f.moghaddassi@unistra.fr and Martine Yvernault martine.yvernault@unilim.fr.  Études Médiévales Anglaises uses double-blind peer review. The stylesheet to be used may be found on our website: https://amaes.jimdo.com/submit-a-paper/

References:

– Barron, Caroline. “Telling the time in Chaucer’s London.” “A Verray Parfit Praktisour”. Essays Presented to Carole Rawcliffe. Eds. Clark, Linda and Danbury, Elizabeth. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2017. 141-151.
– Bede and the Future. Ed. by Peter Darby and Faith Wallis, Studies in Early Medieval Britain and Ireland. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014.
– Boèce. Traité de la musique. Introduction, traduction et notes par Christian Meyer. Turnhout: Brepols, 2004.
– Boyle, Elizabeth. “Forming the future for individuals and institutions in medieval Ireland.” Mittelalterliche Zukunftsgestaltung im Angesicht des Weltendes/ Forming the Future, Facing the End of the World in the Middle Ages. Ed. Schmieder, Felicitas. Beihefte zum Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 77. Köln: Böhlau, 2015. 17-32.
– Critten, Rory G. “Via Rome: medieval medievalisms in the Old English Ruin.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, vol. 49, no. 2, 2019. 209-231.
– Davies, Morgan Thomas. “Warrior time.” Kings and Warriors in Early North-West Europe. Eds. Rekdal, Jan Erik and Doherty, Charles. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2016. 237-309.
– Godden, Richard H. “Gawain and the nick of time: fame, history and the untimely in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” Arthuriana, vol. 26, no. 4, 2016. 152-173.
– Gourevitch, Aaron J. Les catégories de la culture médiévale. Paris : Gallimard, 1983. Chapitre I, « Les représentations spatio-temporelles », ‘Qu’est-ce que le temps ?’. 96-154.
– Harris, Jonathan Gil. Untimely Matter in the Age of Shakespeare. Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 2009.
– Le Goff, Jacques. Pour un autre Moyen Age, Temps, travail et culture en Occident : 18 essais. Paris: Gallimard, nrf, Bibliothèque des histoires, 1977.
– Langeslag, Paul S. Seasons in the Literatures of the Medieval North. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2015.
– Liuzza, Roy Michael. “The future is a foreign country: the legend of the Seven Sleepers and the Anglo-Saxon sense of the past.” Medieval Science Fiction. Eds. Kears, Carl and Paz, James. King’s College London Medieval Studies, 24. London: King’s College London, Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, 2016. 61-78.
– Ricœur, Paul. La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. Paris : Éditions du Seuil, 2000.
– Reconsidering Gender, Time and Memory in Medieval Culture, Ed. by Elizabeth Cox, Liz Herbert McAvoy and Roberta Magnani. Gender in the Middle Ages, 10. Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 2015.
– Romance and History: Imagining Time from the Medieval to the Early Modern Period. Ed. Jon Whitman. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 92. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
– Rouse, Robert Allan, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance. Studies in Medieval Romance 3. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005.
– Rouse, Robert Allan. « ‘Riche pelure and spicerye’: Mercantile Readers and the Imagined World of Medieval Romance ». ÉMA 94, 2019. 149-170.
–  Rudd, Gillian. Greenery: Ecocritical readings of late medieval English Literature. Manchester University Press, 2007.
– Schmitt, Jean-Claude. « Le temps. ‘Impensé’ de l’histoire ou double objet de l’historien ? ». Poitiers, Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale, 2005. 31-52.
– Time in the Medieval World. Ed. Chris Humphrey & W.M. Ormrod. University of York, Centre for Medieval Studies: Boydell & Brewer, 2001.

(posted 13 May 2021)

New Humanities 1: Perspectives on the Anthropocene
Academic Quarter, vol. 25
Deadline for abstracts: 15 January 2022

Academic Quarter presents a new call addressing new perspectives on the Anthropocene in the humanities.

Five years ago, British writer Robert Macfarlane introduced us to “Generation Anthropocene: How humans have altered the planet for ever”. The Anthropocene denotes a new epoch of geological time in which human activity has such a strong influence on the planet that it will leave a geological strata record (Macfarlane 2016). The term goes back to the year 2000 with Crutzen & Stoermer’s article “The ‘Anthropocene’”. Macfarlane presents a large number of aesthetic responses to the Anthropocene, novels and films in particular, but he also sees it as a challenge to the humanities: “The indifferent scale of the Anthropocene can induce a crushing sense of the cultural sphere’s impotence.”

In a similar, and more recent blend of pessimism and call to action, Carolyn Merchant asks, “How, for example, is the air and water pollution associated with global warming reflected in history, art, literature, religion, philosophy, ethics, and justice?” (2020, p. x) She consequently lauds the emerging multidisciplinary concept of environmental humanities as necessary, her reason being that the hu

manities have not responded adequately to relevant questions: “today there are relatively few analyses of the Anthropocene as it relates to the humanities.” The humanities must be reconceptualized “in new ways that make them compelling for the twenty-first century.” (p. xi)

It is these challenges that the issue of Academic Quarter about the Anthropocene seeks to meet. We ask for new perspectives on the Anthropocene. How can the humanities throw a new light on the Anthropocene and articulate new perspectives on it, possibly from an activist standpoint? How to create “arts of living on a damaged planet” (Tsing et al. 2017)? Articles could for instance focus on themes and approaches such as dark ecology (Morton 2018), new materialism (Sanzo 2018), object-oriented ontology (O3) (Harman 2018), rewilding – virtual and real (Lorimer 2015; Jepson & Cain 2020), swamp theory (Sutherland 2021; Urbonas et al. 2022), (eco-) feminism and queer theory (for instance Grusin 2017), and de-colonialist perspectives (for instance Stenbeck 2020).

Aesthetic responses to the Anthropocene are already manifold, and there are also scholarly treatments of it and related fields. Examples are: Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014) and Field Notes from a Catastrophe (2006), Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate (2014), Gaia Vince’s Adventures in the Anthropocene (2015), Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World – On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2017). The post-apocalyptic movie and computer game genres with locations of a collapsed and potentially lethal world are represented by for instance Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), the Mad Max franchise, The Walking Dead streaming series, and The Fallout computer game series. Scholarly publications on the subject include Carolyn Merchant’s The Anthropocene and the Humanities. From Climate Change to a New Age of Sustainability (2020), Nomeda Urbonas et al.’s Swamps and the New Imagination. On the Future of Cohabitation in Art, Architecture, and Philosophy (2022), Alanda Y. Chang’s Playing Nature Ecology in Video Games (2019). The Anthropocene has been reflected and debated within the art institution, for instance with various events and research initiatives at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt since 2013, and Danish artists and artistic researchers such as Rikke Luther, Eva la Cour and Jakob Kudsk Steensen have worked with this theme, Steensen in his Berl Berl exhibition in Berlin 2021.

One challenge to the humanities is whether an activist approach may be expected from them, as contemporary environmental movements might reflect. In Underland: A Deep Time Journey, Macfarlane elaborates on the unique imaginative challenge posed by the Anthropocene and calls for “a retrospective reading of the current moment”, i.e. “a palaeontology of the present” (2019, p. 78) in which we confront ourselves from a distant future as “the sediments, strata, and ghosts” we have become, and ask ourselves the question (originally phrased by Jonas Salk, and pursued by strands of indigenous research): “Are we being good ancestors?” (p. 77) This call from Academic Quarter is the first of three serialized issues under the common theme “New humanities” from an active and committed standpoint.

This issue of Academic Quarter is dedicated to articles from the fields of:

• literature
• art
• film, tv and media
• architecture
• computer games
• music
• museology and curating
• fashion
• experience design
• gender
• leadership
• organisation research
• history
• human geography
• cultural anthropology
• religion
• philosophy
• indigenous research

and other pertinent approaches and critiques of the concepts of the Anthropocene itself are also welcome. We especially value new perspectives on the antropocene from the humanities in a wide and inclusive sense.

References
Crutzen, Paul J. & Stoermer Eugene F. 2000. “The ‘Anthropocene’”. IGBP Newsletter 41. May 2000. 17-18.
Enderby, Emma (ed.). 2021. Jakob Kudsk Steensen: Berl-Berl. Berlin:
Lass & Koenig Books.
Grusin, Richard. 2017. Anthropocene Feminism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Harman, Graham. 2018. Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. Harmondsworth: Pelican Books.
Jepson, Paul & Blythe, Cain (2020). Rewilding: The Radical New Science of Ecological Recovery. London: Icon Books.
Lorimer, Jamie. 2015. Wildlife in the Anthropocene Conservation after Nature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Macfarlane, Robert. 2016. “Generation Anthropocene: How Humans have Altered the Planet for Ever”. The Guardian, April 1, 2016.
Macfarlane, Robert. 2019. Underland: A Deep Time Journey. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Merchant, Carolyn. 2020. The Anthropocene and the Humanities. From Climate Change to a New Age of Sustainability. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Morton, Timothy. 2018. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press.
Rimanoczy, Isabel. 2021. ”Anthropocene and the Call for Leaders with a New Mindset”. In: Ritz A. A., Rimanoczy I. (eds.) Sustainability Mindset and Transformative Leadership. Sustainable Development Goals Series. London: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76069-4_6.
Sanzo, Kameron. 2018. “New Materialism(s).” In Critical Posthumanism. Genealogy of the Posthuman. Posted On: April 25, 2018. Available at https://criticalposthumanism.net/new-materialisms/.
Stenbeck, Katarina. 2020. Forms of Entanglement. Omsorg og verdensskabelse i det antropocæne. Ph.d.-dissertation, Copenhagen University.
Sutherland, Dane. 2021. “A View from the Swamp.” In Enderby, Emma (ed.). 2021, 92- 104.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt et al. 2017. The Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Urbonas, Nomeda, Urbonas, Gediminas and Sabolius, Kristupas (eds.) 2022. Swamps and the New Imagination. On the Future of Cohabitation in Art, Architecture, and Philosophy. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
Wright, Christopher, Daniel Nyberg, Lauren Rickards, and James Freund. “Organizing in the Anthropocene.” Organization 25, no. 4 (July 2018): 455–71. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508418779649.

Practical Information
Abstracts in English, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish will be accepted. Abstracts and articles should be sent to Annemette Helligsø (anhe@hum.aau.dk).
Please check our Submission guidelines: https://journals.aau.dk/index.php/ak/Submission

Deadlines
Submission of abstracts: 15.1.2022
Response to authors of abstracts: 1.3.2022
Submission of articles: 1.7.2022
Reviews will be sent to authors:  1.9.2022
Final articles submitted:1.10.2022
Layout copyedit: 1.11.2022
Publication expected: 1.12.2022

Word count
Abstract: 150 words
Article: 3,000 – 3,500 words

Video essays
7–12 minutes. Detailed author guidelines and further information can be found on the journal’s website: https://journals.aau.dk/index.php/ak/index

You are welcome to use the possibility of producing a video essay following these guidelines:

• Video essays should be 7-12 minutes long and accompanied by an academic guiding text between 1,000-1,500 words.
• The video essay should be of scholarly quality and may be argumentative (documentary) or symbolic (metaphorical) or a combination.
• The guiding text should clearly explain the argument in the video essay as well as the insight that the viewer may gain from watching it. This guiding text should follow the directions in the article style sheet.
• Video essays should be final and handed in as a separate mp4video-file. Academic Quarter supports only publication and not the technical development of video essays.
• Video essays and the guiding text will be reviewed together. Criteria for reviewing video-essays are a// the lucidity of the argument, b the technical and stylistic execution of the video material and c/ the clarity of the guiding text.

(posted 29 November 2021)

Journal of Ecohumanism – Special Issue: “Decolonial Echosophy: A Deliberative Encounter with Indian and non-western Eco-Theologies”
Deadlines: for abstracts: 5 February 2022.

The dense interplay between the multiple strands of eco-criticality in the current times that effectively exposes the ambivalences of state machinery’s eco-political intervention culminates in yielding ecosophical assemblages that works with a new ‘conceptual grammatology’, a grammatology that could be turned into an effective praxis to bring about multiple forms of eco-healing and create effective ways of existing in a ‘qualitative diversity’ beyond anthropocentrism. However, it is the ethics of post-structuralist micropolitics that drives these assemblages. So, the relation these assemblages bear with humanism is productively disjunctive, inclined towards ‘difference engineering’ the latter into an expanding problem field, rather than treating it as a dispensable metaphysical abstraction. As a result, humanism gets to persist in these assemblages as hauntological traces or better inexpugnable stains, brooding over latter’s ecosophical reconstruction of the Bio. Moreover, if the current epistemology stands impregnated with a desire to remove this invisible human mediation it is because the current pandemics we are enmeshed in has generated an aggressive form of desire to exorcise the vestiges of the human. The attempt to work out a form of a-humanism that we encounter in epistemology is a fall out of this desire.

However, the need of the times is to broaden and diversify this attempt by coupling the radical western epistemology with ongoing processes of decolonization. This is a project that demands not only provincial forms of decolonization expressed by Western epistemology’s drive towards a-humanism, but a kind of transversal wedding between radical western epistemology and non-western parallax views.
However, except a few random attempts by some Western thinkers to work out semblances of decolonial enquiry by inventing a form of a-humanism engaging with minor positionalities or ‘thresholds’ of epistemology none of what we get encounter as eco-critical interventions or ecosophical assemblages keenly partake of any form of decolonial enquiry. The Heideggerian concept of self-care or Simondon’s non-anthropocentric approach to technology connect with life promoting process that thinkers such as Levi-Strauss were keen to initiate yet they creatively disjunct from Straussian conviction while reworking anthropocentrism into a redeemable assemblage. In the current times Bernard Steigler’s “Neganthropocene” and Sloterdjik’s anthropotechnic or anthropotechnogenic exist as paradigms of non-anthropocentric assemblages, but the nuanced non-anthropocentrism they offer stand as problematic fields demanding renewal. Their non-anthropocentrism orient us towards making the earth habitable by providing a homotechnologicalturn, a turn that is not contra-natural, but co-natural, entrapping both human and non-human—not unlike Deleuze and Guattari’s reconstructive version of non-humanism—in a process of non-linear co-becoming. But what we desire currently are much broader ecosophical “spherological” assemblages that could synthesize differential forms of a-humanism with broader processes of decolonization entailing a sustained interaction with South Asian epistemic and non-epistemic practices.

In this sense, positioning non-western, in particular Indian and Western philosophy in a process of dynamic interactionism is not only the means of working out a broader decolonial framework, but also a way of producing an effective ahumanist radical sensibility that may work towards creating a new Earth devoid of the traces of humanism. The dense overlap that exists between the Western and the Indian eco-theology has been already teased out and archived. Philosopher Henryk Skolimowski, the proponent of Eco-philosophy, has effectively teased out eco-theological strands of Indian mythology. For him the myth of Shiva happens to be a force which transforms and re-creates the world. Skolimowski holds the view that Shiva’s dance propels towards becoming a dance of healing and infusing the cosmos with a new creative substance and energy. Advaita Vedanta’s concept of Brahman accentuates admiration for all life and for nature as a whole. It is this form of adherence which acts as a ground of any eco-centric philosophy or what we call Deep Ecology. This happens to be a radical strand of Indian philosophy that may not in the outset seem ecological, but by refusing to discriminate between humans, animals, trees, it works out a-humanist tangle. By cutting and combining portions from Western and Indian eco-theology one may work out broader, denser and equally decolonial ecosophical assemblage aptly represented by Sloterdjik’s spherology.

However, the need of the time is to turn them into an effective praxis. Undoubtedly, the dissemination of a range of decolonial ecosophical affectualities among the masses could ensure that they acquire a radical sensibility. But it is only by providing a praxial turn to the broader, expansive and decolonial ecosophical assemblages we work out by connecting with Indian and non-western eco-theology that a transformative ethico-politicality could be worked out. Further with this ethico-political restructuration it may be possible to restructure the current degenerative state of democracy into what Skolimowski in his book Philosophy for a New Civilisation calls ecocracy. So, in this issue of Journal of Ecohumanism we invite articles that:

i. could possibly expose how the model of eco-criticality that the governmental apparatuses routinely works by betraying dense overlap with these apparatuses and overt bio-political and necropolitical agendas.
ii. creatively map the ways by which western a-humanist Ecosophy seeks to decolonize itself by engaging with cult, magic and minor positionalities lying within its immanent exterior.
iii. creatively map the limits of Western Ecosophy and come up with a creative art of decolonizing
them, a process that entails a radical critique of Western posthumanism, non-humanism and a-
humanism.
iv. could make an attempt to pose a deliberative encounter between western Ecosophy and Indian
eco-theology and go on to create decolonial ecosophical assemblages geared to Sloterdjik’s
idea of spherology.
v. could suggest creative ways of turning these ecosophical assemblages into effective praxis.
vi. could even connect with other forms of divergent non-western, eco-activist, eco-critical
parallax views with the intent of folding them into a critique of current western epistemology’s ecosophical drive that stands vulnerable to appropriation by the phenomenon of ‘green Capitalism’.

Editors

Dr. Saswat S. Das is an Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India. He has jointly edited books Taking Place of Language (Peter Lang, 2013) and Technology, Urban Space and Network Community (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), and Deleuze, Guattari and Global Terror (Edinburg University, December, 2021) He is currently co-editing Deleuze, Guattari and the Global Pandemics (Bloomsbury Publication forthcoming). His book reviews are regularly published in Postcolonial Studies, South Central Review, Cultural Politics, French Studies, and Philosophy in Review.

Dr. Ananya Roy Pratihar is Assistant Professor in Communication Studies at the Institute of Management and Information Science, Bhubaneswar, India. She has jointly edited Technology, Urban Space and Network Community(Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) and currently co-editing Deleuze, Guattari and the Global Pandemics (Bloomsbury Publication, forthcoming). Her book reviews and articles are published in Philosophy in Review, French Studies and Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal (University of Warwick).

About the Submissions

You are welcome to submit full-length papers of approximately 5000-6000 words. The language of submissions is only English.

All submissions shall follow the latest guidelines of APA style referencing. More information about the style sheet is found here: [https://journals.tplondon.com/ecohumanism/about/submissions].
The submissions of full-length papers, including an abstract and short bio/CV, will be sent directly to both Editors’ e-mails as well as any queries that you may have. The Editors’ e-mails are [saswatdas.bapi@gmail.com], [ssd@hss.iitkgp.ernet.in] and [aroypratihar@gmail.com].

The abstracts’ deadline is until the 5th of February 2022.
The deadline for the final papers’ submissions is the 31st of May 2022.

Journal’s website: [https://journals.tplondon.com/ecohumanism/announcement/view/27]
Contact details: The Editors’ e-mails are [saswatdas.bapi@gmail.com], [ssd@hss.iitkgp.ernet.in] and [aroypratihar@gmail.com].

(Posted 14 January 2022)

Linguaculture – International Journal of Iaşi Linguaculture Centre for (Inter)cultural and (Inter)lingual Research. Vol. 13, no. 1, 2022
Deadline for contributions: 15 February 2022

Issue editors: Dr. Rodica Albu and Dr. Teodora Ghiviriga

For this thematic issue we welcome original contributions in the areas of narratology, literature (with a special focus on fantasy, on possible worlds in language structures, at the crossroads between referential semantics and fiction studies), translation studies (the challenge of translating fantasy for readerships of various ages and its effect on reception), semiotics, philosophy, logic, theology, cultural and arts studies, preferably focusing on the works of C. S. Lewis and of authors belonging to the literary group known as the Inklings. The theme may be approached from a specific or an interdisciplinary perspective. Equally welcome are reviews of books, particularly – but not compulsorily – devoted to authors of the same literary circle.

Contributions to be published in the June 2022 issue are expected by February 15, and they should not have been published or submitted for publication elsewhere. All submissions will go through a blind peer-review process and notification of acceptance will be sent by April 1.

Please consult our Instructions for Authors page (https://journal.linguaculture.ro/index.php/home/instructions-authors) for further information about submissions and additional requirements.

Use the Submissions page (https://journal.linguaculture.ro/index.php/home/about/submissions) to send us your contributions.

Dogmas in Literature and Literary Missionary: Text, Reader and Critique – chapter contributions
Deadline for chapter proposals: 28 February 2022

This book project aims to examine the existence of dogma in literature and some cult texts, and how dogmas in literature are conveyed to various audiences as a mission by some literary readers, experts and academics. The questions leading up to the volume are varied and their answers require lengthy examination and interpretation. So, this project investigates; Is literature dogmatic? What about literary theories? Can they be dogmatic, too? The answers to these questions are open to clarification, but the responses can also initiate an extensive discussion and manifestation. However, above all, literature does have an aspect that drags the readers, habitually burying them in its pages, and blindly attaching them to itself. Blind devotion stems from the factors that are effective in determining the readers’ faith. Theories of literature, similarly, might bring about the generation of blind adherence and dogmatic approaches. Frank Ritchie, in his revealing essay ‘Literary Dogma’ defines pure belief underlining “A creed, so long as it is merely the expression of the genuine belief of an individual, is innocent enough,”1 and he continues, “but when it is put forth with the sanction of a well-known name, and when its promulgator is inspired with a missionary spirit, it is apt to exercise an unwholesome influence.”2 Do the dogmas in literature then begin precisely ‘with the sanction of a well-known name’? Do literary readers and critics turn to literary missionaries after this ‘blind devotion’? While the philosophies fashioned by some well-known literary theorists are typically accepted, very few scholars participate in speculative inquiries and discursive criticisms towards them. Here we, as one of the few scholars, will survey the dogmas in literature in this study.

Generally, dogma is a word related mostly to religion. In this frame, Mathew Arnold’s “Dogma in Religion and Literature” is of great importance as long as religion is concerned. However, there are dogmas in every field, literature being no exception. Virginia Woolf, for instance, wrote stupendous works, turned out to be well-known, and in 1928 she delivered a lecture at Cambridge University, where women were once not allowed, that formed the basis for the celebrated A Room of One’s Own (1929). Her metaphorical wit “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”3, which she ingeniously expressed in her work, has been recognized as a cult by various people, especially suffragette writers and women, and practically everyone seems to be blindly attached to the idea that ‘a woman without room and money cannot write’. But does this ‘blindly’ acceptance have to do with the fact that Woolf was already a famed writer when she proclaimed this history-defying motto? So, if any woman had said that, would the literary world have reacted in the same way? Undoubtedly, Woolf is quite right when she claims that a woman writer if she desires to be an authoress, should have a room of her own and a salary or money of her own. However, it does not mean that otherwise female writers cannot write. There are a huge number of examples to claim the opposite. The Bronte sisters, Jane Austen, to mention but a few, never had a room of their own. Even Simone de Beauvoir herself confesses that “I didn’t have a room of my own. In fact, I had nothing at all.”4 Interestingly, even those who could afford a room of their own, preferred other ways of “accommodation”. Maya Angeloo, for instance, wrote mainly in a hotel room; Tony Morrison wrote with a paper on her lap. Fortunately, there are recently a number of notes against this statement. One of them is by Ida Rae Egli titled No Rooms of their Own.5 The most poignant is Asja Bakic’s “Not all Writers Can Afford Rooms of their Own”.6 She rents a flat and that’s what she says: “Had Virginia Woolf been forced to walk Mayor Bandic’s gravelly paths in search of inspiration, her cult essay would’ve sounded quite different.

Roland Barthes’ 1967 ‘La mort de l’auteur’ (‘The Death of the Author’)7 essay might be another text that some of its literary readers have developed a dogmatic commitment to. It seemed so unfair and unjust towards writers. In the same vein, some scholars vehemently protested against those who applied this conflicting theory to Shakespeare. “Does it matter who wrote his works”8 exclaimed some critics considering the opposite view sceptically. And that is what is dangerous: to consider all the literary theories by prominent critics and philosophers unchallenging. Recently, even very reputable writers and critics do not consider the theory very reliable and state that “the time for the dead author is over. Now is the age of Living Dead authors.”9 After all, one shouldn’t forget that theory does not mean ‘it is’, rather it means “it might be’. This theory is good for experimenting. Several academics used it at the exams giving students modernist or realist texts without mentioning the writer. and having them determine the literary movement and genres.

Examples abound. Indisputably, one of the most vital hitches that arise is connected to the ‘reader’s intention’. In a way, it is the reader who undertakes the missionary role of the literary text. To put this in two examples, does every text in which Western writers treat Easterners have an Orientalist point of view? Or does the reader produce it? Does the work of every woman writer have feminist elements? How exactly do biases work in the interpretation of a text? How does the reader’s intention affect the fate of the text? Or how accessible is the idea that a text, whether lyrical or prose, is shaped entirely or indirectly by the reader’s emotions? So, the question is, are fallacies? These and similar questions will gather possible answers in this book.

Possible topics to cover but not limited to:

• Dogma(s) in literature
• Literary dogmas
• Dogmatic literary theories
• Dogma, literature and author relationship
• Dogma and the literary reader
• Dogma and literary text
• The relationship between dogma and fiction
• Dogma and creativity
• Readers as literary missionaries
• Reader’s bias and intention
• Author’s intention
• Literary fallacies

A renowned international publisher (US based) with peer-review system has already expressed their interest in this collection. The project is currently under contract.

The anticipated completion deadline for this work is December 2022.

Deadline Processing

28 February 2022: Call for chapter proposals of 500 words along with CVs
15 March 2022: Announcement of the accepted proposals
15 July 2022: First Drafts of Full Papers
15 August 2022: Announcement of Revisions of First Drafts
01 October 2022: Second Drafts of Papers Revised
01 November: Announcement of Final Revisions
01 December 2022: Completing the materials and submitting them to the Publisher

Please send your 500-word proposal along with your recent CV and all your other inquiries to: ondercakirtas@bingol.edu.tr

Contact details

Editor: Önder Çakırtaş, Bingol University, Department of English Language and Literature, Bingol TURKEY, Email: ondercakirtas@bingol.edu.tr

Dogmas in Literature

(Posted 16 January 2022)

Literary writings of non-literary artists – special issue: “Poli-femo”
Extended deadline: 20 March 2022

Literary writings of non-literary artists 

First of all, let us set the boundaries by means of exclusion: this issue of Poli-Femo does not deal  with the work of the category of artists defined as literary authors: writers of poems, novels, short stories,  fables, dramas, etc.; rather, it deals – in a positive sense – with the written work of all the other kinds of  artists, representing not literature but the many other arts. A rudimentary classification of which might include the visual arts (painting, sculpture, etc.), the performing arts (music, dance, theatre, musical  theatre, etc.), the constructive arts (architecture, design), the arts of electr(on)ical media technology  (photography, cinema, video art, radio drama, etc.) and all those that have emerged more recently as  hybrids or extensions or twists of the traditional arts (conceptual art, installation, performance art, land  art, net art, comics, videogames, etc.). 

In the most recent historical period, from modernism onwards, there has been a strong tendency  to deconstruct the explicit and implicit codes of the system of literature (or, more generally, of  writing). Including codes relating to genres and their classification. On the creative front, authors are  increasingly inclined to transgress the order of centuries-old or millennia-old codified genres, crossing  or abolishing the boundaries – on different planes – between poetry and prose, between fictio and  dictio, between high and low literature, between pure writing and writing mixed with other material  media, etc. On the historical-theoretical-critical front, scholars increasingly recognise the lability of  established categories of genre, even in their application to history: hence, those categories prove to  be not entirely effective in accounting for past phenomena, let alone the present.  

In such a context, if we want to deal with a textual genre other than codified ones, we should  proceed with caution. The writing of non-literary artists does not form a single, separate, compact genre;  on the contrary, it takes the most diverse forms and constitutes a heterogeneous whole. Alongside the  obvious interest in this issue in production of a more specifically fictional or poetic nature, there is also  interest in other categories of artists’ writings, such as, typically, manifestos, or the presentation of the  artist’s own work, or essays (concerning the artist’s own art or even other arts or non-artistic fields),  epistles, interviews, or articles with a publicist slant. Much of this production has declared literary  ambitions or reveals an intention, albeit not explicit, in this sense. It is precisely this literary intention that will be the object of investigation in this issue of the magazine. 

Despite the heterogeneity of forms and objectives, the writing of non-literary artists is a sufficiently  clear and distinct category to be the object of a specific, dedicated investigation. It is worth isolating and  focusing on this field of investigation, which does not appear to be devoid of scientific interest. The  working hypothesis is that, without presupposing the existence of a unique and autonomous  (macro)genre of “writings by non-literary artists”, it is nonetheless useful, at least from a heuristic  perspective, to bring together in a single volume a set of analyses and theoretical studies on texts by  artists from different artistic backgrounds in order to allow the emergence of characteristic traits or  significant common elements inherent in the so-called “dual talent”. Moreover, while there are  collections of authors’ writings (sometimes in specialised series), in-depth studies on the writings of  individual artist-authors, reflections on the writings of authors belonging to individual artistic fields (the  writings of painters, the writings of composers…), as well as precise analyses of significant examples of  dual talent (cf. “Literature and Art”, no. 18, 2020), it does not appear that a general study of artists’  writings across the different arts (a study that will presumably have to be collective and interdisciplinary)  has already been firmly established, indeed it may almost have to be invented. The basic question could  be the following: can the inevitable interferences between artistic languages that characterise the production of non-literary artists be traced back to a series of characteristic traits? 

The writings of non-literary artists (actually, with regard to what follows, also those of literary authors)  can be divided into two macro-categories (whose boundaries are obviously not rigid, but nor are they inconsistent or entirely arbitrary): 

• literary writings, belonging to greater or lesser established genres, typically – but not exclusively – fictional, e.g. a novel by a painter or a poem by a composer, etc.; 
• non-literary writings, not belonging to established literary genres and typically nonfictional, including,  for example, manifestos, self-presentations, essays, analyses, epistles.

The volume to which this call for papers refers will therefore be subdivided into two sections,  respectively concerning the two above-mentioned macro-categories (without excluding contributions  that may also profitably challenge them). 

“Poli-Femo” therefore invites researchers from various disciplines – those inherent to literature and  those inherent to the other arts – to propose articles aimed at studying the literary and non-literary  writing of non-literary artists. 

The monographic theme of this issue can be approached in a completely free manner, but some  suggestions for lines of enquiry may be: 

• within the work of the same individual author, the unity or separation – genetic and then actual – between the products of their non-literary art and those of their writing; 
• even in the case of separation of the products of the two distinct activities, the possible interference of  the artist’s individual poetics in their (non-literary) art with their writing; 
• the artist’s ability to innovate with respect to canonical writing genres; 
• any historical or geographical tendencies relating to the propensity of certain categories of artists to  write about their own art (poetic, critical, theoretical, didactic texts etc.), about a different art or about  something else entirely; 
• the possible impact of the fictional production of non-literary artists on contemporary literature; – the question of ‘dual talent’ (where relevant) approached from a theoretical point of view; – exploration of language affinities/differences. 

Proposals for study on the subject put forward by those intending to collaborate in the publication will be examined by the Scientific Committee, in order to widen the field of exploration undertaken in  this issue of the Magazine. Contributions will be accepted in Italian, English and French. 

To this end, the Editorial Board proposes the following deadlines: a preliminary and essential step is to send an abstract (min.10/max.20 lines), keywords and a brief curriculum vitae of the proposer, to redazione.polifemo@iulm.it by 20 March 2022 (absolute deadline). The Editorial Office will confirm to the authors the acceptance of the contributions by 30 March 2022. The deadline for submission of contributions is 15 June 2022.

All contributions will be subject to double blind peer review. The issue, edited by Prof. Laura Brignoli and Prof. Stefano Lombardi Vallauri, will be published in December 2022.

call – POLIFEMO CFP_ENG

(Posted 12 February 2022)

Territory in the English-speaking world
RANAM 56, to be published in June 2023
Deadline for proposals: 1 March 2022

Please note that proposals (250 words) should be sent to Gwen Cressman (cressman@unistra.fr), Fanny Moghaddassi (f.moghaddassi@unistra.fr) and Jean-Jacques Chardin (chardin@unistra.fr) by March 1st and full papers by October 15, 2022.

We welcome proposals from the humanities, social sciences and related disciplines on the following themes. We expect contributors to approach territory in practical and conceptual terms.

…Tell me, my daughters
(Since now we shall divest us of both of rule,
Interest of territory, cares of state)
Which of you shall we say doth love us most.
(King Lear, I,1)

King Lear’s test of filial obedience at the beginning of the play connects territory with ruling and organizing space into a geographic and political entity.

The notion of territory is generally admitted to articulate the concept of space with that of its appropriation by a community (the Latin word territorium links the idea of space to that of jurisdiction: Varron’s “Ager Romanus”, Lingua latina, V, §55, defines the territory that all Roman tribes owned in common). In Pour une géographie du pouvoir (1980) for instance, the French geographer Claude Raffestin states that territories are being generated from space through the actions of an actor who territorializes space. In French geographical historiography, a remarkable expansion of the use of the concept of territory since the 1980s has led to its acquiring a nearly hegemonic status in the field. The reasons for such success lie in the very broad definitions territory has received in Francophone contexts. Brunet and Théry for instance note that “The notion of territory always includes legal, social and cultural, and even emotional dimensions. Territory differs from space in that it always implies a form of appropriation of space” (1993). Maryvonne Le Berre also notes that “Everything leads to discussing the idea of territory. Anything can be a territory”, while Yves Jean (2002) stresses that geographers sometimes define territory as “an imaginary and real space” or as “signs, symbols and images inscribed in time”. Using ethological notions of territory, Deleuze and Guattari have produced philosophical concepts of territory, territorialization and deterritorialization that are used in extremely varied research contexts. The fields of geography, history, anthropology, law, urbanism and social sciences have resorted to the concept, which is often used metaphorically as well.

By contrast, Anglophone historiography seems to restrict the use of the word territory to more explicitly political contexts. In a seminal publication about The Significance of Territory (1973), Jean Gottman thus argued that “Territory is a political organization of space that defines the relationships between the community and its habitat”, and many Anglophone publications resorting to the concept of territory endorse that primacy given to the political dimension of the notion (for instance Moore, 2015). Explorations of other ways of appropriating territories (social, personal, emotional, literary, artistic…) resort, perhaps more often than in French, to the word ‘space’, associated to various forms of qualification.

The present call for papers however means to draw attention to a defining feature of the concept of territory in both Anglophone and Francophone historiographies: its emphasis on the relationships territories imply between space and its usages by human actors, who try to organize space, physically, legally, linguistically, ethnically…

To analyze territory is to examine the negotiations and collaborations, sometimes the rivalries, in order to produce forms of space appropriation, ranging from adaptation to domination. Territorializing means naming and identifying space both in communal and personal terms, resorting to the projections of collective or more individual identities. Territory embraces such issues as social, local, regional, national, ethnic, religious, or linguistic identities in relation to the notion of otherness. Whether it be a geographic, or political entity, territory constructs, and is constructed by discourse.

1/Geography, politics, power

• The specific historical contexts within which relations of domination and contestation have produced singular territories;
• The cultural and political construction of territories through linguistic, literary and/or administrative mapping;
• The cultural and ideological dimensions in the process of territorialization – understood as defining limits and boundaries, whether they be jurisdictional, geographic and/or political;
• Processes of territorial appropriation and reclamation and the complexity of extra-, inter and intra-territorial relations implied;
• The tensions, exchanges and forms of negotiation induced by multiple and overlapping layers of authority in the organization of territories;
• The emergence of third spaces (such as co-working areas) as alternative territories productive of social relations that seek to redefine notions of consensus and dissensus;
• Environmental politics and the territory (resource management, sovereignty).

 2/ Social practices and territorial identities

• Cultural production of identity in relation to territory (discourse and practices) (territory producing identity and being produced by social relations);
• Social, ethnic, religious, linguistic, personal identities and their Others in relation to national, regional and local territories;
• Sociolinguistic policies and how territories construct, and are constructed by language;
• Social belonging and interpersonal conversation as forms of territorial delimitation;
• Mapping as sociohistorical where history and memory are constructed as territorial palimpsests;
• The production of mythical territories and the manufacturing of knowledge;
• Fluctuating territories or the territory in a permanent process of redefinition by its actors;
• Mapping the territories of discourse: gender, genre and the canon.

3/ Territories of the mind and the body

• Imagining and constructing the self as territory;
• Forms of language and artistic expression that capture the complexities of the relation between the self and the territory;
• Territories of the self through sensory perceptions (visual / sound territories…);
• Historical relation between the self, the territory and the environment: eco-critical approach, territory as experienced physically (illegal migration, aesthetic experiences of landscape and territory);
• Subjective territories : the inscription of the individual in constructed and real territories or landscapes: finding one’s way and place, psychological topographies;
• Imaginary and fictionalized territories : how the self defines, and redefines territory and its place within it;
• Territories as projections of the mind: imaginary territories, video games, literature, film studies…
• Discourses about the self that include the idea of territory, namely in psychology: line between mental health and pathological;
• Verbal representations of territory in terms of metaphorical discourse, how metaphors can express our bodily experiences of territory (cognitive metaphor theory).

References :

Roger BRUNET, Hervé THERY, « Territoire », in BRUNET, Ferras et THERY, Hervé (dir.), Les mots de la géographie. Dictionnaire critique. Reclus, La Documentation française, 1993 (1^e éd. 1992).
André CORBOZ « Le territoire comme palimpseste », Diogène, n° 121, janvier-mars, 1983.
Gilles DELEUZE, Félix GUATTARI, Mille plateaux, Paris, Ed. de Minuit, 1980.
Stuart ELDEN, The Birth of Territory, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Jean GOTTMANN, The Significance of Territory, Charlottesville, Unversity Press of Virginia, 1973.
Yves JEAN, « La notion de territoire : entre polysémie, analyses critiques et intérêt » in Lire les territoires, Yves JEAN et Christian CALENGE (dir.), Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais, coll. Perspectives Villes et Territoires, 3, 2002, 9-22. https://books.openedition.org/pufr/1765
Zoltan KOVECSES, Metaphor and Emotion, New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Zoltan KOVECSES, « Methodological Issues in Conceptual Metaphor Theory”, in S. Handl & H. Schmid (eds.), Windows to the Mind: Metaphor, Metonymy and Conceptual Blending, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2011, 23–40.
George LAKOFF and Mark JOHNSON, Metaphors We Live by. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980.
George LAKOFF and Mark JOHNSON, Philosophy in the Flesh, New York: Basic Books, 1999.
George LAKOFF and Mark JOHNSON, “Why Cognitive Linguistics Requires Embodied Realism”, Cognitive Linguistics, 2002: 13(3), 245–263.
Ronald W. LANGACKER, Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol. 1: Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987.
Ronald W. LANGACKER, Grammar and Conceptualization. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1999.
Maryvonne LE BERRE, « Territoires », in Antoine BAILLY, Robert FERRAS, Denise PUMAIN (dir.), Encyclopédie de géographie, Paris, Economica, 1995, 603.
Margaret MOORE, A Political Theory of Territory, New York, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015.
Thierry PAQUOT, « Qu’est-ce qu’un « territoire » ? », Vie sociale, 2011 : 2 (n°2), 23-32, online : https://www.cairn.info/revue-vie-sociale-2011-2-page-23.htm?contenu=article#no10 (16 Nov. 2021)
Claude RAFFESTIN, Pour une géographie du pouvoir, Paris, Librairies Techniques, 1980.
Leonard TAMLY, Toward a Cognitive Semantics, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.
Jakob von UEXKÜLL (1864-1944), Mondes animaux et monde humain, Paris, Denoël, (1934) 1984.

(posted 7 December 2021)

Thematic issue of Studia Litteraria Universitatis Iagellonicae – “Ulysses 100 years after”
Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland
Deadline for paper proposals: 15th March 2022.

“Science, it cannot be too often repeated, deals with tangible phenomena.
The man of science like the man in the street has to face hardheaded
facts that cannot be blinked and explain them as best he can.
There may be, it is true, some questions which science cannot answer – at present…”
(James Joyce, Ulysses)

On 2 February 2022 the literary world will celebrate the centenary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, about which the author famously stated that he put so many enigmas and puzzles into it that it will keep the professors busy for centuries. After one hundred years, how much do we actually know about it? How many puzzles have been solved, and which still remain a challenge? What insights have we gained into Joycean enigmas? Which of them are intersubjectively verifiable, and which are just fanciful flights of critics’ imagination barely grounded in rigorously conducted research? Which results obtained in Joycean scholarship have stood the test of time? What are milestones of Ulysses research, which are seminal critical texts, which of them have fruitfully informed other research, and which have been blind paths?

Beyond questions of factual knowledge, accurate information and its deliberate misrepresentation by the author, there is also the question of the reader’s background knowledge, their choice of methodology, and bias. What some critics perceive as highly relevant, others may tend to ignore. This may result not only in different, but even contradictory findings and interpretations. We may comment on this, quoting Joyce again: “though people may read more into Ulysses than I ever intended, who is to say that they are wrong: do any of us know what we are creating?”

This raises questions about soundness, applicability and relevance of various methodological approaches, not only for Ulysses but for literary works in general. Thus, we invite the authors to reflect on the nature of knowledge, its verifiability, deliberate manipulation, and (degrees) of ignorance, with regard to Ulysses, and other Joyce’s texts. The proposed paper may deal with:

• facts and fictions in Ulysses
• science, knowledge, epistemology in Ulysses
• historical reconstructions, accuracies and inaccuracies
• impact of Joycean scholarship on translation reception, and teaching of Ulysses
• genetic Joyce studies
• relevance and Joyce studies

Please send an abstract of approximately 200 words to Katarzyna Bazarnik (k.bazarnik@uj.edu.pl), and/or Dirk Vanderbeke (vanderbeke@t-online.de), and/or Jolanta Wawrzycka (jolanta@radford.edu). The deadline for paper proposals is 15^th March. Paper proposals will be reviewed and the authors will be notified about their acceptance. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 25^th March. The deadline for the final papers is 15^th July.

Selected, peer reviewed papers will be published in a thematic issue of Studia Litteraria Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis. The publication is planned for December 2022.

For the journal website, see https://www.ejournals.eu/Studia-Litteraria/.

Cfp for the thematic issue of Studia Litteraria_Ulysses 100 years after

(Posted 10 January 2022)

The Myths of Modernism / Modernism and Myths: Then and Now
The Polish Journal of English Studies
Deadline for proposals: 31 March 2022

The year 2022 marks the centenary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. To celebrate this watershed in the history of the English-language literature The Polish Journal of English Studies invites papers for inclusion in a special issue titled The Myths of Modernism / Modernism and Myths: Then and Now.

As suggested by the title, the project has not only a dual, but a repeatedly bifurcating nature. On the one hand, it centres on the modernists themselves: their love of myths, as well as the myths that now surround them. After all, modernist writers from Joyce and Yeats to Woolf and Lawrence were fascinated by their own literary predecessors, the classics, “the dead poets and artists” whom Eliot mentions in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” At the same time they were driven by the desire to break with the past. Once rebels, even outcasts, some of them authors of outlawed works, they have long been canonised and mythologised. Thus, on the other hand, the project also looks at the generations of writers who have followed the modernists, and have engaged in their own rewriting of ancient scripts and/or have entered into a dialogue with the modernists themselves as pivotal figures within the literary mythos.

Both laudatory and critical/revisionist approaches are welcome. Philip Larkin observed, irreverently:

What I do feel a bit rebellious about is that poetry seems to have got into the hands of a critical industry which is concerned with culture in the abstract, and this I do rather lay at the door of Eliot and Pound… I think a lot of this myth-kitty business has grown out of that, because first of all you have to be terribly educated, you have to know everything to know these things, and secondly you’ve got somehow to work them in to show that you are working them in. But to me the whole of the ancient world, the whole of biblical and classical mythology means very little, and I think that using them today not only fills poems full of dead spots but dodges the writer’s duty to be original.

Is this a fair – or unjust – assessment of the modernists’ supposedly (?) elitist esotericism? How did the modernists approach “the pastness of the past” and “its presence”? What relations did they form with their “ancestors”? What is the use of “this myth-kitty business” today? Does “the whole of the ancient world, the whole of biblical and classical mythology mean very little” to contemporary writers? Or, on the contrary, far from creating the feared “dead spots,” ancient myths can be given a new life in new texts that – exactly by taking us to their distant origins – illuminate the most vital issues of our present moment? Our special issue offers an opportunity to reflect on the above, and other related questions.

Please send a 150-200-word abstract (titled Surname_PJES_Myths) together with a short biographical note to izabela.curyllo-klag@uj.edu.pl and ewa.kowal@uj.edu.pl. The deadline for submission of abstracts is 31 March 2022. Notifications about proposal acceptance will be sent by 15 April 2022. The deadline for submission of completed papers is 15 July 2022. Planned publication: December 2022.

The topic of this special issue of PJES will be discussed during a panel at the 31^st PASE conference titled “Transitions,” held by the Institute of English Studies, Jagiellonian University in Kraków, on 1-2 July 2022. Detailed information about the arrangements concerning the PASE conference will be provided at a later date.

Special Issue Editors / Panel Organisers:
Dr Izabela Curyłło-Klag
Dr Ewa Kowal

(posted 6 December 2021)

Journal of Narrative and Language Studies – special issue: “Geopolitics and the Anthropocene: Examining the Implications of Climate Change in the narratives of Global South”
Deadine for abstracts: 31 March 2022

Call for papers for a special issue of Journal of Narrative and Language Studies

Geopolitics and the Anthropocene: Examining the Implications of Climate Change in the narratives of Global South

The term ‘Anthropocene,’ which refers to the current geological epoch as a result of the escalation of anthropogenic activities, has sparked much debate since its proclamation by Paul J. Crutzen in 2000. Crutzen argues that the beginning of the Anthropocene coincides with the beginning of the fossil fuel energy regime in the late eighteenth century (Crutzen 2000). In other words, the onset of the Anthropocene marks an increase in the carbon concentration in the atmosphere, eventually contributing to global warming. Anthropocene, the human dominated geological epoch, being arguably tied with the fossil fuel extractions, calls for the convergence of natural and human capitalist histories (Chakrabarty 2016). The capitalist history indicates an imperial past that has thrived on fossil fuel extraction from the Asian and African colonies. The flourishing of the empire at the expense of the environmental health of the colonised has created an ecological divide between the imperial power holders and their subjects. There is no significant change in the present scenario given the expansion of the neo-colonial regime of the Global North that exploits the ‘extraction ecologies’ (Miller 2021) and ‘resource cursed’ (Nixon 2010) nations of the Global South.

The European and American powers’ politics of de-nationalising the resources of the decolonized nations has created an opportunity for the Global North multinationals to exploit the resources of the Global South, thereby damaging the immediate ecology of those countries. Such a divisive and exploitive scenario calls for the assignment of the epoch as ‘Capitalocene’, the ‘geology of capital accumulation’ (Malm 2016), instead of ‘Anthropocene,’ meaning the ‘geology of mankind’. The term ‘Capitalocene’ points to the economic divide between the developed Global North and the developing Global South and the climate change-related inequitable experiences of the two economically divided parts of the globe. Critics argue that the poor and other dispossessed communities are relatively more vulnerable to the current climate change than those capitalist states that primarily contribute to it. The geographical peculiarity of the Global South, with its remnants of the colonial past, requires an assessment of the anthropogenic ecological degradation contextualised within the geopolitics of the Global North and the Global South.

Thus, the special issue of the Journal of Narrative and Language Studies aims to introspect into the politics of unequal human agency and its resultant consequences related to climate change in the literature of the Global South. In this issue, we would like to place a special emphasis on the ‘Anthropocene fictions’ (Trexler 2015) produced within the literary culture of the Global South, addressing the problems of the present climate crisis and speculating on the future in order to understand ‘what anthropogenic climate change is and how long its effects may last’ (Chakrabarty 2016). In doing so, we invite abstracts that will explore the varied implications of ‘Anthropocene’/ ‘Capitalocene’ through the literary practises of the Global South, emphasising the issues related to climate refugees, eco-cultural calamities, environmental justice, citizenship, human-nonhuman interrelationship, dispossession of indigenous communities, and capitalism versus climate and island vulnerability. Thus, the special issue intends to invite submissions making theoretical and literary investigations into the multifaceted ‘Anthropocene’, particularly contextualised in the Global South, which demands greater representation within the climate change discourses. In the special issue, we also seek to examine the role of the authorial voices from the Global South in explicating the dire climatic conditions of the region in relation to geopolitics and in presenting an alternative environmental historiography of the Global South.

We thus invite scholars to submit abstracts/paper proposals that address the following (but not limited to) issues contextualised in the Global South and literature:

• The critique of human agency in the Anthropocene
• The critique of unequal human agency in the Capitalocene
• Capitalism and climate change
• Environmental justice and citizenship
• Indigenous communities and the climate crisis
• Speculative fiction and climate change
• Human-nonhuman interrelationship
• Fossil fuel energy regime and ‘extraction ecologies’
• Ecological and cultural calamities
• Postcolonial ecology and climate change
• Graphic narratives and climate change
• Racism and speciesism
• Island ecology and the Anthropocene

The abstracts (300 words) should be submitted to specialissuegk@gmail.com no later than March 31st, 2022.

Intimation of the selection of abstracts: 15 April 2022

After an initial review of abstracts by the editors of the special issue, selected authors will be invited to contribute full-length (5.000–7000 words) articles written according to APA 7th edition and adhering to standard NALANS guidelines for authors that can be found here: https://www.nalans.com/index.php/nalans/about/submissions. The deadline for submission of full articles is June 30, 2022. This issue is expected to come out in October 2022.

NALANS (ISSN: 2148-4066), the Journal of Narrative and Language Studies is a double-blind peer-reviewed journal published by Karadeniz Technical University. The Journal is indexed in SCOPUS, MLA International Bibliography, DOAJ, The Linguist List, Google Scholar, DRJY, ASOS, Academic Resource Index, Turkish Education Index, SOBIAD. All other important information on the Journal can be found here: https://www.nalans.com/index.php/nalans/index 

Issue editors

Goutam Karmakar, Ph.D. (English), is an Assistant Professor of English at Barabazar Bikram Tudu Memorial College, Sidho-Kanho-Birsha University, Purulia, West Bengal, India. His forthcoming and recently published edited books are Narratives of Trauma in South Asian Literature (Routledge), The City Speaks: Urban Spaces in Indian Literature (Routledge), and Religion in South Asian Anglophone Literature: Traversing Resistance, Margins and Extremism (Routledge, 2021). He has been published in journals including MELUS, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, South Asian Review, Journal of Gender Studies, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, National Identities, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, and Asiatic among others.

Somasree Sarkar is an Assistant Professor of English at Ghoshpukur College, University of North Bengal, West Bengal, India. She is also pursuing her Ph.D. from the Department of English, University of North Bengal, West Bengal, India. Her articles have been published in an edited volume, Partition Literature and Cinema: A Critical Introduction (UK: Routledge, 2020). Her articles have also been published in Journal of Gender Studies, South Asian Review and Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. 

Mustafa Zeki Çıraklı, PhD, is an Associate Professor of English Language and Literature at Karadeniz Technical University, Turkey. He is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Narrative and Language Studies.

(Posted 7 Fenruary 2022)

Unorthodox Minds: Innovative Exchanges Between Cognitive Studies, Narrative Theory and Contemporary Fiction
An edited collection of essays
Deadline for proposals: 1 October 2021

Edited by Grzegorz Maziarczyk and Joanna Klara Teske

In recent years research on the subject of consciousness, cognition, and the human mind has been constantly gaining momentum. New theories take emotions to be information processing programs which control the work of subprograms responsible for perception, attention or conceptual frameworks (Tooby and Cosmides), construe mental states − our subjective experience − as having no causal power (Dennett), claim that we read the minds of the others by simulating their experience (Goldman), submit that instead of being rational in our actions we simply post hoc rationalize them with the help of the interpreter module, confabulating when needs be (Gazzaniga). These and similar cutting-edge conceptualisations of consciousness and cognition have already attracted attention of both novelists (Peter Watts, Ian McEwan, David Lodge, Tom McCarthy, Julian Barnes) and narrative (postclassical) theorists (Monika Fludernik, Alan Palmer, David Herman, Lisa Zunshine).

In 2016 and 2017 we edited two collections of essays on works of fiction investigating the human mind: Novelistic Inquiries into the Mind (Cambridge Scholars Publishing) and Explorations of Consciousness in Contemporary Fiction (Brill). Though the two volumes have helped to fill an important gap in the literature, they have not exhausted the subject. Contemporary fiction as well as contemporary narrative studies seem to engage more than ever in interaction with cognitive studies and philosophy of mind offering provocative ideas and/or original means of their expression.

We invite proposal submissions for a forthcoming edited collection concerning recent developments in cognitive science and philosophy of mind and their reverberations in narrative theory and contemporary English-language fiction. We are especially interested in innovative theories of mind and equally innovative works of literature, which offer unorthodox representations of the human mind.

We welcome research papers focused on any of the following issues:

•  postclassical analyses of techniques for showing mental states/cognition in narrative fiction,
•  literary responses to narrative theories of the mind,
•  literary reception (in narrative studies and fiction) of phenomenological interpretations of the mindful body/ the embodied mind (rejecting the post-Cartesian dualism),
•  the use of experimental narrative strategies to problematize mental experience (cf. works such as The Trick is to Keep Breathing by Janice Galloway, Woman’s World by Graham Rawle, The House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski or The Breathing Wall by Kate Pullinger, Stefan Schemat and babel),
•  unnatural minds of narrative texts: examination of human minds carried out within the framework of unnatural narratology,
•  new interpretations of the role of emotions and affect in contemporary fiction and/or narrative theory,
•  analyses of literary representations of the impact of the Internet and, more generally, contemporary digital culture on the human mind,
•  cultural minds: “fictional” representations of cultural differences between minds,
•  the idea of the constructedness of the self: the role of the imagination in human subjective experience as explored in postmodern (meta)fiction,
•  notions of extended mind and intermental thinking: their use in narrative theory and/or fiction,
•  interactivism as a radically new interpretation of cognition: its reflection in narrative theory and fiction,
•  “fictional” discussions on artificial intelligence and what they can reveal about the nature of the mind,
•  literary discussions on the subject of ethical consequences of recent developments in the theory of mind (ideas such as physical determinism, constructivism, epiphenomenalism),
•  novelistic attempts to anticipate the future evolution of the human mind (posthumanity).

Proposals (250-word abstracts) should be submitted to grzegorz.maziarczyk@kul.pl and joanna.teske@kul.pl by October 01, 2021. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by October 30, 2021. Final papers will be expected by March 01, 2022. We hope to be able to publish the collection by the end of 2022.

We would like to ask the authors to follow the MLA stylesheet (8th edition) and use British English spelling. Please attach a brief biographical note to your abstract.

Grzegorz Maziarczyk, Associate Professor of Literary Theory
Joanna Klara Teske, Associate Professor of Literary Studies
Institute of Literary Studies
John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Al. Racławickie 14, 20-950 Lublin, Poland

(posted 4 May 2021)

Literature and peripheries
Polifemo no. 23, 2022
Deadline for proposals: 1 October 2021

The ‘periphery’ has long been the scene for the most pressing wagers of urban, economic and social development: in its various, often unfortunately negative aspects, the periphery constitutes a node of transition and inevitable connection between the ‘centre’ and the ‘outside’ of the city, maintaining opposing characteristics towards both, and acting as an identity-creating workshop for ‘middle-earth society’, where degradation is mixed with opportunities and is redeemed by creative energy.

The periphery is an extremely mobile place, in both time and space: it changes according to epochs and the cities where it is located, seeing that today there are ‘internal’ peripheries, characterised by situations of social marginalisation, cultural and emotional deprivation, and a lack of opportunities.

It is a mutable ‘object’ and for this reason continually eludes evaluations: if, on the one hand, it is defined by subtraction in relation to the terms of reference with which it is compared, on the other hand, it is now finding its place in the imagination as an accumulation of the multiple meanings acquired over time. The metaphorical (and re-semanticised – in an anthropological, linguistic and cultural sense) use of the term therefore makes use of different connotations, seen as values or as disvalues, depending on the diaphasic contexts and, above all, on the internal or external gaze of those who narrate the peripheries.

Nowadays, the periphery is a theme that has been so well covered by the arts (literature, the visual arts, music) and by the humanities in general (social, linguistic, anthropological and historical sciences) that it has now acquired a classic status, which must now attempt to find an interdisciplinary epistemological structure.

This thematic issue of Polifemo will welcome the work of researchers from the various disciplines – literary and other arts – who are studying the theme proposed.

Among the topics that may be developed, we can mention by way of example:

• the role of language and literature in the formation of the concept of ‘periphery’ with reference to some specific cases;
• the metaphor of the periphery and its connotations;
• the peripheries of literature (the noir genre and others);
• the literature of the peripheries;
• the condition of young people in the peripheries.

Other proposals for study on the subject put forward by those intending to collaborate in the publication will be examined by the Scientific Committee, in order to widen the field of exploration undertaken in this issue of the Magazine. Contributions will be accepted in Italian, English and French.

To this end, the Editorial Board proposes the following deadlines: a preliminary and essential step is the sending, to redazione.polifemo@iulm.it, of an abstract (min.10/max.20 lines), keywords and a brief curriculum vitae of the proposer, by 1st October 2021 (absolute deadline). The Editorial Office will confirm to the authors the acceptance of the contributions by 15 October 2021. The deadline for submission of contributions is 15th February 2022.

All contributions will be subject to double blind peer review. The issue, edited by Prof. Giovanna Rocca and Prof. Marta Muscariello, will be published in June 2022.

(posted 5 May 2021)

The ‘Edge’ of Sylvia Plath Critical History: A Reappraisal of Plath’s Work 60 years after
A special issue of E-Rea: Revue électronique d’études sur le monde anglophone
Deadline for abstracts: 15 October 2021

Edited  by:

• Nicolas-Pierre Boileau (Aix-Marseille Université, France)
• Carmen Bonasera (University of Pisa, Italy)

Sixty years after the publication of The Bell Jar (1963), her semi-autobiographical and only novel, and, also, sixty years after her untimely death, Sylvia Plath’s poetry and prose continue to attract attention from scholars and readers worldwide, as seen in the constant re-publishing of her works in English and translation. For many decades, her trailblazing career was overshadowed by the emotional response of critics and readers alike to her suicide. This gradually resulted in constructing Plath either as an iconic martyr or as a melodramatic cliché, all of that perpetuating a distorted reception of her posthumous oeuvre, as if her works mirrored her tragic life.

The year 2023 seems the appropriate occasion to add a further tile to the mosaic of Plath criticism. Far from being exhausted, the critical interest in Plath’s life and writing has adopted various approaches. This heterogeneous critical response was not only caused by different critical trends and cultural contexts, but it was also partly due to a fragmentary publication history. While alternative readings regularly emerged in the 1990s^[1], often in response to edited or newly discovered material, a decade of near silence followed the publication of the most significant critical studies (The Cambridge Introduction, 2006, and The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath, 2008, both edited by Jo Gill), suggesting that the matter could have worn out.

In light of the resurfacing of previously unpublished writings, this special issue of E-Rea aims to engage with the challenging questions put forth by the latest contributions by and about Sylvia Plath: Plath’s correspondence (The Letters of Sylvia Plath, volumes 1&2, eds. Peter Steinberg and Karen Kukil, 2017-18), recent trends in Plath studies (Sylvia Plath in Context, ed. Tracy Brain, 2019), and the latest biography (Heather Clark’s Red Comet, 2020). Given the recent resurgence of interest in her life, works and legacy, we would like to attract established and emerging scholars to discuss the upcoming issues of reading Plath in the 2020s. Specific attention will be devoted to essays that delve into Plath’s construction of her persona in poetry and life writing, in order to discuss which Sylvia Plath we have been constructing these past sixty years, and to promote fresh commentaries about one of the most electric poetic voices of the 20th century.

Original textual readings and essays featuring a comparative scope are especially encouraged. Moreover, papers on topics as diverse as (but not limited to) the following are welcome:

• Plath and life writing
• Plath’s self narrative between poetry and prose
• Plath and her correspondence
• Plath’s biography: new insights
• Plath’s The Bell Jar at 60
• Issues of genre in The Bell Jar: autobiography or autofiction?
• Issues of gender: Plath and feminism(s)
• Queering Plath
• Plath, pathography and the Medical Humanities
• Plath and Nature: ecocritical views
• Plath and intertextuality
• Re-reading Plath
• Plath studies: previous and new perspectives
• Plath’s legacy in the 21st century
• Plath in Europe

E-Rea accepts contributions in French and in English.

Submission guidelines

Contributors  should send a .pdf file to both nicolas.boileau@univ-amu.fr and carmen.bonasera12@gmail.com by October 15th, 2021. The proposal should include a title, an abstract in English or French (500 words max.), the author’s affiliation and brief bio. Acceptance of proposals will be notified by November 15th, 2021. Full articles will be expected by November 15th, 2022. Publication is envisioned for E-REA’s Spring issue in 2023.

^[1] For major monographs about Plath published in the 1990s and early 2000s, see: Steven G. Axelrod, Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins UP, 1990; Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, London, Virago, 1991; Susan R. Van Dyne, Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems, Chapel Hill, U. of North Carolina Press, 1993; Christina Britzolakis, Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1999; Tracy Brain, The Other Sylvia Plath, Harlow, Pearson Education, 2001.

(posted 28 June 2021)

A Culture of Cliches
Freeside Europe Online Academic Journal, Kodolányi János University, 2021 Issue
Deadline for abstracts : 15 October 2021

Freeside Europe Online Academic Journal is an interdisciplinary journal that was first established in 2005. Since the beginning of 2009, the journal has been given a new profile with the aim of connecting the different fields of academic studies (literature, arts, media, intercultural communication, cultural studies, history, linguistics, applied linguistics, translation, and English language teaching) by providing each issue with one particular topic. Through these specific topics we intend to create a platform for discussion that will connect the different areas of the humanities in the form of articles, reviews, interviews or even comments. We hope that by inviting and featuring various perspectives on a current theme we will be able to investigate an issue at greater length and depth. e Freeside Europe welcomes quality work that focuses on research, development, and review.

Upcoming issue

We live in an age of cliches. Their presence can be felt on various levels of our culture, including politics. Famously, the former president of the United States, Donald Trump, relied on an overly simplistic rhetoric to win support, and many argue that Brexit could not have happened without the recourse to nationalistic cliches.

In a more general sense, cliches have been gaining significance at least since the advent of postmodernism. The blurring of the lines between high and low art called for a new, creative approach to the commonplace. But are we still engaging with cliches in this postmodern way, or has our attitude changed? What are the most important cliches in a particular field, in the first place? How can we distinguish them from, say, tropes?

Freeside Europe Online Academic Journal invites submissions that explore how cliches determine, influence, or affect our culture or certain aspects of our culture. Potential topics include (but are not limited to):

• Cliches and discoveries in literary criticism
• Cliches and populism in contemporary and historical contexts
• Subverting genre expectations in works of art (visual, media, film)
• The relevance of cliches in linguistics
• Reconsidering canonical translations of famous works
• Cross-cultural stereotypes in literature, arts, linguistics, pragmatics, and business
• What are cliches and what are not in international communication?

All papers will be peer-reviewed and evaluated for their originality, language perspective, and correctness, relevance of topic and presentation quality.
Articles must be 5000-7000 words and should not exceed 15 pages.
Reviews must be 1,500-2,500 words (4-6 pages).
Please send an abstract of 150-200 words by 15 October 2021 to kjefreeside@gmail.com
Submitted abstracts should be in English.
Authors will be informed of the acceptance or rejection by 15 November 2021.
Abstracts should include the following:

• Title of contribution
• Author’s name and surname/s
• Institutional affiliation
• email address
• 150-200 word abstract

Deadline for full-text article submission: 20 December 2021.
For guidelines please refer to the website: http://www.kodolanyi.hu/freeside/submissions/Submitting_contributions
Publication fee: no fee
Abstracts (150-200 words), articles and any enquiries should be sent to kjefreeside@gmail.com
We look forward to your submission!
Sincerely, Krisztina Kodó, Habil. PhD (Editor-in-chief)

(published 11 September 2021)

“I want to die”: The contemporary writer and their suicide
Organizer: Josefa Ros Velasco (Complutense University of Madrid)
Deadline: 31 October 2021

Contact the Seminar Organizers

https://www.acla.org/i-want-die-contemporary-writer-and-their-suicide

From the turn of the 20th century to the present, debates over the meaning of suicide became a privileged site for efforts to discover the reasons why people commit suicide and how to prevent this behavior. Since Émile Durkheim published his study Suicide in 1897, a reframing of suicide took place, giving rise to a flourishing group of researchers devoting their efforts to understand better the causes and prevention of suicide. A century later, we still keep on trying to reach such an understanding of suicide and its modern conceptualization to prevent suicidal behaviors.

Suicide is an act that touches all of our lives and engages with the incomprehensible and unsayable. In searching for solutions to how to make life valuable, modern neuropsychiatric research alone is not able to offer such a chance to people after all. On the contrary, self-reflection and self-analysis, as those made by contemporary writer who committed suicide, seem a good alternative. To explore the place where reasons end, in addition to traditional and clinical suicidology studies, we count on literature and the experience of authors who committed or tried to commit suicide as invaluable resources to approach this issue in modern times.

This is a seminar to analyze the social and contextual causes of suicide, the existential, philosophical, and psychological reasons for committing suicide, and the prevention strategies we can learn from contemporary writers across the world who attempted to commit suicide or reached this goal and wrote about this topic in their biographical notes or artistic pieces. Proposals should focus on the clues the authors themselves left before committing suicide (or attempting to) both in their biographical texts and in their literary works, regardless of the literary genre, the sex of the authors or their nationality.

Such an analysis will serve the purpose of understanding better the phenomenon of suicide, its most inaccessible impulses, and provide a space to think of how their suicides might have been prevented from the examined clues found both in their biography and their masterpieces.

This workshop will be the second part of the one held in 2019 at Georgetown University (with a brief sequel at Harvard University the same year), as part of the ACLA Annual Meeting, focused on the study of suicide through the characters of contemporary fictional works. The results of these meetings will be published in September 2021 by the publisher Springer Nature (https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783030693916). The proceedings of this second meeting are waiting to be published in another volume with the same characteristics. NOTE: If you are interested ONLY in contributing a chapter to the collective book, please, reach me at josros@ucm.es.

DEADLINE: October 31, 2021.

(posted 23 August 2021)

Theorizing Literary Animals
Special issue 2/2022 of Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Philologia
Deadline for proposals: 1 November 2021

Guest editor: Dr. Ema Vyroubalova, Trinity College Dublin

(posted 22 February 2021)

Victorian and Edwardian Autobiographies
Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens n°98, Fall 2023
Deadline for proposals: 10 November 2021

https://journals.openedition.org/cve/5046

A 400-word abstract and brief biography should be sent to Aude Haffen (aude.haffen@gmail.com) by November 10^th, 2021. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by December 18^th, 2021. Full articles (up to 7,000 words) will be due by June 10^th, 2022.

This issue of Les Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens aims to shed new light on Victorian and Edwardian self-narratives and self-representations (autobiographies, letters, travelogues, diaries etc.) by focussing on their connection to the period’s mainstream as well as minor or marginal literary tropes, political ideas, ethical principles, epistemological frameworks and religious beliefs. Subaltern forms of life-writing will be of particular interest, but also literary endeavours which challenge dominant views of the subject from within their own hegemonic or canonical status. Postmodern, feminist, queer, Marxist and Foucauldian theories have fruitfully engaged with how modern subjectivities were fashioned by 19^th century capitalist, patriarchal, scientific discourses and archetypal narratives like the Bildungsroman. However, the actual autobiographical practices of the time might also involve forms of self-representation and self-understanding which elude such ideological patterns and frameworks of subjectivation. From the cultural centre epitomized by John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography to less prominent and even marginal positions (those, for example, held by female, queer, working-class, radical or Black autobiographers or diarists), Victorian and Edwardian life-writing practices might indeed resist the liberal paradigm of universal male agents developing individual selfhood along a linear course leading to wholeness, self-discipline and self-knowledge.

We invite contributions from all fields of 19^th and early 20^th-century literature, history and cultural studies. Topics and approaches might include:

• – Autobiography and liberalism
• – Chartists’, socialists’, workers’ autobiographies
• – Black British autobiographers
• – Circulation, impact and literary influence of American ex-slave self-narratives and Black abolitionists’ lecture tours in Victorian Britain
• – Archiving and publication history of subaltern self-narratives
• – Women’s autobiographies; gender and sexuality
• – Religion and faith
• – Psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis
• – Hybrid forms of self-narratives; “autobiografiction” (Max Saunders); autobiographical uses of literary paradigms, motifs and patterns
• – Diaries, journals, letters, travelogues, poetry, biography as alternative modes of self-representation
• – 20^th and 21^st-century rediscovery and reinterpretation of Victorian and Edwardian personal voices (biographies, Neo-Victorian literature, films and series)

Selective bibliography:

Amigoni, David (ed.)., Life-Writing and Victorian Culture. Ashgate, 2006.
Bensimon, Fabrice, “L’histoire ouvrière au prisme des autobiographies en Grande-Bretagne au XIX^e siècle”, SFEVE conference “Popular forms and practices of reading and writing in the Victorian and Edwardian eras”, January 2021. https://sfeve.hypotheses.org/date/2020/12
Buckton Selves, Oliver, Confession and Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Autobiography, University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
Foucault, Michel, Histoire de la sexualité I : La volonté de savoir, Gallimard, 1976.
Gagnier, Regenia, Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832-1920, OUP, 1991.
Gurney, Peter, “Working‐Class Writers and the Art of Escapology in Victorian England: The Case of Thomas Frost”, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 45, No. 1 (January 2006), pp. 51-71.
Regard, Frédéric (ed.), Mapping the Self.  Space, Identity, Discourse in British Auto/Biography, Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2003.
Roulston, Chris, “The Revolting Anne Lister: The U.K.’s First Modern Lesbian”, The Journal of Lesbian Studies, 17:1, 2013, pp. 267-278.
Saunders, Max, Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature, OUP, 2010.
Stanley, Liz, The Auto/biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/biography, Manchester University Press, 1995.
Stapleton, Julia, Political Intellectuals and Public Identities in Britain since 1850, Manchester University Press, 2001.

(posted 18 May 2021)

­Re-Storying the World for Multispecies Survival
A special issue of Synthesis (15. 2022)
Deadline for abstract submissions: 15 November 2021

Synthesis: an anglophone journal of comparative literary studies
Website: https://ejournals.epublishing.ekt.gr/index.php/synthesis/index

Special Issue Editor: Mayako Murai

This special issue of Synthesis aims to respond to the challenges that recent reflections on multispecies survival and coexistence pose for studies in literature, art, and critical theory today.  In the past few decades, there has been a plethora of works in various media, such as literature, film, and visual and performing arts, that thematise human-animal interactions and interspecific transformations in a way that acknowledges more positive values in more-than-human worlds than before. This rising interest in literary and artistic works focusing on reconfigurations of human-animal interactions and boundaries seems to reflect a shift away from an anthropocentric and exclusive view of nonhuman animals towards a more inclusive view that values interdependence and interconnectedness between human and nonhuman animals.

This special issue invites contributions that offer new perspectives on multispecies entanglements in literary and artistic works and theories from different disciplines, genres, historical periods, and cultural traditions. At the heart of this approach is a commitment to careful and imaginative attention to the lives and worlds of others, whether human or nonhuman, grounded in diverse academic and creative practices, including literary studies, art, critical theory, natural sciences, and Indigenous knowledges.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• multispecies entanglements in literary and artistic works
• literary and artistic imaginings of more-than-human worlds
• theorising more-than-human aesthetics across art and science
• critical anthropomorphism in literary and artistic works
• post-anthropocentric critique of existing literary and aesthetic theory
• intersectionality and multispecies studies
• translation theory and multispecies studies
• Indigenous studies and multispecies studies
• the ethics of eating and multispecies entanglements

Abstracts of 250-300 words (and a brief bio note) should be submitted to Mayako Murai at mayakomurai@me.com and synthesisjournal2008@gmail.com by 15 November 2021.
Notification of acceptance will be delivered by 15 December 2021.
Deadline for a manuscript (6,000-8,000 words) submission: 31 May 2022
Publication: December 2022

All enquiries regarding this issue should be sent to the guest editor, Mayako Murai (mayakomurai@me.co

(posted 16 September 2021)

Theorizing Literary Animals
Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Philologia Special Issue 2/2022
Deadline for proposals: 15 November 2021

studia.philologia@lett.ubbcluj.ro
Guest editor: Dr. Ema Vyroubalova, Trinity College Dublin, vyroubae@tcd.ie

Animal studies as an academic field of inquiry’s starting point is often identified with the publication of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation in 1975. The foundations nevertheless began to be laid down long before recent scientific insights into animal cognition and communication were available. Animals have been depicted in writing for thousands of years: the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Aztec codices, and medieval bestiaries all teem with animals and the Bible alone mentions around 120 different animal species. In the sixteenth century, Michel de Montaigne famously mused, “When I am playing with my cat, how do I know that she is not playing with me?” and, in the late eighteenth century, Jeremy Bentham asked, “the question is not, can they reason? nor, can they talk? but, can they suffer?”

Numerous thinkers from diverse disciplines have continued along this trajectory, working to complicate, challenge, and ultimately supersede traditional anthropocentric and anthropomorphic approaches to animals by finding alternatives to the hard binary and/or implicit hierarchy through which human-animal relations have often been conceptualised. Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer envisages a more fluid “indistinction” between animal and human life. Cary Wolfe in Animal Rites explores theoretical avenues for freeing discourses about continuities and differences between species from the anthropocentric tendencies of speciesism. Animacies by Mel Y. Chen seeks to break down boundaries further, not only between human and non-human animals, but also between animate and inanimate entities and organic and inorganic matter. Donna Haraway’s recent work offers bleak visions of humans and animals alike clinging to survival in the degraded worlds of the Plantationocene and Capitalocene. David Herman’s Narratology Beyond the Human repurposes the methodologies of narratology to craft a new animalcentric approach to narratives dealing with animal-human relations. Advances in animal studies have opened up new opportunities for scholars working in literary studies to apply and create theories and methodologies based on understanding the relationship between humans and non-human animals as a complex and constantly evolving
multidirectional dynamic.

This special issue seeks essays in English that engage with as well as challenge existing work in animal studies in relation to literary texts and/or theories from across different genres, historical periods, and linguistic and national traditions. Topics for possible essays include the following:
• relationship between animal studies and literary theory and/or history
• theorizing human-animal hybridities and continuities in literary texts
• alternatives to anthropocentrism and/or anthropomorphism in literary criticism and theory
• intersectionality and animal studies
• triangulating between animal studies, ecocriticism and literary theory/studies
• animals and translation theory
• impact of the animal rights movement on literature
• pedagogical approaches to combining animal and literary studies

Indicative Bibliography:
AGAMBEN, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
BAKER, Steve. Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation. Urbana- Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1993.
BOEHRER, Bruce, ed. A Cultural History of Animals in the Renaissance. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2009.
BJORKDAHL, Kristian, and PARRISH, Alex. Rhetorical Animals: Boundaries of the Human in the Study of Persuasion. Lantham: Lexington Press, 2017.
BROWN, Laura. Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in Modern Literary Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010.
DERRIDA, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.
HARAWAY, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.
HARAWAY, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
NASH, Richard. Wild Enlightenment: The Borders of Human Identity in the Eighteenth Century. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003.
RITVO, Harriet. Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras: Essays on Animals and History. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010.
SALISBURY, Joyce. The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages. London: Routledge, 2010.
WOLFE, Cary. Zoontologies, The Question of the Animal. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
WOLFE, Cary. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Timeline:
• 15 November 2021 – proposal submission deadline (200-word abstract, 7 keywords, 5 theoretical references, 150-word author’s bio-note)
• 1 December 2021 – notification about acceptance
• 1 February 2022 – submission of full papers (Instructions for authors regarding formatting rules and style sheets can be found on the journal’s webpage: http://studia.ubbcluj.ro/serii/philologia/pdf/Instructions_En.pdf)
• 30 June 2022 – publication of the special-themed issue

Please send your abstracts and papers to both email addresses: studia.philologia@lett.ubbcluj.ro and vyroubae@tcd.ie.

(posted 19 October 2021)

Tolkien as a translator: investigations on Tolkien translation studies
A collection of essays
Deadline for submissions: before December 2021

Editors: Giuseppe Scattolini and Enrico Spadaro

A call for papers from Tolkieniani Italiani

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was first and foremost a great philologist: words and languages were his bread and butter. Languages that evolved throughout their history, languages near and far, languages that had to be translated. Because Tolkien was also a great translator: dealing with Old and Middle English, it was necessary for him to translate into modern English, according to contemporary language, those ancient texts that would inspire him so much as a future author and creator of worlds and languages. It is perhaps from the translation into modern English of the poem Beowulf that Tolkien’s great literary production started; and to this first translation work, the Professor also dedicated a study, Translating Beowulf, in which he explained and argued his choices and reflected on the difficulties of translation.

Therefore, it turns to be useful to devote a collection of essays to Tolkien as a translator: to his way of translating, to the criteria he used, to the choices that distinguished his style and that inevitably influenced his sub-creation(s). Tolkien’s interest in translation was manifold and peculiar; moreover, the quick success of The Lord of the Rings around the world soon prompted him to draw up guidelines on the nomenclature of the work itself for those who would attempt to render the novel in their own languages. Several countries may now boast of having more than one translation of the adventures of Frodo and the Ring, thus providing new elements for reflection in Tolkien translation studies. This miscellany therefore aims to cross-examine, from a comparative point of view, the translation practice of Tolkien’s work in the light of the author’s thoughts on translation itself.

Contributions are particularly requested that investigate:

• The translation methodologies that Tolkien used in his translations and that he establishes in his non-fiction works, with particular attention to the essay Translating Beowulf;
• The translation criteria Tolkien gave to the translators of his works, especially in the “Nomenclature” and “Appendices” of The Lord of the Rings;
• The use of such methodologies and criteria in translating Tolkien’s works into the language of one’s own country;
• The possibility of applying these methodologies and criteria in future translations of Tolkien’s works into the language of one’s own country.

This Call for Papers is international and open to Tolkienian scholars and fans from all over the world: the participation of linguists and translators from is requested and welcomed. Essays will be published in two languages, English and Italian, by carefully selected publishers. For those who need assistance in translating their essays from Italian into English and vice versa, please contact the editors. Anyone wishing to publish this volume in their own language is encouraged to do so by writing to the editors and making arrangements with them for this purpose.

The maximum length of contributions is about 6500 words, notes, bibliography and spaces not included in the calculation. Abstracts of no more than 300 words are requested before December 2021; essays are due in May 2022. Essays should be written according to the editorial criteria that will be indicated to the participants via e-mail. Citations should not exceed 15% of the total word/character count of the article. Copyrighted material should be avoided unless you have permission to publish.

Email addresses to which proposals should be sent:
Enrico Spadaro henryspad7@icloud.com
Giuseppe Scattolini giuseppescattolini@gmail.com

(posted 18 May 2021)

World-Wide Woolf
A book to be published in 2023
Deadline for proposals: 1 December 2021

From a somewhat niche position in English modernism, Virginia Woolf istoday an icon (see Brenda Silver, Virginia Woolf Icon) recognised aroundthe world. World Wide Woolf will consider the many steps of culturalmediation that ‘produce’ the varied and varying versions (‘versionings’,Silver) of Woolf that readers and even non-readers encounter in nationaland transnational contexts. Organised in two axes, this internationalmulti-authored collection will explore the poles of production andreception as part of the complex circuits from which many differentWoolf images emerge. The chapters in the first section will explore howher works are edited, translated, and (re)produced in many languages,media, platforms and disciplines, both historically and contemporarily.The second section will focus on how ideas of Woolf are received in newmedia and on new platforms such as the world wide web, fashion, andsocial media, and how Woolf lives in the works of contemporary artistsand cultural creatives. Given the importance of academics in mediatingthis reception, the final chapters will also bring new critical perspectiveson Woolf.
We the editors are excited to invite contributions for chapters that fallinto either of the following sections:

World-Wide Woolf
Edited by:
Elisa Bolchi, Universit  degli Studi di Ferrara (Italy)
Maria Rita Drumond Viana, Universidade de Federal deSanta Catarina (Brazil)
Hala Kamal, Cairo University (Egypt)
Monica Latham, Université de Lorraine, Nancy (France)
Sayaka Okumura, Kobe University (Japan)
Mine Özyurt Kılı, Social Sciences University of Ankara(Turkey)
Helen Southworth, University of Oregon (USA)

1. Production: Editing, Translating, Publishing
This first section of World Wide Woolf will include chapters covering allsteps of cultural mediation put in place by literary agents, editors,translators, publishers and booksellers to ‘produce’ and ‘market’ Woolfaround the world. This section will be mainly concerned with bookhistory, publishing history, translation studies, censorship, sociology ofliterature, and archival studies.
The two main subsections of this section will be:
A. Woolf’s many languages: editing and translating
B. Publishing Woolf around the world: past and present challenges

2. Reception: New Media and New Critical Perspectives
This second section of World Wide Woolf will focus on the reception ofWoolf in new media (Websites, Fashion, Social Media…); on Woolf stillliving today in contemporary literature, art, dance and music, in short onWoolf’s literary and artistic legacy; and it will end with a section on newcritical perspectives both applied to Woolf or in which Woolf is usedinterdisciplinarily to discuss other subjects. Among the many subjectareas touched on in this section are ecocriticism, digital humanities,feminism and neo-feminism, sociology of literature, interdisciplinarity,transnationalism and gender studies.
The three main subsections of this section will be:
A. Multimedia Woolf / DH Woolf: the Web and Other Media
B. Thinking through Woolf: Legacy and contemporary influences
C. New Woolf, New Critical Perspectives (Woolf’s oeuvre interpretedwith new critical concepts).

Deadlines
Prospective contributors are invited to submit a 1,500-word chapterproposa by the 1st of December 2021
In their final versions, chapters should have a 7,000-word count.
Accepted proposals should be turned into full chapters to be sent by the 1st of July 2022 for peer review, which will be conducted on a double-blind process by external readers. The full process, including revisionsby the authors when required, should lead to the final acceptance byJanuary 2023 for the expected publication in late 2023.
The volume prospectus has been preliminarily accepted in the Edinburgh Companion to Literature and the Humanities series, with the provisiona title: The Edinburgh Companion to World Wide Woolf
For this reason allchapter submissions should be in English and appropriate for an academic readership.
Please get in touch with us if you have any questions or would like toknow more about the project. We encourage proposals from emergingscholars as much as well-established ones and are especially interestedin research conducted in the Global South, in non-Anglophone contexts,and by artists, editors, and publishers in independent presses.
All queries and chapter proposals can be sent to:

• worldwidewoolf@gmail.com
• to the corresponding editor, Elisa Bolchi,
• or to any of the other editors.
  Elisa Bolchi – elisa.bolchi@unife.it
  Maria Rita Drumond Viana – m.rita.viana@ufsc.br
  Hala Kamal – hala.kamal@cu.edu.eg
  Monica Latham – monica.latham@univ-lorraine.fr
  Sayaka Okumura – sayaka1931@hotmail.com
  Mine Özyurt Kılı  – mine.ozyurtkilic@asbu.edu.tr
  Helen Southworth – helen@uoregon.edu

(posted 21 June 2021)

Conjugal Relationships: An Assessment of Sino / West Discourse and Aesthetics
An edited volume to be published in 2022
Deadline extended: 15 January 2022

We are now inviting chapter proposals for the book volume Conjugal Relationships: An Assessment of Sino / West Discourse and Aesthetics. This book aims to review the presentation of conjugal relationships in the Sino / West context. In what way is the act of marriage represented / misrepresented in different literary genres and their adaptations? What are the gendered characteristics that affect the overall conjugal relationships in Chinese societal practices? What are the essential features that give rise to nuptial arrangements from the Chinese perspective? How do Sino and / or West mentalities differ in terms of autonomy in marriage? To what extent could marriage be in the form of transaction of female / male bodies? Under what circumstances do wedding ceremonies constitute to archetypal or counter-archetypal notions in modern / pre-modern society? The volume serves to revisit the connection between marriage and various art forms including literature, film, theatre, adaptations, etc.

We welcome submissions that include, but not limited to, the following topics in Sino / West scenarios:

1. Marriage from ancient to present times
2. Empire, romance and marriage
3. The ethics of love and marriage
4. Duty and rights in conjugal relations
5. Marriage as ritual culture
6. Inter-racial / Inter-cultural marriage
7. Legitimacy in marriage and concubinage
8. Widowhood in Confucian ideology
9. Divorce as resistance
10. Re-marriage and its taboo
11. Conjugal violence
12. Conjugal transaction

The volume will be edited by Dr. Kelly Kar Yue Chan and Dr. Chi Sum Garfield Lau. They have rich experience in the academia and connections with various publishers. Their edited book, Chinese Culture in the 21st Century and its Global Dimensions: Comparative and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Springer Nature) was published in 2020. A forthcoming edited volume, Cross-Cultural Encounters: Global Networks, Mediation, and Intertextuality in Modern and Premodern China (Springer Nature), will soon be released in late 2021 / early 2022.

Interested authors should send an abstract (no more than 250 words) and a short biography (no more than 150 words) to the editorial team (kkychan@hkmu.edu.hk and cslau@hkmu.edu.hk) by 20 December 2021.

Authors will be notified of the decision made by the editorial team by 31 January 2022. Only papers that have not been submitted to any other publishers before will be considered for acceptance.

For details and enquiries, please write to kkychan@hkmu.edu.hk and cslau@hkmu.edu.hk.

Full Paper Submission Guideline The submission should be between 6,000 and 8,000 words (excluding references) and it should follow the attached full paper style guide.
Submission Channels: Please send your full paper prepared in APA style to kkychan@hkmu.edu.hk and
cslau@hkmu.edu.hk by 25 April 2022. All received abstracts and papers will go through the process of internal review and language editing before they are included in the proposal to potential publishers.

Important Dates:
20 December 2021 (Mon) Deadline of abstract submission
31 January 2022 (Mon) Notification of acceptance
25 April 2022 (Mon) Deadline of full paper submission

(posted 25 October 2021 / Dedline extended: 25 December 2021)

Fantasies of the Subject: Affecting Selves in Contemporary American Literature
Call for chapters for an edited volume
Deadline for abstract submission: 30 December 2021

The volume is edited by Paula Barba Guerrero & Laura de la Parra Fernández

If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly towards and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core —the fountain— of our power […] we give up the future of our worlds.
—Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”

“Nations provoke fantasy”, contends Lauren Berlant (1997, 1). In The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (1997), Berlant argues that citizenship has become privatized in neoliberal America, and political discourses have turned to the private sphere and the appeal of the emotions. This way, what being an American citizen represents has become closely linked to the individual subject, their life choices, and their feelings and emotions. In short, certain choices, feelings or even identities, as Donald Pease claims, can be considered “un-American” (1994, 11). At the same time, the tendency toward the privatization of feeling and politics has developed along with neoliberalism. If, according to Foucault, neoliberalism can be understood as organisation of subjectivity (2008), the subject can then be managed by market rationality, whereby identity is turned into a series of rational consumer choices, risk-management and governmentality. The individual can thus be marketed and capitalised through emotions.

Following Benedict Anderson’s claim that nations are “imagined communities” (2006, 22), Timothy Brennan affirms that nations “are imaginary constructs that depend for their existence on an apparatus of cultural fictions in which imaginative fiction plays a decisive role” (1990, 49). In this sense, the idea of national fantasy may be propelled forward by means of cultural artifacts that sustain it, and which put forth the “correct” performance of subjectivity. Amongst them, fiction is a powerful tool to create what Lauren Berlant has called “intimate publics”, which are a group of readers and consumers who “already share a worldview and emotional knowledge that they have derived from a broadly common historical experience” (2008, ix). These productions, especially those traversed by sentimentality and addressed to an intimate public, allow, on the one hand, to voice complaints and express discomfort or disappointments at the failed expectations of the “good life” (Berlant 2011), while on the other hand they reify and uphold these normative narratives.

This volume seeks contributions that deal with representations of emotional selfhood from a variety of perspectives. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

• “Biofiction” and the female self
• Bodies and/in nations
• Re/productive future(s)
• National post-memories, mobility, and the American dream
• Radical hope narratives and emotional (after)lives
• Emotional fantasies and cultures: the self and/as the Other
• Environmental fiction and the anthropocene
• Visual and digital cultures
• Political emotion and intimate publics
• Pleasure narratives, affect-centered writing
• Posthuman subjectivities and the emotions of the future
• Literature, emotion, and activism

Prospective contributors are expected to submit 300 to 400-word abstract proposals, including full name, affiliation, and email address to paulabarbaguerrero@usal.es and lauradelaparra@usal.es by December 30th, 2021. Please indicate “Fantasies of the Subject Proposal” in the email’s subject.

Selected, peer-reviewed contributions will be published in 2023 by a top-tier academic press.

Bibliography

Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
—. Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
—. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.
—. Willful Subjects. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, [1983] 2006.
Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
—. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2008.
—. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham; London: Duke University Press, 1997.
—. The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Brennan, Timothy. “The National Longing for Form.” Nation and Narration, edited by Homi Bhabha. New York: Routledge, 1990, pp. 44–70.
Butler, Judith. The Force of Non-Violence. London: Verso, 2020.
—, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay, eds. Vulnerability in Resistance. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
Foucault, Michel. The birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Gilmore, Leigh. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001.
Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
Illouz, Eva. Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. London: Polity, 2007.
Khair, Tabish. The New Xenophobia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Lorde, Audre. “Poetry Is Not a Luxury.” Your Silence Will Not Protect You. London: Silver Press, [1977] 2017, pp. 7-12..
Pease, Donald E. “National Identities, Postmodern Artifacts, and Postnational Narratives.” National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives, edited by Donald E. Pease. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994, pp. 1–13.

Timeline:

• Deadline for abstract submission: December 30th, 2021
• Confirmation of acceptance: January 30th, 2022
• Book chapters due: June 30th, 2022

Contact information:

Dr. Paula Barba Guerrero, University of Salamanca paulabarbaguerrero@usal.es

Dr. Laura de la Parra Fernández, University of Salamanca lauradelaparra@usal.es

(posted 16 September 2021)

Representations of Happiness
Journal of Philology and Intercultural Communication Vol. 6 No. 1, February 2022
Deadline for contributions: 31 December 2021

In times of pandemic and world-wide socio-economic crisis, we evoke the example provided by Giorgio Boccaccio’s characters in the Decameron and invite contributors to conceive papers on the concept of ‘happiness’, its various representations as well as its dark counterpart, the ‘unhappiness’. We welcome submissions from different fields of expertise, including literature, visual arts, cultural studies, gender and identity studies, philosophy, religion, anthropology, psychology, linguistics, among many others and propose topics such as:

• Theoretical approaches of (un)happiness;
• Types of happiness;
• The eternal quest for happiness
• Ways of achieving happiness
• Collective vs individual happiness
• Social happiness: utopia vs dystopia
• Happiness in empires and colonies
• Mythological representations of happiness
• God / Divinity and the expression of supreme happiness
• Materialism / Consumerism / Social status and happiness
• Mass media and the projection of happiness
• Human ages and the stages of happiness
• Family and its old / new ways of expressing happiness
• The connection between happiness, love and passion
• Passions and addictions as forms of happiness
• Happiness and mental or physical sickness, disability
• Finding happiness in extreme conditions: wartime and pandemic  Happiness in seclusion: extermination camps, prison, hospital, monastery

Please note that the above topics are not exclusive and all contributions on the proposed theme are warmly welcomed. Likewise, the journal section titled Miscellaneous may include papers that are not related to the present theme.

HOW TO SUBMIT:
Contributions should be sent by December 31st 2021 to:
Adela Catana: adela.catana@yahoo.com (English and Romanian)
Andreea Preda: andreeamaria_diaconescu@yahoo.fr (French and Romanian)

GUIDELINES FOR CONTRIBUTORS:
We invite our collaborators to submit original articles that have not been published, under
review or accepted elsewhere. It is the responsibility of the authors to ensure the originality,
authorship, accuracy, complete references, coherent organization and legible appearance of their
works.

• Languages: English, French, Romanian
• The page-limit for articles: no more than 12 pages, works cited included
• The margins: left – 25 mm, right – 25 mm, top – 25 mm, bottom – 25 mm, header and footer –15 mm
• Paper setup: A4, 1,15 space between lines, 20 mm margins, justified
• Title of the article: Caps, Times New Roman 14 Bold, Centred, at 50 mm above the text
• Author’s name, scientific title and academic affiliation: Times New Roman 12 Bold, under the title, at 2 lines distance
• Abstract: Approximately 250 words in English, Times New Roman 11, italics, two lines below the author’s name, in English
• Five Keywords under the abstract, in English (TNR 11)
• Text of the article: one line below the keywords, in English, Times New Roman, 12, justified
• No endnotes (footnotes only): font size 10, numbering: continuous; No Page Breaks in the document; All graphic elements set in line with the text
• Bibliography/ Works Cited: at 2 lines distance from the end of the paper; single column format, Times New Roman 12, italics, under the bibliography. Sources must be quoted according to the latest edition of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers
• Biodata: 2 lines distance from the end of the Bibliography; Times New Roman 12; justified
• All papers will be submitted electronically in Microsoft Word format

Submitted papers are subject to PEER REVIEW and will be evaluated according to their significance, originality, technical content, style, clarity, and relevance to the journal issue’s theme.
For more information, feel free to check our website https://jpic.mta.ro

(posted 10 September 2021)

Intercultural Communication and Ubiquitous Learning in Multimodal English Language Education
Call for chapters for an edited volume
Proposals Submission Deadline: 15 July 2021

• Soraya García-Sánchez, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain
  
• Richard Clouet, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain
  

Hunger and Waste
Literature and Medicine, Volume 40, Number 1, Spring 2022
Deadline for proposals: 1 August 2021

Issue Editor: Isabelle Meuret

This issue of Literature and Medicine will interrogate expressions of hunger and waste in both literary and biomedical contexts. Hunger is a physiological disposition, a daily preoccupation, and a metaphor for desire. On another scale, global hunger—leading to malnutrition and starvation—affects hundreds of millions living in poverty. As for waste, the dearth, careless use, or squandering of resources, together with climate change and other environmental challenges, have raised new concerns about food supplies and unequal access.

Literary variations on the theme of hunger and waste span from the stories of hard-line strikers to those of hunger artists or modern anorexics. Famine fiction is a genre in itself. Memoirs by eating-disordered patients have replaced fasting saints’ hagiographies. Likewise, doctors and caregivers are confronted with the complications of bodies wasting away: subjects may be affected by severe pathologies, suffer dietary restrictions, endure invasive treatments, or resist nutritional intervention or rehabilitation. But while inanition can be lethal, fasting also proves therapeutic. Severe calorie restriction endangers the functions of the organism, induces alterations in energy metabolism, results in nutrient deficiencies and dehydration—yet abstaining from food may cause health benefits in terms of weight loss, blood pressure, and cholesterol levels.

Both literature and biomedicine grapple with issues pertaining to hunger and waste in terms ofrepresentations (How, by whom, to what ends are stories of starvation told? How do the mechanisms of hunger and waste work? What are the effects of malnutrition on mind and body?); significations (What are the social, political, religious meanings of hunger? Is anorexia a response to trauma?); aggravations (What are the consequences of famine on vulnerable populations? How does emaciation interpellate the other?); counteractions (Which clinical, ethical, and humanitarian responses best address food deprivation? What are the challenges of (re-)feeding individuals and entire nations?)

These questions show the many avenues for problematizing hunger and waste in fields such as the health and medical humanities, cognitive literary criticism, fat and hunger studies, and narrative medicine. They invite interdisciplinary dialogue with sociology, philosophy, history, psychology, anthropology, media and cultural studies, and performing and visual arts. They also encourage and welcome intersectional methodologies, for instance in connection with disability and lgbtq+ studies, or critical race theory. In any instance, proposals should consider literature or biomedicine, or both, in their broadest sense, as points of reference, and will ideally fit in one of these topical categories:

• Food insecurity; malnutrition in times of poverty, famines, wars, exiles, and epidemics.
• Food waste; including protest against consumerism, or environmental impact thereof.
• Hunger strikes; political and/or subversive resistance to coercion and oppression.
• Fasting vs feasting; asceticism, relative to spiritual or religious taboos and rituals.
• Anorexia; pathologization, medicalization, and treatment of self-starvation.
• Hunger and anger; expression of rage, of ravenous appetites and insatiable desires.

Strong submissions that do not quite fit into the theme issue as it takes shape will also be considered for inclusion in general issues of the journal.

Deadline for submission: August 1, 2021.  Address inquiries to Isabelle.Meuret@ulb.be.

Call for Papers and Guidelines for Contributors

Literature and Medicine is a peer-reviewed journal publishing scholarship that explores representational and cultural practices concerning health care and the body. Areas of interest include disease, illness, and health; the cultures of biomedical science and technology and of the clinic; disability; and violence, trauma, and power relations as these are represented and interpreted in broadly defined archives of verbal, visual, and material texts. Literature and Medicinefeatures one thematic and one general issue each year. Past theme issues have explored identity and difference; contagion and infection; cancer pathography; the representations of genomics; and the narration of pain.

Literature and Medicine is published semiannually. Literature and Medicine editors will consider essay clusters devoted to a particular topic or written on a specific occasion. Submissions on any aspect of literature and medicine will be considered, but the journal rarely publishes short notes, personal essays, or creative writing. Authors are advised to look carefully at past issues of the journal (available on the journal website) before submitting their work. Manuscripts should be between 5,000 and 9,000 words in length. Please include an abstract of 100–150 words, and 3–5 keywords.  All submissions should have text, end notes, and bibliography double-spaced and prepared according to guidelines in The Chicago Manual of Style, current edition. Authors will be responsible for securing permission to include visual images, figures, or verbal quotations that exceed fair use.

Literature and Medicine is a peer-reviewed journal. Authors’ names should appear only on a cover sheet, and any identifiers in the text should be masked so manuscripts can be reviewed anonymously. Literature and Medicine reviews only unpublished manuscripts that are not simultaneously under review for publication elsewhere.

Manuscripts must be submitted in digital form (.doc, .docx, or .rtf) through our website: https://lit-med.scholasticahq.com

Correspondence should be sent to:Isabelle.Meuret@ulb.be

(posted 16 June 2021)

• Edward Bond and ‘Bondian Drama’
• Theatrical and Pedagogical Background of ‘Bondian Drama’
• ‘Bondian Drama’ and Theatre for Young Audience
• ‘Bondian Drama’ and ‘Dramatic Child’
• ‘Bondian Drama’ and Theatre in Education (TiE)
• Edward Bond’s Plays for Young Audience (Big Brum Plays, etc.)
• Future Implications of ‘Bondian Drama’ on Theatre for Young Audience

• Abstract/Chapter Due: 15 August 2021
• Notification of Acceptance: 1 September 2021
• Full Drafts of Chapters: 1 November 2021
• Finalized Full Drafts of Chapters: 15 December 2021

J.R.R. Tolkien in Central Europe
Edited Volume/Collective Monograph
Deadline for abstracts: 15 September 2021

Due in part to the success of the film adaptations, Tolkien, and by extension, fantasy has recently been rediscovered as a trending genre paradigm in Western literary and media scholarship. It is perceived as a conduit for underlying cultural ideas about world-building and historical nostalgia, transmediality, fandom and participatory culture as well as media convergence. Tolkien and the fantasy genre have seen an upsurge in post-socialist Central Europe as well, yet while the fandom is increasing, the scholarly study of Tolkien’s Central European legacy has lagged behind, with fantasy still being considered a niche genre situated on the popular end of the literary scale. This monograph proposes to correct this oversight, re-contextualize concepts and discourses about Tolkien’s reception in the post-socialist Central-European context, and examine the impact of his legacy on the re-positioning of fantasy in Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, and Polish popular culture.

This study would be both a historical investigation of the development of fantasy through national literatures of Central Europe, and a methodological reflection on the metamorphoses that ensure the survival and dissemination of Tolkien’s work.

Successful proposals will address (but are not limited to) the following:

• the reception of Tolkien’s work in Slovakia, Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland (both pre- and post- 1989, but with an emphasis on the contemporary situation)
• the ways Tolkien’s work has been perceived, disseminated, studied, and most recently, taught at universities in Central Europe
• translations of Tolkien’s work in Slovakia, Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland
• what the shifting focus of literary scholarship towards popular genres reveals about forms of cultural import from Anglophone contexts between and across media / between and across literary fiction and screen media
• how fantasy’s world-building helps circulate ideas about racial, political and geographic otherness, domination and equity, and finally, mythological conceptions of good vs. evil, from communist times to the present
• what is the relationship between discourses of Tolkien’s work and the political, economic and cultural anxieties in post-socialist Central Europe, and what they reveal about the ways we negotiate local cultural legacies in relation to global ones
• the reflections of Tolkien’s legacy in contemporary Czech, Slovak, Hungarian and Polish fantasy writing (across literary fiction and screen media)
• how manifestations of historical nostalgia, transmediality, fandom and participatory culture as well as media convergence mobilize Tolkien’s legacy in a Central-European context

Abstracts of 500 words with a brief author bio note (100 words) with ”Tolkien in Central Europe” in the subject line should be sent to the editors: Janka Kascakova at janka.kascakova@ku.sk and David Levente Palatinus at david.palatinus@ku.sk. The deadline for abstract submission is September 15, 2021. If accepted, the authors will be invited to present their preliminary findings and first versions of their papers at an online/hybrid conference to be held at the Catholic University in Ruzomberok, Slovakia in March 2022. The final chapters will be due on 31 May 2022. Please, note, the original papers/proposals can be written in one of the Central European languages (Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Polish) but will have to be translated into English for the monograph. However, we prefer papers in English. The book proposal will be submitted to an established international publishing house. Do get in touch with us if you have any questions.

Important Dates:
Submission of 500-word abstract: 15 September 2021
Decision to authors (abstract): 30 September 2021
Submission of first draft: 15 February 2022 (6000-8000 words)

Online/hybrid conference: mid-March 2022
First review: 30 April 2022
Submission of final papers: 31 May 2022

(posted 15 June 2021)

Journal of Ecohumanism
Journal of Ecohumanism invites contributors to the inaugural issue
Submission Deadline: 30 September 2021

Please direct any queries about the journal to (journalofecohumanism@gmail.com).

II SEDERI International Conference for Junior Researchers
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid / Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) in Spain, 5, 6 and 7 October 2022
Submission of abstracts: 31 May 2022

We are pleased to announce that the II SEDERI International Conference for Junior Researchers of Early Modern English Studies will be held on 5, 6 and 7 October 2022 at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid / Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) in Spain. This event is part of an initiative born within SEDERI, the Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies, which seeks to provide a platform where junior researchers from around the globe can gather in order to exchange different ideas, views and opinions on the study of the English language and its literature, history and culture of the 16th and 17th centuries. 

Keynote Addresses

• Alexander Samson (University College London)
• Sabine Schülting (Freie Universität Berlin)
• Jesús Tronch Pérez (Universitat de València)

We welcome proposals in English for 20-minute papers that critically explore questions related to the study of early modern literature, language, history and culture, particularly in relation to the English Renaissance and the English Restoration. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Early modern texts, contexts and stages
• Early modern politics, economies and ideologies in texts and on the stage
• Anglo-Iberian and Anglo-Mediterranean relations in the early modern period
• Early modern cultures of work, customs and rituals
• Early modern utopias and dystopias
• Early modern travel narratives and narratives of migration and exile
• Early modern constructions of the figure of the outsider/ the other and their afterlives
• The materiality of the early modern text: critical editions, manuscripts and print culture
• Linguistic contact, variation and change in the early modern period
• Translations, adaptations and appropriations of early modern English texts
• Performance and reception of early modern English plays

The deadline for the submission of abstracts is 31 May 2022. Acceptance will be notified before 30 June 2022. Proposals must be sent to sederijunior2022@gmail.com as an email attachment (preferably as .doc or .docx files) containing the following information:

• The author’s name, institutional affiliation and email address
• A short biographical note (max. 100 words)
• The full title of the paper, a 250-300 word abstract, and 4 keywords
• Your SEDERI membership status (member, non-member, application submitted). If you wish to join SEDERI, please visit http://www.sederi.org/membership/

Conference fees: SEDERI members (€30), non-SEDERI members (€40)
Registration: 30 June 2021– 15 September 2021

(Posted 26 April 2022)

Transnational Shelley(s): Metamorphoses and Reconfiguration Conference
Accademia Vivarium Novum, Vila Falconieri, Frascati, Rome. 6-7 October 2022
Deadline for abstracts: 30 April 2022

This conference celebrates Percy Bysshe Shelley’s multifaceted afterlives, exploring the many echoes his oeuvre has produced throughout the history of modern and contemporary literature. The aim of the conference is to craft a map of the poet’s seminal influence on single authors as well as on literary movements.

Starting from Mary Shelley’s immediate editorial and critical efforts, and passing through both late 19th century Victorian celebrations and Modernist (apparent) rejection, the history of Shelley’s fortune is one of the most interesting in modern and contemporary literature, and helps us to reflect on the true essence of his poetic legacy. Robert Browning, Walter Pater, the War Poets, Wallace Stevens, and many other poets were indeed among the most overt estimators of P.B. Shelley’s works. Furthermore, his poetical and philosophical lesson has reverberated through the production of authors from around !he globe, not just those in the anglophone world.

Given the Shelleys’ fruitful collaboration, especially in their “Italian” years, Mary Shelley’s transnational legacy will also be the object of investigation.

Scholars from various parts of the world and fields of study (literature, sociology, anthropology, pedagogy, to name a few) are invited to discuss the wealth of Shelley’s aesthetic and ideological legacy, thus creating a forum which will provide a fertile addition to the various events that constellate the Shelleyan bicentenary celebrations.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

• The Shelleys’ reception in the Americas;
• The Shelleys’ reception in Asia;
• The Shelleys’ reception in Africa;
• The Shelleys’ reception in Oceania;
• The Role of the Shelleys’ oeuvre in the context of other European Romantic movements;
• (New) Translations of Shelley’s poems;
• Adaptations and remediations of Shelleyan character in popular culture;
• P.B. Shelley as a Romantic icon;
• Mary Shelley’s role in the canonization of Shelley’s figure.

Send abstracts of individual papers (250 words) and a short bionote by April 30, 2022 to:

marino@lettere.uniroma2.it 
paolo.bugliani@gmail.com

Acceptance will be notified by May 20, 2022.

Registration fee: early bird (July 15), €75; later registration €100.

Organized by:

• Elisabetta Marino
  (Department of History, Humanities and Society, University of Rome Tor Vergata)
• Paolo Bugliani
  (Department of Philology, Literature and Linguistics, University of Pisa)

Scientific Committee:

Giuseppe Albano, Gioia Angeletti, Serena Baiesi, Roberto Baronti Marchiò, Lilla Maria Crisafulli, Nora Crook, Keir Elam, Carlotta Farese, Roberta Ferrari, Gilberta Golinelli, Daniela Guardamagna, Sharon Ruston, Diego Saglia, Carla Sanguineti, Rossana Sebellin, Maria Valentini

Locandina-Shelley-Rome-2022

(Posted 7 April 2022)

Rogues and Pícaros in Medieval and Early Modern Spain and England: Politics and Poetics
Poitiers, France, 13-14 October 2022
Deadline for proposals: late August 2021

Conference Organizers

• Pierre Darnis (University of Bordeaux 3, AMERIBER – EA 3656)
• Pascale Drouet (University of Poitiers, CESCM – UMR 7302)

Venue

• University of Poitiers, Centre for Advanced Studies in Medieval Civilisation – UMR 7302 (Hôtel Berthelot, 24 rue de la Chaîne, Poitiers, France – https://cescm.labo.univ-poitiers.fr)

Argument

Within Western literature, the picaresque was quickly perceived as a “historically and geographically delimited tradition”[1] specific to Spain during the Golden Age, a genre apart from the rest, almost without precedent. Going against this common misconception, recent studies have reminded us of the importance of the Apuleian and Lucian origins of this ‘new’ narrative formula. The wily beggar thus seems the prodigal son of the Ancients. Shouldn’t we therefore extend the reflection and, at the very least, reconsider the scientific cliché that sees in this character the perfect (dissident) example of the Renaissance hero? Didn’t the Middle Ages also contribute to the creation of the cunning rogue?

Moreover, on the Iberian peninsula, where Lazarillo was born on the banks of the Tormès River, it would not be surprising to find some precursors of this early modern antihero. What about the influential character of the insubordinate, who, whether against the monarch or his various institutional arms, found an interesting echo? The Cid Campeador, on whom Corneille drew inspiration in France, is certainly one of the most striking figures of the South European Middle Ages, in the continuity of Achilles against Agamemnon and, closer to him, of Renaud de Montauban against Charlemagne.

In England, the academic debate invites us to question the plurality of picaresque metamorphoses. At the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Robert Greene’s conny-catching pamphlets, which detailed the fraudulent activities of cozeners, were a great success. Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller was considered as a picaresque novel. With the characters of Falstaff in King Henry IV and Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare portrayed a number of endearing rogues whose notion of honour was reminiscent of the paradoxical ethos of the pícaro, “the exemplary embodiment of anti-honour”. [2] Many of these fictional figures are heirs to the Greek mètis, to the ruses of the Baron de Maupertuis, translated by William Caxton in 1481 as The History of Reynard the Fox, and to early Spanish picaresque novels. The question is how the picaresque novel “grafted itself in England on the national tradition (that of the beggar books and Thomas Nashe’s Jack Wilton), which it inflected in the direction of anathema against vice”. [3]

The marginal characters known respectively as rogues and pícaros have already been the subjects of various academic studies, yet separately.[4] The perspective envisaged here proposes to compare them and place them in dialogue, in order to question the creation, circulation and evolution of literary models from one period to another (Middle Ages and Renaissance) and from one country to another (Spain and England). One may thus wonder what these fictional representations tell us about the society in which they acted, about its socio-political choices on the one hand, and about the expectations and answers of readers and spectators on the other. One may wonder whether (and/or how) rogues find their places in society or how they stand out from it, and where the author stand especially in a socio-political context in which conformism and utopianism often intersect.

When do these specific terms, ‘rogues’ and ‘pícaros’, appear and why precisely at this point? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first occurrence of ‘rogue’ dates back to 1489, meaning “idle vagrant, vagabond”, but the meaning changes in 1568, when it begins to designate “a dishonest, unprincipled person; a rascal, a scoundrel”[5]; the English language appropriated the term ‘pícaro’ in 1622, as a synonym of ‘rogue, scoundrel”. [6] However, these two terms, which are not exactly synonymous, do not cover a similar reality. Do borrowings exist from one country to another, thus preserving the specificity of each term? When were the various works (popular pamphlets, prose ballads, stories, plays) that represent them translated from English to Spanish or from Spanish to English? What did these translations target? For example, why is there a gap of about twenty-four years between the publication of Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache and its translation by James Mabbe? How did the representation of the notion of anti-honour evolve? Why did Richard Head take up the picaresque vein at the time of the Restoration with The English Rogue and not earlier? These are some of the questions this conference aims at answering.

Scientific Committee: William C. Carroll (Boston University, USA), Michel Cavillac (University of Bordeaux Montaigne), Pierre Darnis (University of Bordeaux Montaigne), Pascale Drouet (University of Poitiers), Gordon McMullan (King’s College London, England), Valentín Núñez Rivera (Université de Huelva, Espagne), Fabrice Quero (University of Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3)

Proposals (300 words maximum for the abstract + a written bio-biblio of 200 words maximum + please specify if you are interested in having your paper published) should be sent before late August 2021 to pierre.darnis@u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr and pascale.drouet@univ-poitiers.fr
Proposals may be submitted (and papers given) in 3 languages: French, English and Spanish.

[1] Gérard Genette, Des genres et des œuvres, Paris, Seuil, 2012, p. 131.
[2] Maurice Molho & Jean-François Reille (éd.), « Introduction à la pensée picaresque », Romans picaresques espagnols, Paris, Gallimard, “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade”, 1968, p. cv.
[3] Marcel Bataillon, Le Roman picaresque, Paris, La Renaissance du livre, 1931, p. cxxx.
[4] See, for example, Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz (eds), Rogues in Early Modern English Culture, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2006 ; Pascale Drouet, De la filouterie dans l’Angleterre de Shakespeare : Études sur Shakespeare et ses contemporains, Toulouse, Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2013.
[5] Oxford English Dictionary, “rogue, n. and adj.”, A.n.1, puis 2.a.
[6] Ibid., “picaro”.

(Posted 19 May 2021)

“Modernism and Matter” – An International workshop
Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier3, Montpellier, France, 13-14 October 2022
Deadline for submissions: 1 June 2022

An International workshop organised by EMMA (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier3) in collaboration with CIRPaLL (Université d’Angers)  

This workshop on modernism and matter is an incentive to interrogate the meaning of matter,  and investigate its power in modernist literature. Our assumption is that modernist writings can  help us answer the call for ‘more complex understandings of materiality’ (Alaimo). 

A hundred years after the so-called annus mirabilis of modernist literature, such a  reappraisal of modernism should be appropriate. Over the last few years, revaluations of  modernism or modernisms have been many, from Stephen Ross and Allana Lindgren’s The  Modernist World (2017) and Douglas Mao’s New Modernist Studies (2021) to Jean 

Michel Rabaté and Angeliki Spiropoulou’s recent anthology Historical Modernisms: Time,  History and Modernist Aesthetics (2022). The focus has gradually shifted from canonical  writers such as James Joyce, T.S. Eliot or Virginia Woolf to relatively neglected figures like  Dorothy Richardson or Rebecca West and to lesser-known writers usually not labelled as  modernists, as in Lynne Hapgood’s and Nancy L. Paxton’s Outside Modernism (2000). In order  to embrace the rainbow-like nature of modernism, diverse methods – historical, literary or  philosophical – and theories have been implemented, and archival research often favoured. Modernism has nevertheless remained associated with experimentation (as underlined by  Rabaté and Spiropoulou), the quest for the self and urban modernity, a vision that was promoted  by the modernists themselves, as is well-known. 

Only recently have critics begun to alter this image of modernism by drawing attention  to the ecological sensibility that manifests within its bounds. In his seminal Green Modernism (2015), Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy stated that ‘Until recently, modernist studies has largely  rebuffed the insights of ecocriticism thanks to the aesthetic armor of its autonomous, subjective,  urban texts’, and he proceeded to analyse Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford and D.H. Lawrence  in that new light. Kelly Sultzbach (2016), Andrew Kalaidjian (2020), Michael Rubenstein and  Justin Neuman (2020) have each in their own way extended these reflections. 

Building on this recent work on modernist ecologies and in a similar attempt at renewing  our understanding of modernism – and possibly, tease out some of its contradictions, we would  like to draw attention to the specific connections between modernism and materiality. Indeed,  modernist writers were not only interested in the materiality of the books which they produced,  but also in matter. The ‘prosaic’ concerns of the preceding generation were rejected – Wells,  Bennett and Galsworthy being labelled as ‘materialists’ by Virginia Woolf, because they wrote  of ‘unimportant things’ – while the centrality of matter itself was reaffirmed in new and original  ways, with Woolf herself devoting a short story to ‘Solid Objects’ and comparing impressions  with atoms in her essay ‘Modern Fiction’. 

Far from being inert, matter is considered as being alive and vibrant not only by biologists  or physicists but also by philosophers such as Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, and theorists  such as Jane Bennett or Bruno Latour. What qualifies as matter for the writers of the modernist  era? How do they define matter and represent it? How does it relate to the self they were so  intimate with? How does the Modernists’ conception of matter resonate with the contemporary scientists’? How do the ways they represent matter, materiality or material environments resemble or depart from those that characterize the Romantic and Victorian periods? 

In order to address these questions, theories that embrace the ‘insights of ecocriticism’ or cut across those of New Materialism may be resorted to (although not exclusively); they will  help to explore the plural form and plasticity of matter together with the connections between  the material and the psychological, the organic and the inorganic, matter and consumerism,  matter and materialism, matter and myth, materiality, physicality, animism and mysticism, to  give but a few examples. Such an approach should shed a new light on modernist literature, its  canonical and non-canonical figures, and the aesthetic, ethical, ontological or political role and  power of matter. 

Please send a 300-word abstract with a short biographical note to Christine Reynier  (christine.reynier@univ-montp3.fr) and Xavier Le Brun (xavier.lebrun@univ-angers.fr)  

Deadline for submissions: 1 June 2022 

Notification of acceptance: 30 June 2022 

A selection of peer-reviewed papers will be published in the series Horizons  Anglophones/Present Perfect, PULM: https://www.pulm.fr/index.php/collections/horizons anglophones/present-perfect.html 

Select bibliography 

Scientific committee  

• Dr. Nicolas Boileau, Aix-Marseille Université, France Pr. Rossana Bonadei, University of Bergamo, Italy 
• Dr. Elke D’hoker, KU Leuven, Belgium 
• Pr. Christine Froula, Northwestern University, USA 
• Pr. Jean-Michel Ganteau, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier3, France Dr. Xavier Le Brun, Université d’Angers, France 
• Pr. Caroline Patey, University of Milan, Italy 
• Pr. Frédéric Regard, Sorbonne Université, France 
• Pr. Christine Reynier, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier3, France Pr. Stephen Ross, University of Victoria, BC, Canada 

Organising committee 

• Marie Bertrand, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier3, France
• Alice Borrego, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier3,
• France Tim Gupwell, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier3, France Clémence Laburthe-Tolra, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier3,
• France Xavier Le Brun, Université d’Angers, France  
• Christine Reynier, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier3, France

Modernism and Matter ev

(Posted 12 February 2022)

The View from the Anthropocene: Exploring the Human Epoch from Post-Anthropocentric Perspectives
The Institute of English and American Studies, Faculty of Humanities, University of Debrecen, Hungary, 15-16 October 2022
Deadline for proposals: June 30, 2022

“If the sadness of life makes you tired
And the failures of man make you sigh
You can look to the time soon arriving
When this noble experiment winds down and calls it a day”

In this age of ecological, economic and social crises, the notion of the Anthropocene is becoming ever more significant. Proposed by Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer in 2000, the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch highlights detrimental human impact on the planet, while as a critical notion it synthetises anti-, non- or post-anthropocentric views challenging the dominant discourses and practices that place humans at the centre of the world. However, with its scope incessantly expanding and its meanings ever in flux, the Anthropocene requires constant redefinition and reassessment. So far it has been criticised for its ideological implications and several terms such as Plantationocene (Haraway 2015), Capitalocene (Moore 2016, Davies 2016), and Occidentalocene (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2017) have been offered as alternatives. Yet could we define the Anthropocene and its implications more clearly and harmoniously? Above all, it is an urgent warning about the future of ecosystems, cultures and societies alike, forcing us to realise that “we are embedded in various social, economic, and—especially—ecological contexts that are inseparably connected” (Kersten 2013). Addressing the need for coherence across versatile approaches, the conference calls for a transdisciplinary investigation of the challenges of our age.

We also realise that the Anthropocene must be acted upon, although its cry for action is crippling. As Judy Wilson put it during one of the panel discussions at COP26, “the human epoch is not only external, it is also internal”, for it not only denotes a number of ecological and social crises – including climate change, loss of biodiversity, pollution, poverty and starvation in the global south, causing waves of migration which in turn fuel global conflict –, but it also involves anxiety and apathy that render us passive in the face of these crises. As Liz- Rejane Issberner and Philippe Léna put it, it seems “as though humanity is being lethargic – waiting for the end of the film, when the heroes arrive to sort everything out, and we can all live happily ever after” (2018).

The conference aims to address some of the controversies, the lethargy and (wilful) ignorance that conceal the significance of the Anthropocene, exploring the notion itself as well as its theoretical and practical challenges from the perspectives of posthumanism, animal studies, ecocriticism and any other approaches that question anthropocentrism from their respective viewpoints. We invite proposals that may address, yet are not restricted to, the following topics:

• Critiques of and conceptual alternatives to the Anthropocene—Donna Haraway’s ‘Cthulhucene’, Jason Moore’s ‘Capitalocene’, Bernard Stiegler’s ‘neganthropocene’ and the like
• Cli-fi, dystopian and/or utopian responses to climate change Speculative and fantastic fiction related to the Anthropocene Eco-anxiety
• Fantastic texts exploring indigenous worldviews on ecology
• Literary fiction or other media that interrogate humanity’s relationship with other lifeforms Literary fiction or other media that question the human/animal boundary
• Human-Animal Studies, Literary and Cultural Animal Studies, Animal Ethics, Critical Animal Studies The non- and posthuman other (animals, plants, monsters, aliens, artificial intelligence) in art, literature, cinema and other media
• Nonhuman perspectives in literature and cinema; the nonhuman gaze Non-anthropocentric spaces and temporalities in literature and cinema Ecocriticism, environmental humanities, deep ecology and ecosophy Eco-horror; aesthetics and themes
• Bioethical considerations
• Posthumanism, post- and transhumanist frameworks, posthumanist ethics Anti-humanism, meta-humanism
• Speculative realism, object-oriented ontologies, new materialism, post-anthropocentric ecology theories, theories of social assemblage
• Object-oriented art; bioart, microbial art
• Eco-art, eco-literature, eco-media, eco-cinema

Confirmed plenary speakers include Márk Horváth and Ádám Lovász who will give a talk on the post- anthropocentric turn, and László Nemes, who will speak about his current inquiry into the ethics of de- extinction. Accompanying programmes will include a roundtable discussion addressing the challenges of the Anthropocene, with participants from various fields including philosophy, literary and film criticism, biology, and psychology; a photography exhibition; and a multimedia art event organised by the members of Művészek a klímatudatosságért (Artists for Climate Awareness). With these programmes we hope to turn the collective experience of inertia symptomatic of the Anthropocene into awareness, new forms of agency, and action.

“Time has come now to stop being human
Time to find a new creature to be
Be a fish or a weed or a sparrow
For the earth has grown tired and all of your time has expired.”
(Thinking Fellers Union Local 282: “Noble Experiment”)

Technical details:

The conference is planned as an on-site event, to be held in English and Hungarian, on 15-16 October 2022 at the University of Debrecen. Depending on the dynamics of the pandemic, we will nevertheless adapt and consider moving parts of or the whole conference to a digital platform. Participants will be informed about any changes via email in due time.

Please send a 250 word abstract of your proposed paper with a brief, max. 100 word biography to theviewfromtheanthropocene@gmail.com by June 30, 2022. Those who wish to present in Hungarian are also welcome, but are kindly asked to include an English version of their abstract and mini bio in their application. Responses will be given by July 31, 2022.

It is intended that a selection of the papers based on the conference presentations will be published, either in a separate collection of articles or a thematic volume in a scholarly journal.

Organising committee:

Zsófia Novák and Borbála László (PhD students, Department of British Studies, IEAS, UD);
Tamás Bényei, DSc (professor, Department of British Studies, IEAS, UD);
György Kalmár, PhD (reader, Department of British Studies, IEAS, UD).

For more information please visit the event’s Facebook page or contact the organizers at the following e-mail address: theviewfromtheanthropocene@gmail.com.

CFP_The View from the Anthropocene

Political Polarization in 21st Century Societies: What It Is and Why It Matters
University of Rouen, France. ERIAC research centre,  20th-21st October 2022
Deadline for proposals: 1 March 2022

The term “polarization”, which has its origins in physics and mathematics is used in many countries nowadays to refer to political phenomena. Depending on the context, it may refer to a process or to a resulting situation; it may describe a state of affairs or express a desire to return to consensus and cooperation. It can be used both in an everyday sense meaning the same as “division” and in an academic sense, linked, for instance, to the dysfunctions of an institution; it can be used in a party-political sense, or in a wider sense concerning politics and society. This semantic flexibility no doubt helps explain the popularity of the term, but it means that we must carefully map the movements from one meaning of “polarization” to another and the importance of such movements in different national or other contexts.

In the United States, while the media use the term as a synonym for “division”, some political scientists speak of “asymmetric polarization” to help explain the dysfunctions of political institutions. In the US, the debate around polarization brings up a number of questions. Political scientists attempt to establish whether citizens are actually more divided than previously, or whether it is more that the two main parties have each become more ideologically coherent. Other questions debated include the extent to which the two parties are affected by polarization in an identical manner, whether polarization originates within political elites or among voters, as well as the role played by old and new media in the rise of polarization.

In Latin America, a continent marked historically by the strength of presidentialism and by high levels of inequality, two factors which reinforce political conflict, the term “polarization” has long been used. The massive waves of protest of recent years have meant that the term is increasingly present in the media, referring to the exacerbation of tension and the radicalization of people’s attitudes. There is a risk that it become a quick-fix label of superficial analysis.

In Europe, there is no shortage of examples of political polarization. In Spain the economic crisis has led to the entire post-dictatorship social and political settlement being put into question. The upheavals around the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union, or the “Yellow Vests” crisis in France constitute further indications, as does the rise of a series of “anti-system” movements, or movements for independence, across the continent.

A process of polarization has also been noted concerning specific political questions or spaces, and the weakness of the “centre ground” has often been remarked upon. The impressive political distance separating the two successive leaders of the British Labour Party (Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer) is a key example, but one could also mention the division among British feminists concerning trans rights, or the sharply contrasting positions on the French Left concerning the recent demonstrations against government policy on the pandemic. In addition, groups advocating direct disruptive action (such as Extinction Rebellion in Britain or the Yellow Vests in France) can muster public support unthinkable thirty years ago.

This conference will allow us to question, collectively, the concept of polarization and to produce a critical analysis of the use of the term, and of its links with other political phenomena such as consensus or political violence, in the context of the democratic structures of different countries. Is polarization in itself a problem? Does the term polarization help forge a crucial prism through which one can grasp and analyse social and political reality today, or on the contrary does the idea lead to an oversimplification of complex processes? What aspects does the term help understand and what aspects does it leave to one side? How far is it useful to shed light on present political situations? How much political space remains for nuance, diversity, and difference so central to Western democracies?

In approaching these debates, one might look both at real phenomena of polarization, and at academic uses of the term (asymmetrical polarization, affective polarization, polarization on social networks). Topics might include the genealogy of this concept in political science, party-political polarization, polarization in connection with social struggles and the link between political polarization, the media, and social networks.

Proposals for papers

Proposals should be no longer than 500 words in length and should be accompanied by a short biographical note. Papers will be in English or in French and will be limited to thirty minutes (followed by ten minutes of discussion). They should be sent to lucbenoit2@gmail.com and to anne-claire.sanz-gavillon@univ-rouen.fr before the 1st March 2022.

(Posted 19 November 2021)

Postcolonial Narrations 2022: Postcolonial Matters of Life and Death
Bonn, 20-22 October
Deadline for abstracts: 31 May 2022

The last decades have brutally shown that not all lives and bodies are equally grievable. War, increased migratory movements, the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the climate crisis demonstrate that hierarchies of life and death continue to be dominated by colonial and racialized criteria as well as political and social power structures. In her much-referenced work Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004), Judith Butler asserts that “[s]ome lives are grievable, and others are not; the differential allocation of grievability […] operates to produce and maintain certain exclusionary conceptions of who is normatively human: what counts as a liveable life and a grievable death?” (XIV-XV). Her assessment raises further questions about the conception and boundaries of ‘the human’ and who controls them. Since the European Enlightenment the predominant understanding of ‘the human’ has been shaped by a universalizing focus on individualism and rationality. These humanist notions do not only foreground an immaterial understanding of human essence, neglecting any question of the material existence of the body, but more so indicate a sharp distinction between subject and object, self and other. Recent posthumanist scholarship seeks to expose these binaries and tries to negotiate new understandings of ‘the human’. Examining marginalised lives and deaths through a focus on black, female, queer, or non-human agents, critical posthumanism investigates who counts as ‘human’. This endeavour is especially relevant in a postcolonial context, where existing ideas of the human mind and body are continuously reconsidered, and the imagining of alternative ways of life is a central concern. Emerging from this framework, we hope to explore postcolonial matters of life and death in next year’s Postcolonial Narrations Forum.  

The controlling and policing of life and death, which dominate our screens again and again in the form of racially motivated police shootings, the discoveries of mass graves of Indigenous children, and the violence at Europe’s borders, have long been central to colonialism and its continuous aftermath. Consequently, the institutionalised regulation of human life and bodies has attracted notice as a major focus in literary and cultural studies, postcolonial studies, medical and environmental humanities, and other fields. Concepts such as biopolitics (Foucault), bare life (Agamben), necropolitics (Mbembe), and slow death (Berlant) are only a few among the many tools which are useful to examine the abovementioned issues. Literary genres as diverse as life-writing, memoir, dystopia, and SF as well as other media have not only voiced criticism in this regard, but have narrated forms of resistance, resilience, and survival. These cultural trends reflect political discourses surrounding, for instance, the Black Lives Matter movement, the reclaiming of bodies through mourning rituals, and #RefugeesWelcome. We would like to invite fellow PhD candidates and early career scholars to join us in a multifaceted exchange on postcolonial matters of life and death. We welcome a wide range of contributions on the following and related issues in postcolonial contexts:  

• the body as the site of life/death/change 
• death and grief / rituals of mourning 
• birth / reproduction (rights) 
• violence / genocide / war / pandemic 
• queer bodies / erotic sovereignty  
• toxic environments / toxic bodies 
• survival / resilience / resistance 
• ageing and decay / preservation 
• suicide / assisted suicide 
• images of the afterlife  
• genre theory: life-writing / autobiography / autobiografiction / memoir
• genre theory: utopia / dystopia / SF / futurism 

Confirmed speakers: 

• Prof. Dr. Mita Banerjee, Universität Mainz (keynote lecture) 
• Alecia McKenzie (artist’s talk and reading) 
• Dr. Jennifer Leetsch (workshop) 

Please send abstracts for 20 minute-long talks (ca. 300 words + 5 keywords) and a short bio note to postcolonialnarrations@g-a-p-s.net by 31 May 2022. We will send out acceptance e-mails and further info by mid-June.  

We are planning to hold the conference in person in Bonn, following current COVID-regulations. In case the circumstances change, the format might switch to an online event. In either case, single events or panels may be held in a hybrid form. There will be no conference fee and a limited amount of travel bursaries can be organised. Please let us know if you require further information on this. 

We are currently exploring possibilities for the publication of a conference volume. Further information on this will follow.  

Organisers: 

• Marie Berndt, Angela Benkhadda, Lena Falk, and Peri Sipahi University of Bonn 
• https://postcolonial-narrations.net/

Works Cited: 

(Posted 30 March 2022)

Ways of Picturing, Thinking and Telling Our Time: Fifty Years of Seeing with John Berger
University of Lorraine, Metz (France), 20-21 October 2022.
Deadline for proposals: 25 June 2022

Keynote lectures: Tom Overton (Barbican Centre) and Olivier Cohen (Éditions de l’Olivier).

2022 marks the 50^th anniversary of two striking developments in John Berger’s career. Indeed, 1972 was the year in which he was awarded the Booker Prize for G., and became a household name thanks to Ways of Seeing, an unprecedented programme through which the critical efforts of art history and historical materialism found their way to a wider audience. The anniversary provides an excellent opportunity for the Société d’Études Anglaises Contemporaines (SEAC) to devote its annual conference to the œuvre of this luminary of 20^th– and 21^st-century British culture: France was the country Berger chose for his home, and although his work has been staged, translated, and published there, it has not always received the academic attention it deserves. Accordingly, this conference will acknowledge Berger’s significant impact on his contemporaries, both as a writer of fiction and non-fiction and as an art historian. Such an undertaking is, however, problematic: even as he rose to fame, Berger himself repeatedly warned against hagiographic approaches to great writers, and, more profoundly, argued against misapprehending art history as a linear sequence of individual protagonists, encouraging instead an understanding of culture as collective and collaborative. How then can we commemorate Berger’s work without falling into the pit-falls he himself draws attention to? This reflexive paradox will be at the centre of the conference, which aims both to commemorate and to problematise Berger’s complex legacy.

The very notion of an anniversary raises the issue of influence, and one of the objectives of the conference will be to examine the long shadow Berger casts on the landscapes of visual art and contemporary fiction. The impact of his thinking on visual art is widely documented, and reflected in events such as the symposium held in Lausanne in 2018, ‘De B à X. Faire (l’histoire de) l’art depuis John Berger.’ The deep impression he left on contemporary literature is also noteworthy, especially in the anglophone world. In A Jar of Wild Flowers, a collection published in celebration of his 90^th birthday, Ali Smith states: ‘I could say that everything I’ve ever written or aspired to write has been in one way or another an appreciation of the work of John Berger.’ In the same volume, Amarjit Chandan describes Berger as ‘the writer of our time,’ suggesting that his figure towers over any attempt at apprehending contemporary writing and culture. 

And yet, as Tom Overton points out in Landscapes, thinking in terms of ‘influence’ contradicts Berger’s own understanding of authorship: ‘Rather than the collective, collaborative act of storytelling, the idea of “influence” seems more associated with […] a capitalist logic of debt and restitution that Berger rejects.’ If the present conference is to propose a tribute to his work, it is bound to do so by fully engaging with the challenges his thinking and practice pose to any form of authoritarian imposition and to disciplining processes. Indeed, suspiciousness towards deference and canonisation is characteristic of his work.

One way of doing justice to Berger’s celebration of his readers’ ever-critical minds and eyes would be to respond to his entreaty in Ways of Seeing: ‘I hope you will consider what I arrange, but please, be sceptical of it.’ Ever mindful of the distinction between monography and hagiography, this conference will make room for critical appraisals of the contribution his work has made to our visual perception and imagination. It will take into account the ways in which Berger himself noted and anticipated such critical readings, stating as early as 1959 ‘I have been writing art criticism long enough to be proven wrong’ (in Portraits), and often connecting this sensitivity to his readers’ critical perspectives with his personal practice of ‘reconsidering’ (Overton, Portraits) artists and their works, returning to them from a different angle. Taking our cue from Berger’s awareness that the critic cannot content himself with situating the piece he studies, but must also reflexively ‘place [himself] historically’ (‘Between Two Colmars’), we will recognise a readiness to being read, critiqued and situated by others, as was the case for instance when Christopher Wood’s A History of Art History placed Berger beside Gombrich in the category of ‘fallen’ art historians. 

 The double movement that consists in inviting an other’s critical gaze while acknowledging one’s own situatedness points beyond a simple precaution against solipsism to a fundamental understanding of the collaborative nature of writing. One of the challenges of the conference in that sense will be to do justice to Berger’s own resistance to the ‘individualist illusion’ that would have us read art history as ‘a relay race of geniuses,’ (in Portraits) in a context where the monograph remained ‘one of the most typical discursive forms of art historical research and writing’ (Pollock). The aim will be to combine the attention to singularity proper to monographic research with Berger’s constant concern for the ramifications that inscribe each life in world historical processes. In doing so we will be fulfilling a condition necessary to the elaboration of any contemporary portrait, for ‘[i]n a world of transition and revolution, individuality has become a problem of historical and social relations […] Every mode of individuality now relates to the whole world’ (‘No more portraits,’ in Landscapes). The consideration shown to the reader as a singular feeling and thinking agent is therefore underpinned by the wider attention to be paid to the collective – that same attention which led Berger to share his 1972 Prize between his ‘project about the migrant workers of Europe’ and the activism of the Black Panthers, thereby counteracting the logic of exploitation behind the wealth of Booker McConnell.

Finally, by keeping in mind the material framework within which he could work, Berger reached beyond academic networks of specialists and art historians, and beyond the communities of political activists he kept ever present in his mind and writings, to a wider audience who might encounter him through such popular media as TV or paperbacks. Following the same logic that made him choose cheap, black and white illustrations over the glossy ones frequently used in exhibition catalogues and academic books, the conference will aim to look for the marks Berger left in our ways of seeing especially where these imply unexpected yet welcome encounters, the sort of coincidences and serendipities unchecked by academic structures and boundaries. In keeping with the author’s appeal to an audience of non-specialists in Ways of Seeing, the conference will welcome contributions from ‘common readers’ as well as from  Berger scholars.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to: 

• art and politics, scholarly writing and activism
• the individual and/within history
• reproductions and reproduction rights
• contemporary times and history
• Berger and border-crossings
• Berger and the common
• the monograph, the œuvre
• Berger and art historians
• Berger and academia
• Berger and discipline(s)
• word and image
• intertextual connections: Berger and/in contemporary fiction 
• Berger’s readers as authors? Writing with/after Berger
• storytelling and ideas, concepts and/in narrative
• storytelling and/as looking
• writing and/as letter-writing

This conference will be jointly convened by Dr Sarah Gould (Paris 1-Panthéon Sorbonne; HiCSA research center) and Dr Diane Leblond (University of Lorraine in Metz, IDEA – Interdisciplinarité dans les Etudes Anglophones). It will be held at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities on the University of Lorraine’s campus in Metz, on October 20^th-21^st, 2022.

We invite contributions from scholars, artists, writers, translators, publishers, or anyone who might testify to the impact of John Berger’s work and ways of seeing. Proposals of 300 words, together with a short biographical note, should be sent to Sarah Gould (sarah.gould@univ-paris1.fr) and Diane Leblond (diane.leblond@univ-lorraine.fr) by June 25^th, 2022. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by June 30^th, 2022.

A selection of peer-reviewed papers will be published in the SEAC’s journal Études britanniques contemporaines: https://journals.openedition.org/ebc/

References

• Berger, John, Ways of Seeing. 1972, Penguin Books, 2008.
• —‘Speech on accepting the Booker Prize for Fiction at the Café Royal in London,’ Nov. 23^rd 1972, in Steps Towards a Small Theory of the Visible, Penguin Books, 2020.
• —‘Between Two Colmars,’ in About Looking. 1980, Bloomsbury, 2009. 
• —, ed. Geoff Dyer. Selected Essays of John Berger. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014.
• —, ed. Tom Overton. Portraits: John Berger on Artists. Verso Books, 2015.
• —, ed. Tom Overton. Landscapes: John Berger on Art. Verso Books, 2018.
• Chandan, Amarjit, Sally Potter, and Jean Mohr, eds. A Jar of Wild Flowers: essays in celebration of John Berger. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016.
• Guins, Raiford, Juliette Kristensen, and Susan Pui San Lok, eds. ‘Ways of seeing: 40th anniversary issue.’ Journal of Visual Culture 11, no. 2 (2012).
• Pollock, Griselda, ‘Artists, Mythologies and Media — Genius, Madness and Art History’, Screen 21, iss. 3 (Autumn 1980).Wood, Christopher, A History of Art History. Princeton University Press, 2019.

CFP

(Posted 11 May 2022)

Uncertain Landscapes
University of Strasbourg, 20-22 October 2022
Deadline for proposals: 15 May 2022

CALL FOR PAPERS

“Uncertain landscapes”: representations and practices of space in the age of the Anthropocene.

 Keynote speakers: Pr Mark Cheetham, Department of Art History, University of Toronto ; Lina Prosa, Playwright, Palermo

“A working country is hardly ever a landscape. The very idea of landscape implies separation and observation.” (Williams, 1973) In this well-known statement, Raymond Williams expresses the view, often reformulated by cultural geographers and philosophers since the 1980s, that the idea of landscape always supposes a distancing process, whether it is a dissociation between the observed environment and the observing subject or, to use Alain Roger’s term, an “artialization,” a break with the natural world that allows environments to be constructed or represented according to aesthetic values (Roger, 1997).

Beyond this cultural separation, the history of the idea of landscape in Western thought seems to be punctuated by moments of tension between the natural world and man, in which aesthetic constructions of nature appear to be correlated with a sense of loss. Thus, just as forms of severance from rural life in the early modern period seem to have led to an aesthetic perception of environments that was dissociated from their use as working spaces, the flourishing of landscape painting in the Romantic period could be understood as a response to the tensions generated by industrialization.

In an era defined by some as the Anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000), in which it is increasingly difficult to deny the acceleration and irreversibility of environmental damage as a result of human action, the concept of landscape has become the subject of multiple debates and redefinitions. The necessity to give aesthetic meaning to the spaces which we inhabit, as well as renew our social and political commitment to them, seems to be more urgent than ever. The paradigm of landscape as it was constructed in the early modern era no longer seems to give satisfactory answers to contemporary concerns, which emphasize the imbalances and degradations caused by decades of industrial exploitation and intensive agriculture. The contemplation of nature, far from conveying a reassuring sense of permanence, goes together with our awareness of humanity’s responsibility in what appears to be an ultimate crisis. While some consider that the idea of landscape is no longer relevant and put forward the notion of “post-landscape” (Wall 2017), others experiment with new aesthetic spatialities and outline new artistic practices of space.

In this context, the history of the landscape idea is re-examined by academics as well as political actors. In historical studies, the primacy of landscape as representation or “abstract picture of the world” is being questioned, with a new focus on landscape as “a way to inhabit the land” (Dauphant, 2018, 30). The role played by the landscape idea in the colonial imaginary as an instrument of appropriation is also underlined, allowing non-European cultures to challenge or even reinvest the concept. Once the historicity of the landscape idea is acknowledged, it becomes possible to explore the diversity of aesthetic conceptions of spaces that are simultaneously perceived, conceived and lived, to use Henri Lefebvre’s categories (1974). This diversity expresses itself in concrete ways of appreciating and experiencing landscape, such as French or English gardens, rural enclosures or open fields, and perhaps especially in changes of perception through time. For example, the “wilderness” was long perceived as terrifying before becoming desirable in the 19th century (R. F. Nash, 1967), and has now become an objective and symbol of preservation in the context of the Anthropocene. It is essential to acknowledge the ideological implications of such perceptions and their material, social and political impacts, when, for example, they justify the appropriation of territories for the sake of preserving a fantasized pristine landscape, untouched by humans (Black, 2012).

 This conference aims to reassess the notion of landscape, understood in an aesthetic, social and political sense, and its current relevance to contemporary environmental challenges. While raising the question of the historical conditions of its construction and transformations, it proposes to examine its relevance today, its new meanings, as well as the practices of space and political actions that are now possible and justified. The emphasis will be on the artistic practices of the industrial and postindustrial eras as sources of resilience or reflection – in the visual arts and literature – as well as the idea of landscape, in its diachronic dimension, in order to reflect on the various ways in which it is possible to reassess our relationship to the environment in the context of the Anthropocene.

 We welcome proposals on topics that may include, among others:

• new aesthetic and artistic spatialities (site-specific art, Land Art, Earthworks)
• cultural variations on the idea of landscape 
• the inscriptions and traces of human history in landscapes
• contemporary ruins
• The shift from the notion of landscape to that of site in the 1960s
• soundscapes
• contemporary forms of political commitment in relation to specific landscapes (such as natural or urban parks, shorelines that are threatened by rising waters, sacred territories) 
• inequalities of access to landscapes 
• the inclusion of the idea of landscape in urban policies, in the context of ecological transition
• the questioning and rethinking of anthropocentric approaches to nature
• the role of landscapes in psychological well-being 

Please send a 250 to 300-word abstract, as well as a short bio, before May 15th, to the following addresses: 

• sbaudry@unistra.fr (Sandrine Baudry), 
• hibata@unistra.fr (Hélène Ibata), 
• f.moghaddassi@unistra.fr (Fanny Moghaddassi)

Organising committee: 

References:

(Posted 13 April 2022)

6th International Conference on Linguistics and Literature
Department of Philology, University of Cantabria, Santander, 27-28 October 2022
Deadline for abstracts: 1 June 2022

The Department of Philology at the University of Cantabria is pleased to resume the celebration of our VI International Conference on Language and Literature. We are interested in fostering a scientific meeting for the exchange of current research linked to the areas of knowledge that comprise the Department: Spanish Philology, English Philology, French Philology and Didactics of the Language and Literature. 

Our goal is to create a forum where all specialists in the study of modern languages ​​can present the development and results of their research from a variety of perspectives such as: 

• Acquisition and teaching of First, Second and Foreign Languages  
• Bilingualism and multilingualism  
• Translation studies 
• Corpus linguistics  
• Sociolinguistics  
• Diachronic and synchronic linguistic studies (phonetics, phonology; morphosyntax; semantics; lexis; discourse…) 
• Digital Humanities o Disabilities Studies o Ecocriticism and Animal Humanities  
• Comparative literature  
• Cultural studies  
• Gender Studies 
• Postcolonial Literature  
• Critical Theory 
• Eccriticism 

The Conference will take place online, through synchronous sessions using Zoom. The Conference will be honoured with three plenary speakers:  

• Asier Altuna (University of Deusto) 
• Angela de Bruin (York University) 
• Frank Boers (University of Western Ontario) 

We welcome proposals for 20-minute papers that will be presented in parallel sessions. Please email a 250-word abstract (excluding bibliography) in English, Spanish or French to cill6@unican.es. The deadline is June 1st 2022. Should you have any queries, please contact us or check our webpage: http://congresolinguisticayliteratura.unican.es/ 

Selected papers will be published in a post-conference volume with ISBN.  

(Posted 4 May 2022)