cfp.english.upenn.edu

**DEADLINE EXTENDED: ABSTRACTS NOW DUE JANUARY 31 2013**

10th Annual Université de Montréal English Graduate Conference March 1-2, 2013

OF HUMAN BONDAGE: LITERATURES OF CONSTRAINT

Keynote Speaker: Sherry Simon (Concordia University)
“Translating Social Forces in the City”

Whether employed as a literary trope or as a thematic exploration of circumstance, literature has always examined or been subjected to varying forms of constraint. On the Island of Buru, Pramoedya Ananta Toer composed his Buru Quartet. Georges Perec’s novel, A Void, is written entirely without the letter “e”. Christian Bök’s Eunoia features univocalic chapters, as well as thematic, metric, and rhythmic limitations. Eldridge Cleaver wrote his ground breaking Soul on Ice while imprisoned in California, while Assata Shakur composed her autobiography Assata while in exile from the United States in Cuba.

The 10th annual graduate conference at the Université de Montréal proposes to investigate the stakes of representation and/or utilization of constraint in literature. From American slave narratives, to the experimental poetics of OuLiPo, to current political climates of state oppression, constraint, in some form or another, has always been present in literary history.

This conference will approach constraint from a number of angles. We ask: What is the socially transformative work of literature under pressure? We understand the notion of “constraint” in the broadest possible sense, including: institutions of imprisonment and captivity; systems and languages of oppression; formal conventions; modes of literary production; social etiquette and behaviour; normativity; intersections of race, age, mobility, ability, sex, gender, and sexuality.

All papers submitted will receive consideration, but we are especially interested those that bear on the following fields:

• Prison literature (fiction, memoir, etc.), literature of captivity
• Slave narratives
• Exile writing
• Narratives of disability and impeded mobility, disability theory
• Migration, exile
• Intersections of racial, sexual and gender identity
• “Passing” or opacity
• Experimental writing, constraint-based writing, conceptual writing
• Dystopia
• Decolonization, anti-colonialisms, post-colonialisms
• Mental health, asylums and hospitalization
• Nationalism and language, minority languages in literature, literature of / theories of exiguity
• Translation in literature / literature in translation, translation theory
• “Captive readership”
• Discourse of violence/violence of discourse
• Restrictions of archival and museum spaces
• Banned literature; publishing and editorial constraints

About the keynote speaker:

Sherry Simon is a professor in the French Department at Concordia University, where she teaches literature and translation. She was co-editor of the Quebec cultural review Spirale for ten years and director of the interdisciplinary PhD in Humanities program at Concordia University from 1995-2000.

Among her publications are Fictions de l'identitaire au Québec, (in collaboration, XYZ, 1989); Le Trafic des langues. (Boréal, 1994), Gender in Translation. (Routledge, 1996), Culture in Transit. (ed. S. Simon Véhicule 1996), Hybridité Culturelle, (Editions Ile de la Tortue, Montréal, 1999). Her book Translating Montreal. Episodes in the Life of a Divided City (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), which appeared in French translation in 2008 as Traverser Montréal. Une histoire culturelle par la traduction, won the prix Gabrielle-Roy and the prix Mavis-Gallant. Cities in Translation (Routledge 2012), her most recent book, is to appear in French translation from Presses de l’Université de Montréal. She is co-editor of: Changing the Terms.Translating in the Postcolonial Era (Ottawa University Press 2000), New Readings of Yiddish Montreal-Traduire le Montréal Yiddish (University of Ottawa Press 2007) and Failure’s Opposite. Listening to A.M. Klein (McGill 2011).

She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a member of L’Académie des lettres du Québec. She was a Killam Research Fellow (2009-11) and in 2010 she received the Prix André-Laurendeau from l’Association francophone pour le savoir (ACFAS).

Please send 250-300 word abstracts to egssconference [at] gmail [dot] com. Include your name, affiliation, e-mail address, and a short bio of no more than 75 words, in which you specify your university and program of study. Papers can be presented in English and/or French.

**DEADLINE EXTENDED: ABSTRACTS NOW DUE JANUARY 31, 2013**

Organizing chairs:
Prathna Lor
Kelly McDevitt
Alexandra Grenier
William Burton