ATTENDING TO LITERATURE

We invite paper proposals for a British Academy funded interdisciplinary symposium on the concept of attention, to be held at the University of Nottingham School of English on the 3rd December. The symposium has three aims:

1. To allow researchers who work on similar questions from different disciplines to interact for the purpose of developing future collaborations and networks;

2. To provide a training opportunity for ECRs in engagement and outreach, allowing participants to practice bringing the specifics of their research to bear on an issue of public concern (attention);

Within the current political discourse and political turmoil, representation of women’s races, identities, cultures, precisely of minority women, continue to be under discussion.  Women critics and writers have discussed and examined how current political discourse have changed the understanding of identity in connection with ethnicity, race, color, and language. Identity is formed and shaped by culture, beliefs, race, ethnicity, and space among several other factors. Stuart Hall argues “Identity is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation.” With this in mind, how complex then this process of construction becomes when color, race, or religion emerges as defining factor of whether or not one belongs?

Global climate change is perhaps the most serious threat human beings have ever faced. Human-caused global warming is already upon us with increased temperatures, extreme weather events, massive storms, unprecedented drought, flooding, wildfires, melting ice, sea rise, warming and acidification of oceans, and growing animal extinctions. Scientists now predict that, within a generation, planetary catastrophes may significantly disrupt global food production, create unlivable temperatures in many regions, submerge cities, and create hundreds of millions of refugees. Unchecked, climate change has apocalyptic consequences not only for human beings, but for all life on earth.

“Renaissance(s) / Rebirth(s)”, the theme chosen for the 2020 SAES conference, is particularly relevant in the context of postcolonial literatures in English. Often called “new literatures” in the early years of their emergence, postcolonial works were – and are – frequently characterised by their attempts to renew literary forms, genres and language. These innovative practices sought, and often still seek, emancipation from European norms and canons, with the risk of creating new orthodoxies, like the primacy of the novel in the Indian postcolonial literary scene.

We are honored to announce the 9th International Conference on Language, Literature & Culture and Crossroads III Conference. This combined conference is organized jointly by the University of Białystok (Poland) and Çankaya University (Ankara, Turkey) on June 4-5, 2020 in Białystok, Poland, and the topical theme of the conference will be “Risk and Safety” in different areas of human sciences.

Keynote Speakers:

Prof. Dr. Gerd Bayer, Friedrich–Alexander University Erlangen–Nürnberg

Dr. Anna Barcz, Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich

ACCUTE 2020 (May 30-June 2) - Member Organized Panel

“This Book is Trash!”: Genres and Forms of Disposability, Ephemerality, and Disintegration

Panel Organizer: Kelly McDevitt (kelly.mcdevitt@queensu.ca)

Biofiction (literature that takes a real biography as its point of departure) is powered by what Colm Tóibín has recently called “the anchored imagination”, which grants the fictional narrative a certain ambiguous (almost duplicitous) credibility. But what do biographical novels mean as world-making vehicles? Is the recent boom in stories that rely on the real past, yet project contemporary visions upon it, only a sign that we are trying to build a coherent world-image of centuries past, or is it also an attempt to bring into being a new way of seeing and/or being in the present?

JAMES HOGG AT 250: CALL FOR PAPERS

 An International Conference marking the semiquincentennial of James Hogg. University of Stirling, Scotland, 1-3 July 2020. Call for PapersPaper and panel proposals on any aspect of James Hogg's life and work are now invited. AbstractsAbstracts of no more than 250 words, of papers lasting no longer than 20 minutes, should reach the address below by 1 December 2019. Panel proposals are also welcome: please enquire prior to submission. Abstracts may be e-mailed to jameshogg250@stir.ac.uk

Can we theorize World Literature as an intellectual and creative practice of resistance against the cultural imperialism embodied by the idea of the Global, the celebration of what Graham Hubbard calls the “postcolonial exotic,” and the hegemony of the English language? Is there a degree of antagonism between World Literature and the Global--or between the notions of translation and lingua franca? In what ways have these various terms been conflated or exchanged, and what do these conceptual entanglements tell us about the stakes and methodology of World Literature as a theory, a field of inquiry, and an institution?

To feel something is “awkward” is to verge on—without exactly arriving at— a judgment: it notes that a situation is uncomfortable without diagnosing what is responsible for that social impasse. (Here one thinks of the childhood staple the “awkward turtle,” which surfaces when there is nothing else to do.) Awkwardness thus names an interval of epistemological suspension: it invokes a placeholder for a situation to which one is unsure how to react and registers an emergent sociality the contours of which are not readily intelligible.

The past decade has seen an outpouring of work on form. Relatively little, by comparison, has foregrounded style.  What is the relation between form and style? How does style get us leverage on political and social questions that form does not—and vice versa—and why?  Which social contradictions animate style, or is it more a matter of psychic ambivalence? As D. A. Miller has argued, style may aim to get us close, but not too close, to hegemonic social and sexual orders that exclude us.  Or perhaps, as Mark McGurl advances, style helps us negotiate our entrance into newly democratizing but elite institutions such as the university. What is the relation between style, social capital, and the body?

Wait Five Minutes: Weatherlore in the Twenty-first Century (edited collection)

Editors: Willow G. Mullins and Shelley Ingram

“Don’t like the weather here? Wait five minutes, it’ll change.”

This session focuses on positioning the humanities curricula within the growing "global turn" in higher education. In addition to administrative and programmatic perspectives, we welcome fresh insights on expanding the canon and global humanities pedagogies. Recommended areas of specialization include but are not limited to cultural studies, comparative studies, philosophy, translation studies, world literatures, (applied) linguistics, and pedagogy.

Convenors:

• Emily Bell, Loughborough University (e.bell@lboro.ac.uk)
• Georges Letissier, Université de Nantes (georges.letissier@univ-nantes.fr)
• Céline Prest (celine.prest@gmail.com)