Relational Forms VI. Imag(in)ing the Nation: Literature, the Arts and Processes of National Construction
Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Porto, Portugal, 2 – 4 December 2021
Deadline for proposals: 20 September 2021
Confirmed keynote speakers:
- Jeremy Black (Professor Emeritus, University of Exeter)
- Roy Foster (Professor of Irish History and Literature, Queen Mary Univ. London)
- Uta Staiger (Associate Professor of European Studies, University College London)
According to scholars, criteria for nationhood have typically involved a commonality of ethnicity, language or religion, historically prolonged occupation of a stretch of land, frequently linked to the existence of a state apparatus, collective experience, and shared memories. Literature and the other arts have often been mobilized to support (if not altogether participate in the construction of) this sense of belonging and identity, which they can also challenge and complicate. Nationalism may simply be described as the most extreme form of such engagements and allegiances. In his 1945 essay “Notes on Nationalism”, George Orwell denounces the characteristic aggressiveness and single-mindedness of the nationalist, as well as the peculiar indifference to reality such attitudes entail. Orwell’s essay betrays a sense of urgency derived both from the hazards of the Second World War and from the perceived political and ideological threats of the approaching Cold War – a term he would himself coin. More recently, adopting the more poised stance of the historian, Jeremy Black has observed that nationalism “is a feeling as much as a principle. It manifests powerful emotional elements as well as the interaction of the ‘deep histories’ of particular national, or would-be national, groups with the contexts and expressions of these ‘deep histories’ in specific circumstances” (2018). And a pervasive tension between accounts of the past and versions of an envisaged future often energises the historiographic process; as noted by Roy Foster, “The most illuminating history is often written to show how people acted in the expectation of a future that never happened” (2002).
Such remarks emphasize the intersecting of ideologies and practices of memory, of emotional commitment and institutional constraints. It is at these crossroads that literature and the other arts have often played a role in presenting, critically assessing and reformulating discourses of nationhood that may be seen as either conservative, progressive or subversive. This conference is aimed at addressing this vast problematic. The conference marks the centenary of the partition of Ireland (1921), and, taking place at this time in history, inevitably intends to reflect on the meaning of the circumstances leading to and arising from Brexit. The focus of the conference is however intended to be broad and international, as well as intermedial, in keeping with the rationale that has been guiding the Relational Forms research group.
The organisers will welcome proposals for 20-minute papers in English responding to the above. Suggested (merely indicative) topics include:
- literature, the arts, and the ideology/ies of nation
- culture and the nation-state
- nation, nostalgia, trauma, exaltation, utopia
- institutions of national memory: academies, museums, libraries, archives
- genres and practices of nation-building: historical fiction, historical painting, historiography
- rival discourses of patriotism and identity
- nation(alism), aggressiveness, prejudice and intolerance
- identity, peace and conflict
- nation and class, nation and gender
- the nation, the state and the education of the citizen
- remediating the political imagination: from literature to audiovisual to digital media
As indicated by the number in its title, this conference is the sixth in a series of academic events that reflect the ongoing concerns of the eponymous research group (Relational Forms), based at CETAPS (the Centre for English, Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies).
Submissions should be sent by email to relational@letras.up.pt
Please include RF6 in the subject line of your email and organise your proposal into two separate files:
- a file containing the full title and a 250-300 word description of your paper;
- a file containing the author’s data: name, affiliation, contact address, paper title and author’s bio-note (150 words).
Please name these two documents as follows:
Surname_Name_Abstract_RF6
Surname_Name_AuthorInfo_RF6
Deadline for proposals: 20 September 2021
Notification of acceptance: 15 October 2021
Deadline for registration: 15 November 2021
Registration Fee: 80 Euros
Student fee: 65 Euros
Registration details will be posted online in October 2021</stron
All delegates are responsible for their own travel arrangements and accommodation.
More information available later at http://www.cetaps.com/events
Organised by the Relational Forms research area : http://www.cetaps.com/research-areas/relational-forms-medial-and-textual-transits-in-ireland-and-britain/
Executive Committee: Rui Carvalho Homem (coord.) | Jorge Bastos da Silva | Miguel Ramalhete Gomes | Jorge Almeida e Pinho | Márcia Lemos | Katarzyna Pisarska | Mark Wakefield
For further queries please contact:
CETAPS – Centre for English, Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies
Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto
Via Panorâmica, s/n
4150-564 PORTO
PORTUGAL relational@letras.up.pt
(posted 19 July 2021)
INCOLLAB: Innovative Learning and Teaching Environments
Prage, Czech repubic; on Zooom, 10 December 2021
Deadline for abstracts: 30 November 2021
Dear colleagues,
We most cordially invite you to join the third Innovative Interdisciplinary Collaborative Approaches to Learning and Teaching (INCOLLAB) Conference 2021. The conference will be organised by MIAS CTU and will take place via Zoom on 10 December 2021 and offer yet another opportunity to discuss the current trends, this time exploring Innovative Learning and Teaching Environments.
It is our sincere hope that it will be as successful as our June and September online conferences.
We invite contributions that include but are not limited to the following topics:
• Gamification
• Digital learning/teaching solutions
• E- and M- Pedagogies
Registration: You can register and/or submit abstracts for a 15-minute presentation (180–200 words) including a short academic bio (80–100 words) via the following REGISTRATION FORM
Deadline for submissions: 30 November 2021
Selected conference papers will be published in a reviewed collection of essays.
For more details about the conference, please see: conference website or project website.
The conference is part of the Erasmus + INCOLLAB 2019-1-CZ01-KA203-061163
Venue: MIAS CTU, Kolejní 2a, Prague 6, 160 00
Contact: Magda Matušková magda.matuskova@cvut.cz
Hana Pavelková hana.pavelkova@cvut.cz
Martin Štefl martin.stefl@cvut.cz
(posted 2 November 2021)
Vulnerability and Resilience in English Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century
An international online conference, 16-17 December 2021
Deadline for proposals: 3 July 2021
Co-organised by
- Raffaella Antinucci, Università Parthenope, Naples,
- Adrian Grafe, Université d’Artois (Research Lab “Textes et Cultures”).
Art in general, and literature in particular, have long been used as means to represent and give visibility to dynamics of violence, hurting and endurance. Vulnerability and resilience are two strongly related and almost antonymic concepts whose first meanings originate in the physical world. If vulnerability indicates the quality of being easily physically hurt or attacked, the word resilience was first used in physics to describe the ability of a substance or body to recover its shape and size after being bent, stretched, or pressed. When transferred into the social sciences, vulnerability denotes the diminished capacity of an individual or group to anticipate, cope with, resist and recover from the impact of a traumatic situation, whereas resilience points to a human intrinsic quality or “inner strength” that varies according to each individual’s capacity to react in a positive way to the same dramatic event or conditions. Considering the dramatic social and epistemic changes, including several tragic events, that characterized nineteenth-century Britain, the conference wishes to explore the literary forms in which individual and collective responses to traumas and marginalisation were addressed.
Taking into account the Darwinian paradigm but intending to broaden and go beyond it, the conference seeks to address the representation of modes of exposure and (apparent) powerlessness, and how these are overcome. The conference will examine literary responses in the nineteenth century to crisis, trial and torment, topoi that loom large, for example, in Joseph Campbell’s idea of the monomyth, or hero’s and heroine’s journey, although here we are also specifically concerned with the non-heroic and anti-heroic. The neuroscientist Boris Cyrulnik has, in Un merveilleux malheur, described resilience as related to the idea that a crisis that deals the human subject a serious psychological blow may divide him or her into two, with one part of the self suffering the blow while the other ensures the subject’s survival by focusing on possibilities for happiness, what Hardy in a much-quoted phrase called ‘the appetite for joy’. How does the ‘acceptance of the fallible self’ (Collins 144) lead to a superabundance of love and goodwill? In George MacDonald’s novel Adela Cathcart (1864), the heroine suffers from a mysterious illness to which storytelling is perceived as ‘a potential cure’, and the means “to another kind of life”’ (cf Dubois 2015).
The conference seeks to go beyond purely individual vulnerability. It will therefore take into account how nineteenth-century literature, in the shape, for instance, of the invasion scare novel, dramatised what Stephen Serata has called “the nation’s vulnerability” (110). Sir George Chesney’s 1871 cautionary novel The Battle of Dorking (mentioned by Serata) is but one example. It also means to explore ways in which different literary genres can be perceived in the nineteenth century as more or less vulnerable: poetry, for example, due to the rise in novel-reading. Also in this respect, we will be glad to receive proposals exploring the conference topic in journals, apologies, confessions, and autobiographies. What is the relationship between the artist Benjamin Haydon’s writing his Journal, which ends on June 22 1846, and his suicide committed a few hours after the entry for the latter date.
We are interested in literary depictions of the family as a site of vulnerability and resilience: the treatment and mistreatment of Pip and Joe in Great Expectations. Are children such as Pip or Jane Eyre depicted as mistreated as a manipulation of the reader on the author’s part, in order to arouse the former’s sympathy for the hero or heroine (cf Coveney).
Among examples of prison literature, we would be pleased to welcome readings of Wilde’s De Profundis (written while he was in prison) and The Ballad of Reading Gaol (written after his time in prison and he had left England for France).
Apart from the above examples, and among other possible topics, presentations may focus on:
- Literature, storytelling, humour and altruism as mechanisms of resilience and survival;
- Impact, positive or negative, of local communities on the individual;
- Damage done to, and the survival of, children;
- Resilience and social Darwinism; competition or adaptation?
- The depiction of illness and care, the responsiveness or otherwise of patients to treatment, the nature and quality of medicine and the medical professions;
- Post-feminist readings of care ethics in the literature of the period;
- ‘broken and failing groups of organic beings’ (Darwin, Origin, as quoted by Beer, 42);
- Gratitude, kindness and bravery as factors in the promotion of resilience and survival—or not?
- Poetry as mourning (Tennyson) or
- As response to, if not enactment of, spiritual disturbance and recovery (Hopkins);
- Why do some characters overcome adversity and others do not?
- The perception and depiction of gender in relation to vulnerability and resilience: does “the man”—rather than “the woman”—ever “pay”?
- …
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Beer, Gillian (2009). Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction.
- Collins, Deborah L. (1990). Thomas Hardy and His God: A Liturgy of Unbelief.
- Coveney, Peter (1967). The Image of Childhood.
- Cyrulnik, Boris (1999). Un merveilleux malheur. Paris: Odile Jacob.
- Dubois, Martin (2015), ‘Sermon and Story in George MacDonald’, Victorian Literature and Culture 43, 577–587.
- Serata, Stephen (1996). Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Identity and Empire.
- Troisi, Alfonso (2001). “Gender differences in vulnerability to social stress : a Darwinian perspective”. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11438373
There are no fees to take part in, or attend, this online conference.
Please send Adrian Grafe adrian.grafe@univ-artois.fr and Raffaella Antinucci raffaella.antinucci@uniparthenope.it 150-word proposals for 20’ presentations, along with a brief bio-biblio, by July 3rd 2021. We expect to publish a set of essays arising from the conference.
(posted 20 April 2021, updated 22 April 2021)