theory

In response to the sustained scholarly focus on the material aspects of eighteenth century culture, the core concern of this interdisciplinary, bilingual (English and French) conference will be reactions to instability in the material realm, including but not limited to the emergence of an affective public sphere; a revaluation of labour; cosmopolitanism; sensibility; the new spiritualism; political radicalism and rights discourse; supernaturalism and the rise of the gothic; and anti-slavery and anti-imperial movements. Papers on these and any topics related to the material and the immaterial in the period will be welcomed.

Woolf's novels and essays often sustain a central tension between individuals' freedoms or agency and what they perceive groups to demand of them. For example, A Room of One's Own displays the tensions between intellectual freedom and the mind of the crowd, while Orlando wrestles in ambushes set up by means of unstable identity categories. This approved special session looks for papers that discuss Woolf's concerns about the impact of group life on her characters, or that place her literary agonists in proximity to group-driven events and trends between the wars.

Negation and Negativity: Theory, Form, and Representation
June 3, 2011
Los Angeles, CA

Keynote Speakers:
Sianne Ngai, UCLA Department of English
Joseph Bristow, UCLA Department of English

"Do
"You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
"Nothing?"
I remember
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
"Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?"
-T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

When an author writes a literary text either wholly or partly in dialect, he or she is making a conscious choice to represent something other than the standard language. This conference invites papers that explore this process. We welcome papers from across different periods, different genres and different geographical locations, including regional, social and world dialects. Questions that might be addressed include, but are not restricted to:

"Discovering the Fantastic": A creative writing component of "Curious, if True: The Fantastic in Literature" Graduate Student Conference 2011

University of Victoria
Victoria, British Columbia
March 10-12, 2011

The historical, theoretical, and cultural contexts of the fantastic in literature are the focus of this year's graduate student conference at the University of Victoria. The fantastic crosses many formal and generic barriers in literature, and challenges the historical concept of the novel as a realist production. The conference invites graduate students who are writers of the fantastic to contribute their creative work as a complement to the academic presentations and research papers also offered.