The Foreign Literatures and Civilisations (LCE) Research Laboratory at Lumière Lyon 2 University organises a conference on “Phantoms in Rites, Myths, and Discourse” on February 13-14, 2025. For the purpose of this conference, we invite scholars from various disciplines belonging to human sciences, and from various geographical and cultural areas, to study the figure of the ghost under its variegated forms, appearances, and representations (whether they are anthropological, artistic, political, linguistic, or else), from ghosts that we ourselves fashion to ghosts who fashion who we are. Indeed, ghosts take shape in the realm of fiction and in people’s minds while shaping and strengthening beliefs, as well as social, political, and artistic practices.

Papers will reflect ghost practices performed from the mid-18th century – which roughly corresponds to the advent of the Gothic novel in the West, from Horace Walpole to Mary Shelley – until today. Although the temporal frontiers that were chosen reflect a timeframe based on a Western reading of social, political, and literary history, this conference, by welcoming non-European viewpoints, also aims at decentring and deconstructing, enriching, and contrasting a Western conception of ghosting that is deeply linked to the way Westerners conceive humans’ relationship with death.

The following questions can be tackled (although the list is non-exhaustive):

1. Anthropology, sociology, theology, history of thought and representations:

• Revival of beliefs and modernity
• Connections – and coexistence - between the living and the dead in the construction of societies
• Folklores, legacy, and popular culture
• The spirit or ghost as a figure that tells the truth at times when nothing makes sense
• Questioning the frontiers of the real, rationality, and sanity in an intercultural approach
• Spectrality and phenomenology

2. Literature, art history, iconography, and visual arts:

• Ghost stories and ghosts in literature
• Ghosts on screen (in movies and documentaries)
• Representations of ghosts and spectres in paintings
• Photos and ghosts

3. History, political sciences, and memory studies:

• Creating ghosts as a discursive strategy to narrate a nation
• The character of the ghost citizen
• Memory as a structuring element or the bearer of divisions
• Creating overwhelming threats for political purposes
• The disappeared as both presence and absence, as affective and political substitutes

4. Language studies, discourse analysis, textual linguistics, and translation studies:

• Intertextuality and textual memory
• In/visible translators
• Translated texts, between present and absent texts
• Voices, narrators, and viewpoints in the narrative
• Traces and clues of past discourses in today’s language

We invite scholars to send a 300-500 word abstract along with a short biography by September 1, 2024. The languages of the conference are French, English, and Spanish. Please send your abstract and mini-bio to Marine Berthiot (mcberthiot.recherche@proton.me), Valentine Piéplu (valentine.pieplu@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr), and Marie Schaeverbeke (marie.schaeverbeke@univ-lyon2.fr).

You will be notified by mid-October 2024 on whether your proposal has been accepted.

The conference will be organised in a hybrid format from February 13 to February 14, 2025. The papers presented will then be published in the peer-reviewed journal Textures (the academic journal of the LCE research laboratory at Lumière Lyon 2 University). Papers should not be longer than 25 minutes.

The deadline to submit the full articles for Textures is January 15, 2025. Writers’ guidelines are accessible on the website: https://publications-prairial.fr/textures/index.php?id=327

For more information, please visit the LCE research laboratory website: https://lce.univ-lyon2.fr/activites/colloques-et-journees-detude/aac-cfp-convocatoria-fantomes-rites-mythes-et-discours