Calls for papers – Conferences taking place in August 2016

Temporal Discombobulations: Time and the Experience of the Gothic
University of Surrey, United Kingdom, 22-24 August 2016
Deadline for proposals: 4 March 2016

Gothic Temporalities Group in conjunction with the University of Surrey
Our experience of the Gothic is one founded in time. Whether it is of a past that will not or cannot die, multiple presents that can never resolved, or infinite futures that can never be realised it speaks of a temporal excess that refuses to be contained.
Time is one of the fundamental concepts by which we relate to ourselves, others, and the spaces we inhabit. It is at once both an endless, infinite concept and a finite resource, constantly slipping away and being renewed. The Gothic then embodies something of this contradictory nature within the experience of time, manifesting the uncanny unease at its heart. This gives form to a temporal sensory overload: of the moment that is too full, excessive and unable to hold all the differing and contradictory amounts of time it contains. It is the time of the spectre, the dream, the vision, and the infinite.
As a genre and an ideology, the Gothic is inherently drawn to temporalities with expressions through ruin and decay, extravagance and excess. As the expressionist artist James Ensor articulates, the ruin is a site in which deviant behaviours arise and become eroticised in a “contemporary gothic aesthetic.” This conceptualises the gothic moment as one one which is eroticised not as an entirely sexual experience but as one of heightened sensational and sensory excess.

This conference then aims to explore the nature of this temporal sensory excess which sees local time disrupted and discombobulated by vast swathes of historical time, parallel worlds or sublime or infinite futures. Examples of such narratives can be seen where:

  • Literal ghosts and psychological apparitions infect the present, such as Insidious, The Awakening, Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare.
  • Other-worldly constructions of the past, present or future that break into reality such as Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Inception (2010), The Terminator series, M.C. Escher, Giovani Piranesi, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen, George Orwell’s 1984, Mark Morris’ The Wolves of London, Mike Carye’s The Girl with all the Gifts
  • The infinite, sublime and the erotic as seen in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Alien (1979), Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the art of H.R.Giger
  • Historical time, parallel worlds, doppelgangers in Philip Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Melissa Mar’s Wicked Lovely, mash-up novels like Android Karenina and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula
  • Eruptions of the Gothic past: Daphne duMaurier’s Rebecca, Matthew Lewis’ The Monk, Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Paintings of Anselm Keiffer.
  • Breaking reality: Stephen King’s The Shining, Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale, Neuromancer, Mark Z Danielewski ‘s House of Leaves, Fight Club (1999), Coffee and Cigarettes (2003), Surrealism and Neo-Surrealism – Salvador Dali and dream imagery.

We invite 20-minute papers on all aspects of Gothic time in art. Suggested topics and themes include (but are not limited to):

  • Temporality in classical Gothic texts
  • Ruinophilia
  • Explorations of ruin and decay in the arts
  • Spectres of the past or future
  • Time and decay in the Gothic
  • Temporal ruptures, such as regression, progression, displacement or echoes
  • Gothic spaces that function outside or beyond time
  • Parallel universes, ruptured time and relativity
  • Temporal excess that “real” time cannot contain
  • Traumatic time, temporal wounds and repairing time
  • Timelessness and immortality
  • Fundamentalism as regression
  • Medievalism in the Twenty-first century
  • The “found manuscript” and constructing authenticity through notions of the past and/or future
  • The return of the past and eternal recurrence
  • The temporal gravity of Destiny and/or fate

The conference organisers welcome the submission of proposals for short workshops, practitioner-based activities, performances, and pre-formed panels. We particularly welcome short film screenings; photographic essays; installations; interactive talks and alternative presentation styles that encourage engagement.
Please send paper proposals of 300-500 words, along with a short bio to gothictime@mail.com  no later than 4th March 2016.
For further information visit the Conference website.

(posted 14 October 2015)


The ESSE Conference
Galway, Ireland, 22-26 August 2016
Deadline for proposals: 28 February 2016

PrintWe are delighted to welcome ESSE to Ireland, for what promises to be a memorable and stimulating conference. NUI Galway is one of Ireland’s oldest universities, and is located at the heart of Galway city – a place that is both compact and culturally rich. A visit to Galway will allow you to travel to sites associated with Ireland’s major writers, from W.B. Yeats to James Joyce and beyond. But you will also have opportunities to experience the living literary and cultural activity of a city that is often spoken of as Ireland’s unofficial cultural capital.
We are planning an exciting conference that will host readings by important writers and lectures by major international scholars – set in a location that is beautiful, easily accessed, affordable and culturally rich. We look forward to seeing you in 2016!
Professor Patrick Lonergan, Conference organiser Patrick.Lonergan@nuigalway.ie

The Conference, hosted at NUI Galway, will offer a wide choice of plenary and sub-plenary lectures, 86 Seminars, 11 Round Tables, Doctoral Sessions, Poster Sessions.

Deadline for proposals (Poster, and papers for Seminars): 28 February 2016 — but a few Seminars can accept more papers: see the announcements below.

All relevant information to be found on the Conference website

(posted 1 February 2016, updated 4 March 2016)


Contact, Identity and Morphosyntactic Variation in Diasporic Communities of Practice
Seminar 17 at the ESSE Conference, Galway, Ireland, 22-26 August 2016
New extended deadline for proposals to this Seminar: 11 March 2016

PrintSeminar 17 at the 2016 ESSE Conference in Galway invites more papers. Send a 200 word abstract to the seminar co-convenors:
Siria Guzzo, University of Salerno, Italy, sguzzo@unisa.it
Chryso Hadjidemetriou, University of Stockholm, Sweden, chrysohadi@mac.com
This seminar aims to look at issues of language maintenance and shift in heritage communities of practice. Specific attention will be paid to discussing their longstanding migration, cultural heritage and identity construction. Mobility, contact and exchanges are increasing, social and communicative networks are becoming more complex, and the sociolinguistics of diaspora is beginning to address new issues. Diasporic communities are constantly increasing in size and number in the urban centres, making them sites of diversity. What happens to single heritage languages as they are relocated into new settings, creating new dialect contact situations? Papers resulting from ethnographic fieldwork and observation with a focus on language use, morphosyntactic variation and heritage identity are of particular interest.

(posted 4 March 2016)


Contact, Anachronism and the Medieval
Seminar 22 at the ESSE Conference, Galway, Ireland, 22-26 August 2016
New extended deadline for proposals to this Seminar: 11 March 2016

PrintSeminar 22 at the 2016 ESSE Conference in Galway invites more papers. Send a 200 word abstract to the seminar co-convenors:
Lindsay Reid, NUI Galway, Ireland, lindsay.reid@nuigalway.ie
Yuri Cowan, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway, yuri.cowan@ntnu.no
This seminar focuses on anachronism, broadly defined, and its relation to the medieval period. Often understood negatively as a computational fault or disruptive error, anachronism is closely related to archaism, presentism, and para-/pro-chronism, as well as to the notion of the preposterous (in its literal Latin sense of “before-behind”). Contributors to this seminar might reflect on broad issues of temporality or on particular instances of anachronism—intentional or unintentional—in relation to medieval literary exemplars, but equally welcomed are contributions that explore anachronicity in conjunction with later (Renaissance to contemporary) engagements with the medieval past and its textual traditions.

(posted 4 March 2016)


Romanticism and the Cultures of Infancy
Seminar 28 at the ESSE Conference, Galway, Ireland, 22-26 August 2016
New extended deadline for proposals to this Seminar: 11 March 2016

PrintSeminar 28 at the 2016 ESSE Conference in Galway invites more papers. Send a 200 word abstract to the seminar co-convenors:
Cian Duffy, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, fcz573@hum.ku.dk
Martina Domines Veliki, University of Zagreb, Croatia, mdomines@ffzg.hr
Wordsworth’s assertion that “the child is father of the man” is one of the most familiar statements of the Romantic interest in the relationship between childhood experience and adult identity. Indeed it has become something of a commonplace now to assert that the Romantics invented childhood as we understand it. This seminar will investigate the extent to which the wider concept of infancy became a key trope of European thought across a range of different areas of enquiry during the long eighteenth century (1700-1830), from speculation about the age of the cosmos to discussions of the history of civil society.

(posted 4 March 2016)


Representing Diversity in Black British and British Asian Children’s Literature
Seminar 68 at the ESSE Conference, Galway, Ireland, 22-26 August 2016
New extended deadline for proposals to this Seminar: 11 March 2016

PrintSeminar 68 at the 2016 ESSE Conference in Galway invites more papers. Send a 200 word abstract to the seminar co-convenors:
Petra Tournay-Theodotou, European University Cyprus, Cyprus, P.Tournay@euc.ac.cy
Sofía Muñoz Valdivieso, University of Málaga, Spain, simunozvaldivieso@gmail.com
Despite the fact that the study of children’s literature is an ever-increasing, vibrant field, within the lively scene of Black British and British Asian writing literature for children still occupies a marginal space. Even though some authors have managed to gain wider visibility such as John Agard, Grace Nichols, Malorie Blackman, and Benjamin Zephaniah, children’s literature written by authors from an ethnic and racially diverse background is especially underrepresented when it comes to critical attention in academic circles. This seminar invites papers that will look at how literature for children and young adults written by Black British and British Asian writers address the complexities of the cultural situation of contemporary British society in the early 21st century and thus make an important contribution to the call for greater diversity in children’s books.

(posted 4 March 2016)


Desire and “the expressive eye” in Thomas Hardy
Seminar 36 at the ESSE Conference, Galway, Ireland, 22-26 August 2016
New extended deadline for proposals to this Seminar: 11 March 2016

PrintSeminar 36 at the 2016 ESSE Conference in Galway invites more papers. Send a 200 word abstract to the seminar co-convenors:
Phillip Mallett, University of St Andrews, UK, pvm@st-andrews.ac.uk
Jane Thomas, University of Hull, UK, J.E.Thomas@hull.ac.uk
Isabelle Gadoin, Université de Poitiers, France, isabeluis2@free.fr
Annie Ramel, Université Lumière-Lyon 2, France, annie.ramel@gmail.com
Thomas Hardy has inspired critics with an interest in the visual arts: many of his texts can be read as “iconotexts” with a powerful “painting effect”, even in the absence of any direct reference to painting (Louvel). Desire is another theme which has found its way into major criticism of Hardy’s work – the first item in the series being J. Hillis Miller’s Distance and Desire (1970). This seminar will explore the relation between desire and the gaze in Hardy’s work. Is the eye an “expressive eye” (Bullen), which makes manifest the “positive, dynamic and productive dimension of desire” (Thomas), or is it “the evil eye”, “full of voracity” (Lacan)? We will welcome proposals opening new directions in Hardy criticism, linking the desiring subject / the power of the gaze / the writing process.

(posted 5 March 2016)


Technology and Modernist Fiction
Seminar 45 at the ESSE Conference, Galway, Ireland, 22-26 August 2016
New extended deadline for proposals to this Seminar: 11 March 2016

PrintSeminar 45 at the 2016 ESSE Conference in Galway invites more papers. Send a 200 word abstract to the seminar co-convenors:
Armela Panajoti, University of Vlora, Albania, armelap@assenglish.org
Eoghan Smith, Carlow College, Ireland, esmith@carlowcollege.ie
Technology (advanced knowledge applied in the creation and use of tools, equipment, facilities and accessories) has historically not only made life easier but has also reconfigured human and social relationships, fed man’s imaginations, scientists and artists alike, and created the more recent realities of technoculture. In literature, the early possibilities of technology inspired masterpieces such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Technology in its commodifiable forms was a major preoccupation of literary artists at the beginning of twentieth century. This seminar will focus on modernist fiction with the intention to seek productive perspectives on the intersections of literature and technology, with special emphasis on the contribution of the latter to the modernist quality of the first.

(posted 5 March 2016)