Materiality & Corporeality: The Body in Popular Fiction and Visual Culture

Postgraduate Conference, University of Portsmouth
Thursday 6th June 2013

Keynote Speaker: Professor Julian Wolfreys, Loughborough University -
Of Bodies, Being, and Loss: Memory, Amateriality,
and the Spectrality of Touch

A symbol of shared experience and a locus of inscribed meaning, the body can be a source of fascination and disgust, of perfection, manipulation, destruction, abuse, and reclamation. This interdisciplinary conference seeks to explore the ways in which the body functions as a site for the expression of cultural anxieties within a range of literary and visual sources. It aims to consider the significance of the body as a central motif in Western philosophical and critical tradition, as well as the intersections between the fields of literature, art and film which place the body at the centre of debates surrounding gender, sexuality, identity, politics, philosophy and economics. We welcome contributions from postgraduates working in the fields of literary theory, cultural studies and the visual arts, and will consider submissions from related research areas.
Possible areas of interest include, but are not limited to:
The body in literature, art or film
The damaged, grotesque or carnivalesque body/the body as spectacle
Pleasure, pain, power and knowledge
(Re)Writing the body
Sexuality, gender, science and medicine
Marketing or consuming bodies
Perfecting/redesigning the body

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words for papers lasting 20 minutes, and a brief biographical note (100 words) to cslpgconf@port.ac.uk for the attention of Emily Scott, Alexandra Messem and Melanie Seddon. Deadline for submissions: 22nd April 2013.