category: victorian

[UPDATE] Journal of Dracula Studies

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 09:03:57 -0500

We invite manuscripts of scholarly articles (4000-6000 words) on any of the following: Bram Stoker, the novel Dracula, the historical Dracula, the vampire in folklore, fiction, film, popular culture, and related topics.
Submissions should be sent electronically (as an e-mail attachment in .doc or .rtf). Please indicate the title of your submission in the subject line of your e-mail.
Please follow the 2009 updated MLA style.
Contributors are responsible for obtaining any necessary permissions and ensuring observance of copyright.
Manuscripts will be peer-reviewed independently by at least two scholars in the field.
Copyright for published articles remains with the author.
Submissions must be received no later than May 1, 2012, in order to be considered for the 2012 issue.
Send electronic submissions to journalofdraculastudies@kutztown.edu
Contact: Dr. Curt Herr or Dr. Anne DeLong

cfp categories:
film_and_television
gender_studies_and_sexuality
journals_and_collections_of_essays
popular_culture
victorian

Temptation and Redemption - 12 May 2012

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 08:06:26 -0500

The motif of temptation and redemption can be found in almost every area of the humanities and has played a central role in a significant number of works, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to season three of Glee.

For the first annual Carolina Emerging Scholars Conference, we invite papers exploring the complex relationship between temptation and redemption in literature and culture. Abstracts of 250 words or less are due by February 24, 2012. Abstracts should include name, the title of paper, institution, and contact information. For panel proposals, please list topics and titles of papers and an explanation of how these papers fit together. Also, please provide an abstract from each proposed panel member. We welcome submissions from undergraduate and graduate students, as well as independent scholars.

Decisions will be made by March 9, 2012. Conference guidelines will be emailed to participants upon acceptance. Visit our website at usclancaster.sc.edu/cesc.

Submit abstracts electronically via email to cescon@mailbox.sc.edu.

Other Islands: Shaw, Beckett, and World Literature (MLA 2013)

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:49:55 -0500

.
Despite their considerable differences, Bernard Shaw and Samuel
Beckett were born into an Anglo-Irish axis but envisioned worlds
beyond it that incorporated and transfigured their national heritage. This panel seeks papers that address how Shaw and Beckett might be read together, particularly through new definitions of world literature. How do Shaw and Beckett envision modern drama as a series of parables or demonstrations of world creation and destruction; as a negotiation between the local and the global; or as the erasure of historical geographies in favor of flexible places (landscapes, theatres) and spaces (the past, the future, the state)? Papers might also address Shaw and Beckett’s shared Protestantism and Neo-Protestantism, their universalism or rejection of universals, their insistence on science fiction and fantasy as ramifications of realism, and their dramatization of engagements with and retreats from inner and outer worlds, among other related topics.

Please send a 300 word-abstract and CV to Lawrence Switzky at
lawrence.switzky@utoronto.ca by March 10, 2012. Proposals and queries are welcome before the deadline.

FINAL CALL [deadline 10 Feb 2012]: Panel on 'Maurice' (Forster, 1971/Ivory, 1987), AAS, York, UK, 27-28 Sep 2012

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 08:03:35 -0500

FINAL CALL for Panel Participants (deadline FRIDAY 10 FEBRUARY)
E. M. Forster’s Maurice (1913/1971) & 25 years of James Ivory’s Maurice (1987): adaptation(s), authorship(s) and reappraisal(s)

7th Annual Conference of the Association of Adaptation Studies
‘Visible and Invisible Authorships’
27–28 September 2012, University of York, UK

September 2012 is the 25th anniversary of the 1987 Venice Film Festival premiere and US cinema release of Merchant Ivory Productions’ adaptation of E. M. Forster’s posthumously published gay bildungsroman and love story Maurice. (At Venice, the film won the Silver Lion for Ivory as director, a double Best Actor award for its unknown leads James Wilby and Hugh Grant, and the non-annual Golden Osella for Richard Robbins’ emotive orchestral score.)

To mark this anniversary – and to invite reappraisal of the film, novel, and their ‘ongoing lives’ in relation to this year’s AAS conference themes – I would like to constitute a panel on Maurice. If you would like to join me and contribute to this, please send proposals to cmonk@dmu.ac.uk – copied to film-and-literature@events.york.ac.uk – in time for the 10 February 2012 extended abstract deadline. Please send abstracts (within the body of your email) of not more than 250 words and include a biog-sketch of not more than 100 words.

During their ‘ongoing lives’, both Forster’s novel and Ivory’s film have suffered forms of reception that marginalise them as cultural objects worthy of analysis, from the initial 1970s reception of Forster’s Maurice as an ‘inferior’ work or a ‘fairytale’ to the dismissal of Ivory’s Maurice as merely a ‘heritage film’ – epitomised in Finch and Kwietniowski’s declaration that ‘Maurice [is] … fourthly, and only fourthly, about le vice anglais’ (1988:72). Such dismissals have, however, been outweighed over time by the profound, much-testified impact of the film and book alike on readers/audiences, and understandings of both have proved to be far from fixed: whether due to reappraisal of Maurice as the ‘first modern gay novel’ or as a ‘reader, I married him’ text of pivotal significance for pro-LGBT-marriage campaigners (Curr, 2001; DeSimone, 2007); or the belated apprehension of Merchant and Ivory as ‘gay filmmakers’ (Waugh, 2000:190); or as evidenced in the constantly surprising forms of post-2000 Web 2.0 fan productivity, (re-)adaptation and appreciation around their film (Monk, 2011).

Last, neither Forster’s novel nor Ivory’s film are stable or definitive ‘authored’ texts, if we consider factors such as the pre-published novel’s privately-circulated ‘invisible’ life over almost 60 years, and Forster’s revisions during that time (most drastically, of Part 4, in response to the comments of Lytton Strachey, Christopher Isherwood and others); or the impact and implications of the 2004 DVD special-edition release of Ivory’s film – with its 40-plus minutes of omitted scenes – in fostering and making visible fans’ intense and highly personal investments in the film (including calls for a three-hour-plus director’s cut).

The questions of ‘adaptation’ and ‘authorship’ raised by Maurice therefore extend, potentially, from the 1913–1971 ‘invisible’ history of the pre-published novel to the ongoing 21st-century lives of both film and book – including further instances of the adaptation of both across various media, or hitherto under-explored approaches to the film.

References
Curr, M. (2001) ‘Recuperating E. M. Forster’s Maurice’, Modern Language Quarterly, 62:1, 53–69.
Finch, M. and Kwietniowski, R. (1988) ‘Melodrama and Maurice: homo is where the het is’, Screen, 29:3, 72–80.
Gorton, D. (2009) ‘Maurice and gay liberation’, Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, 16:6. At: www.glreview.com/article.php?articleid=173
Monk, C. (2011) ‘Heritage Film Audiences 2.0: period film audiences and online film cultures’, Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies, 8:3, 2011. At: www.participations.org/Volume%208/Issue%202/3h%20Monk.pdf
Waugh, T. (2000) The Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writings on Queer Cinema, Durham, NC: Duke UP.

Dr Claire Monk
Reader in Film & Film Culture
School of Media & Communication
De Montfort University
Leicester LE1 9BH

e-mail: cmonk@dmu.ac.uk
http://dmu.academia.edu/ClaireMonk

Sex, Courtship and Marriage in Victorian Literature and Culture

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 05:14:28 -0500

Victorian Network is an MLA-indexed (from 2012) online journal dedicated to publishing and promoting the best postgraduate work in Victorian Studies.

The sixth issue of Victorian Network, guest edited by Dr Greta Depledge (Royal Holloway), is dedicated to a reassessment of nineteenth-century constructions and understandings of sex, courtship and marriage. Although the heteronormative and companionate marriage was vital for economic and reproductive reasons - as well as romantic impulses - recent scholarship has illuminated its status as but one of several diverse paradigms of marriage/sexual relationship accessible to the Victorians
Across the nineteenth century, profound crises of faith, extensive legal reforms and the new insights afforded by the emergent discipline of anthropology all contributed to a culture of introspection about the practice of marriage, at the same time as advances in science and medicine opened up new interpretations and definitions of sexual practices and preferences.

We are inviting submissions of no more than 7000 words, on any aspect of the theme. Possible topics include but are by no means limited to the following:

• Victorian narratives of queer desire: text and subtext
• Representations of women’s sexuality (angels, whores and spinsters)
• Prudishness and censorship: “deviant” novels and scandalous dramas
• Adultery, bigamy, divorce and other affronts to the ideal of companionate marriage
• Transgressive relationships
• Nineteenth-century marriage law, including prohibited degrees of affinity, property reform and breach of promise
• Representations of sexual innocence and experience (virginity, puberty and prostitution
• Subversion of traditional courtship narratives
• Sex and class: adventuresses, mistresses, sex workers and blackmail
• Customs of the country: courtship conventions, betrothals and bridal nights
• Performance, stylization and parody: gender scripts, consumer culture, theatrical subversion

All submissions should conform to MHRA style conventions and the in-house submission guidelines. The deadline for submissions is 30 May 2012.

Contact: victoriannetwork@gmail.com
Website: http://www.victoriannetwork.org/index.php/vn

Portals Literary Journal is accepting submissions for our Spring 2012 issue.

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 20:29:21 -0500

2012 Call for Submissions
Portals is currently accepting submissions for our Spring 2012 issue.

Submission deadline: March 1, 2012.

Portals invites original critical essays and short creative fiction that explore comparative literary topics across cultural, regional, linguistic, and temporal boundaries for the Spring 2012 issue. This edition will be available in scholarly journal listings worldwide.

Formal requirements for original critical essays:

Papers should be in English.
In order to be considered for submission, essays must compare at least two texts from different linguistic traditions.
Citations should include both the original language and the English translation.
Papers should be no longer than 25 pages in 12 point font, and should be properly formatted and documented in MLA style.
Formal requirements for creative fiction:

An author may submit up to 3 pieces of any form of creative fiction with a limit of 10 pages per submission. Fiction must be of a comparative/critical nature.
General requirements:

All submissions are to be sent via e-mail as an MS-Word attachment.
Submissions must include a 250-word abstract and a cover sheet including name, address, telephone number, e-mail address, school affiliation, and current academic standing. Your name should not appear anywhere else in the proposal, since this will be a blind selection process.
Authors should be currently enrolled undergraduate students, graduate students or doctoral candidates.
Submissions must be original and previously unpublished.
To submit, send your submission as a .doc or .rtf attachment to: clsa[at]mail.sfsu.edu

Review Process:

Portals is published once a year in the Spring semester at San Francisco State University, in conjunction with the Comparative Literature Student Association (CLSA). All articles are reviewed in a double-blind process, and authors will be notified by email within 2 to 3 months of the submission deadline.

We encourage authors to read our journal thoroughly before submitting. Portals most recent issue and archives can be found here: http://portalsjournal.com

All inquiries and questions can be directed to our editors at: clsa[at]mail.sfsu.edu

CFP: Distinctions that Matter: Popular Literature and Material Culture (journal issue, abstract deadline: March 1, 2012)

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 11:35:44 -0500

Essays are invited for a special issue of Belphégor that seeks to explore the relationship between distinctions of taste and textual production by examining how the materiality of literary texts influences and perhaps even determines their cultural status. In the nineteenth century, for example, printing and binding became cheaper, faster, and more easily accessible than ever before, which resulted in an explosion of print material. As printing costs decreased and print runs increased, the price of books became cheaper and publishers were able to attract more readers, which led to a greater demand for new content. The cultural impact of this shift was twofold. On the one hand, this decrease in printing costs lowered the cultural entrance level, which resulted in the expansion of popular or trivial literature as well as a wide range of new popular formats, such as dime novels, pulp magazines, comic books, and paperbacks. On the other hand, publishers also attempted to mimic the conventions of exclusiveness through printing and binding techniques in order to preserve the highbrow status of literature as a marker of class distinctions. This led to the rise of competing formats that attempted to challenge the perceived lowbrow status of popular literature, such as deluxe editions and graphic novels. As the divide between highbrow and lowbrow taste widened, the materiality of the text became the primary site where the cultural status of popular literature was both constructed and contested. The same issues also inform cultural debates concerning digital media, as cultural distinctions are now being reconfigured through new forms of electronic display in the post-print era.

Contributions are invited on any of the following topics:

-The impact of printing technologies on the production and distribution of literary texts.
-The relationship between the material properties of literary texts and their cultural status.
-The production and reception of popular literary formats, such as dime novels, pulp magazines, comic books, paperbacks, etc.
-The relationship between forms of electronic display and the cultural status of digital texts, such as blogs, e-books, e-readers, and cell phone novels.

Please submit abstracts of no more than 1,000 words by March 1, 2012. If an abstract is accepted, a full draft of no more than 10,000 words should be submitted by July 1, 2012. Papers may be submitted in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, or Portuguese. For more information, or to submit an abstract, please contact our guest editors:

Dr. Anthony Enns, Dalhousie University: anthony.enns@dal.ca
Dr. Bernhard Metz, Freie Universität Berlin: bernhard.metz@fu-berlin.de

Belphégor is an international refereed scholarly journal dedicated to the study of popular literature and media culture. The journal welcomes all types of theoretical analysis and encourages interdisciplinarity and comparative studies. Our goal is to stimulate discussion, research, and exchange between researchers of all stripes in the Anglo-Saxon, French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Portuguese-speaking worlds. For more information, please visit etc.dal.ca/belphegor.

[UPDATE] CFP: Science Fiction/Fantasy/Legend NEPCA (6/1/12; Rochester, NY 10/26-27/12)

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 23:51:02 -0500

CALL FOR PAPERS
SCIENCE FICTION, FANTASY, AND LEGEND AREA
http://sf-fantasy-legend.blogspot.com/
2012 Conference of The Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association (NEPCA)
St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York
26-27 October 2012
Proposals by 1 June 2012

Proposals are invited from scholars of all levels for papers to be presented in the Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Legend Area. Presentations will be limited to 15-20 minutes in length (depending on final panel size) and may address any aspect of the intermedia genres of science fiction, fantasy, and/or legends as represented in popular culture produced in any country, any time period, and for any audience. Please see our website (http://sf-fantasy-legend.blogspot.com/) for further details and ideas.

If you are interested in proposing a paper or panel of papers, please send a proposal of approximately 300 to 500 words and a one to two page CV to both the Program Chair AND to the Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Legend Area Chair at the following addresses (please note "SF/Fantasy/Legend Proposal" in your subject line):

Tim Madigan
Program Chair
tmadigan@sjfc.edu

Michael A. Torregrossa
Science Fiction, Fantasy and Legend Area Chair
Popular.Culture.and.the.Middle.Ages@gmail.com

The Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association (NEPCA) is a regional affiliate of the American Culture Association and the Popular Culture Association. NEPCA is an association of scholars in New England and New York, organized in 1974 at the University of Rhode Island. We reorganized and incorporated in Boston in 1992. The purpose of this professional association is to encourage and assist research, publication, and teaching on popular culture and culture studies topics by scholars in the northeast region of the United States. By bringing together scholars from various disciplines, both academic and non-academic people, we foster interdisciplinary research and learning. We publish a newsletter twice per year and we hold an annual conference at which we present both the Peter C. Rollins Book Award and an annual prize.

Membership in NEPCA is required for participation. Annual dues are currently $30 for full-time faculty and $15 to all other individuals. Further details are available at http://users.wpi.edu/~jphanlan/NEPCA.html.

[UPDATE] Principles of Uncertainty: A Conference on Critical Theory

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 22:34:14 -0500

“Principles of Uncertainty”

A Conference on Critical Theory

Keynote Speaker: Martin Hägglund

The students of the Department of Comparative Literature at the City University of New York Graduate Center present the first annual interdisciplinary conference on literary theory to be held Friday, May 4, 2012. This conference is being given in support of the CUNY Graduate Center’s proposed certificate for Critical Theory, which is dedicated to the study of literary and critical theory.

We invite papers from all disciplines focusing on works from any period that explore the theme of uncertainty as it pertains to literary and critical theory.

This conference welcomes papers centering upon any individual theorist, period, or school of critical theory, as well as comparisons of various theoretical approaches, including, but not limited to literary theory, psychoanalysis, philosophy, gender studies, and political theory. Some of the questions this conference seeks to answer include, but are not limited to:

· How is the meaning of a text uncertain?

· Is this uncertainty purposefully placed within a text or a by-product of the act of reading?

· How is this uncertainty demonstrated in the relationship between author and reader?

· How can uncertainty be understood not only with respect to literature but in ethical, gendered, political, and/or social terms?

· How is identity shown to be uncertain?

· How does an “undecidable” future impact present ethical and political actions?

· How is history (whether of language, narrative, and/or society) destabilized and called into question?

· How does language contribute to the uncertainty of meaning and interpretation?

· How does the theorist’s own writing present the reader with an example of uncertainty?

· How does uncertainty function in the methodologies of interpretation and the making of meaning?

· Can a text have a stable meaning or is it always uncertain?

Please submit a 300 word abstract for a 15-20 minute paper by March 1, 2012 to uncertaintyconference2012@gmail.com. Proposals should include the title of the paper, presenter’s name, institutional and departmental affiliation, and any technology requests. We also welcome panel proposals of three to four papers.

This conference is co-sponsored by:

The Writer’s Institute at the City University of New York Graduate Center: an un-MFA program devoted to bringing together the country’s most talented writers and today’s most celebrated editors.

The Doctoral Students’ Council: the sole policymaking body representing students in doctoral and master’s programs at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman (deadline: March 30, 2012)

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:15:12 -0500

In the early days of the Internet, there was much talk about moving from the offline world to the online world. Fanboys to cybertheorists proclaimed the demassification of culture. Life, we were told, would become increasingly virtual and the world of things wouldn’t matter much. In their 1994 preamble to “Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age,” cyberlibertarians Esther Dyson, George Gilder, and George Keyworth nicely articulated this early Internet dream: “The central event of the 20th century is the overthrow of matter. In technology, economics, and the politics of nations, wealth—in the form of physical resources—has been losing value and significance. The powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things.”

The past decade, however, has witnessed a renewed focus on materiality. From Bruno Latour’s constitution of a parliament of things to Jane Bennett’s efforts in Vibrant Matter to challenge the view of matter as passive and inert, Johndan Johnson-Eilola’s recent exploration of the social lives and agency of texts (2010), and Bill Brown’s award-winning 2001 Critical Inquiry issue on “thing theory,” a variety of discourses and disciplines have renewed their efforts to engage questions about the epistemic and rhetorical power of physical artifacts. Literary theorists, digital humanists, rhetoricians, philosophers of technology, and product designers are paying more attention to the crafted environment, the manner in which artifacts mediate human relations, and the constitution of a world in which the boundary between humans and things has seemingly imploded. Simultaneously, new questions arise about the extent to which we ought to view humans and nonhuman artifacts as bearing equal capacity for agency and life, and the ways in which technological mediation challenges the central tenets of humanism and anthropocentrism.

Contemporary theories of human-object relations presage the arrival of the posthuman, which is no longer a futuristic or science-fictional concept but rather one descriptive of the present, and indeed, the past. As Charles Bazerman has observed, “technology… has always been part of human needs, desires, values, and evaluation, articulated in language and at the very heart of rhetoric” (383). Bill Brown’s A Sense of Things likewise points out that humans have long been living under what one Atlantic Monthly article positioned, already in 1906, as a tyranny of things. Discussions of the posthuman already have a long history in fields like literary theory, rhetoric, and philosophy, and as advances in design and technology result in increasingly engaging artifacts that mediate more and more aspects of everyday life, it becomes necessary to engage in a systematic, interdisciplinary, critical examination of the intersection of the domains of design, technological mediation, and the posthuman.

Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman, itself a project of mediation within the complex intersections occasioned by the history of technology, aims to bring diverse disciplines together to foster a dialogue on some of the significant technological issues pertinent to philosophy, rhetoric, aesthetics, and science.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

Humanism and anthropocentrism in a world of relational artifacts
The place of the human being in technologically mediated environments
Moving from a demassified culture to a culture of things and artifacts
The resurgence of materiality and things in a posthuman world
The posthuman at the nexus of design culture and technologies of mediation
The value of things in a posthuman device culture (Albert Borgmann and philosophy of technology)
The symmetry thesis and the status of the human being
Multimodal technologies, rhetorics, and questions of agency
Rhetorics of the posthuman and questions of agency
Rhetorically-focused case studies or ethnographies involving technologically mediated environments, spaces, and bodies
The text as agent; texts and agency
Visual, material, and spatial rhetorics, design, and mediation
The posthuman quality of material cultures, past and present
Textual design as a space of human-object interface
Digital archives and the problems, uses of technologically mediated history
Design culture: interior design, fashion design, artisanal craftsmanship and/as human-
artifact boundary dissolution
Form (style, genre, etc) as technology; parallels between the turn to form and the turn to
things
Proto-posthumanisms (Victorian, Edwardian “cyborgs”)

Please submit abstracts of 500 words and a short biographical statement to Amy Propen (apropen@ycp.edu) or Colbey Reid (creid@ycp.edu) or Dennis Weiss (dweiss@ycp.edu) by March 30, 2012. Essays appearing in the anthology will average 3,000-6,000 words. MLA style should be used where citation is required. Notification of acceptance will be given by early May. Completed chapters will be due by September 30, 2012.