Gothic CFPs

Philament, the peer-reviewed online journal of the arts and culture
affiliated with the University of Sydney, invites postgraduate scholars
to contribute articles, ficto-criticism, reviews, and opinions for a
special issue produced in conjunction with the convenors of UNSW’s School
of English, Media and Performing Arts Symposium. Revised papers from the
Symposium as well as new submissions are encouraged. Possible themes
include but are not limited to:

theories of spectatorship
intersubjectivity and affect
psychoanalysis
gender and sexuality
postmemory
nationhood/ national identity
postcolonial relations
theories of memory
representation and temporality
technology
poetics
performance
performativity
relationships between subjectivity and space

Academic papers: up to 8,000 words.

Opinion pieces: reviews (book, stage, screen, etc.), conference reports,
short essays, responses to papers previously published in Philament
issues, of up to 1000 words.

Creative Work: in the form of writing, images, sounds, or a mixture of
any or all three. All submissions should be limited to three pieces.

All submissions may be sent as email attachment in a PC-readable format
to philament_at_arts.usyd.edu.au

CALL FOR PAPERS

Bodies and Things: Victorian Literature and the Matter of Culture, 27
September 2008, University of Oxford

The question of materiality has a special affinity with Victorian texts.
Notoriously full of the rich trappings of material culture, novels, poems
and plays from the period approach the physical world with both fascination
and anxiety. Recent critical developments such as the emergence of thing
theory have challenged the terms on which the material world can be
encountered in literature and Victorian texts in particular. But how do
these new theories account for the question of the human body? This
conference aims to explore how contemporary notions of the physical self
affected the relationship the Victorians had with the material world. Could
these encounters help to illuminate the ways in which bodies and things
were thought about and understood in the period?

Plenary speakers: Isobel Armstrong, Cora Kaplan, Elaine Freedgood

Possible topics include but are not limited to:
Material culture and consumption; the formalization of the sciences; work
and machinery; gender and sexuality; museums, galleries and exhibitions;
eating, food and taste; the theatre; empire and colonialism.

Please send an abstract of no more than 200 words in length, including your
name, institutional affiliation and position to elbodies_at_herald.ox.ac.uk.

SECOND Call for Papers

“In the Shadows of Empires”: The 2nd International Conference on Asian
American and Asian British Literatures

Date: November 28-29, 2008
Location: Taipei, Taiwan
Organizer: Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica

The word “Asian” has different meanings in the United States and Britain.
Whereas in British English “Asian” refers to people from South Asian
countries, particularly from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh—and people
from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen as “other Asians”—in American
English it refers predominantly to people from East Asia, namely Japan,
Korea, China, despite the admission of Southeast Asians, South Asians, and
West Asians to the pan-Asian family in recent years. “Asia,” Spivak
recently claimed, should be imagined as “one continent in its plurality,”
rather than the designation of a regional identity based on racial
consciousness and self-empowerment. Indeed, Asian as an ethnic identity is
remarkably plural and unstable, because Asia as a continental imagination
is tied to the cartographical imaginations of both the European and
American empires. Asian” thus bears the history of imperialism as it
attempts to carve out a critical space within the multicultural setting of
Britain and the U.S.

How differently are “Asian” and “Asia” as imagined in Asian American and
Asian British literatures and how do these multiple, discrepant, and at
times contradictory articulations enable us to confront, engage, and
produce in the shadows of empires? How is it possible to conceive of “Asia”
and “Asian”as one in plurality and as a position without identity, without
falling into the exhausted tropes of solidarity and coalition? How do Asia
and Asian work—together and in disjuncture—as signifiers, tropes, politics
and perhaps as methods for working through the problematic of “culture and
imperialism” that Said left us? How do we, as intellectuals,
comparativists, and critical scholars, write and rewrite Asians and Asias
in the shadows of empires—not only British and American but also Japanese
and Chinese—in an era of re-regionalization and neo-imperial formation?
The Institute of European and American Studies at Academia Sinica, Taiwan,
invites papers from scholars in literary and cultural studies to face,
contemplate and theorize on the shadows of empires in Asian American and
Asian British literatures in critical and comparative lenses. The conference
understands imperialism as a haunting presence in both Asian American and
Asian British literatures manifesting itself in such issues as comfort
women, the Hiroshima bombing, Hawaii sovereignty movement, the Okinawa
Diaspora, U.S.-Filipino entanglements, the partitions of India and Pakistan,
South Asian immigration and cultural production in Britain and Canada, the
ongoing war on “terror” in many parts of Asia, and even in such sports as
cricket, football, boxing, and baseball. Imperialism functions as what
Jameson calls the “history of the present” that shapes and conditions the
consciousness and cultural production of Asian American and Asian British
subjects. To claim and write about Asia and Asian is to confront the
shadows of empires that tail our precarious present. We welcome papers
that explore, but are not limited to, the following themes:

 immigration and diasporas,
 the Asia-Pacific wars and memories,
 nationalism and globalization,
 affect and community,
 inter and intra-Asian connections,
 Afro-Asian and Latino-Asian encounters
 performance and identity
 transnationality and citizenship
 multiracial subject and transnational adoption
 pedagogy and critiques of disciplinary formation

The University of Chicago
Department of English Language and Literature
Third Annual Graduate Conference
October 10-11, 2008

Call for Papers

Strange Reading
Practice, Audience, Theory
Keynote Speaker: Professor Srinivas Aravamudan, Duke University

Reading is a strange thing to do. We are often so invested in reading, particularly in academia,
that we pay little attention to how reading works and the wide range of practices “reading”
embraces. Estranging us from our immediate surroundings and everyday lives, reading can at the
same time bring us into newly imagined spaces and unfamiliar relations—whether with fictional
characters, critical debates, or fellow readers (who usually remain complete strangers). Critics
often show us new ways (and things) to read, but their readings can risk becoming settled and
familiar—or remaining cut off from other kinds of reading.
 
With the impact of new media, expanded archives, and questions about the future of scholarly
publishing, it is an especially good time to take a step back from reading—both in terms of our
methods of analysis and objects of study—so as to render familiar and unfamiliar texts newly
rich and strange. From foundational books which change how we read (Clarissa and Orientalism,
Alice in Wonderland and Gender Trouble); to texts which acquire new audiences and new
interpretations (across centuries and continents, lines of gender, age, race, class); through to
approaches that draw attention to the very strangeness of “reading” and “readers” themselves—
Strange Reading aims to be a site for dynamic, interdisciplinary discussion across a range of
topics, strange and familiar.

Familiar approaches and entry points include:
• Material Reading: Reception and Publishing History, Textual Studies, History of the Book,
New Audience Studies, The Book as Object, The Sociology of Reading, Reading and the Body;
• Theoretical Reading: The Legacies of Russian Formalism, Queer Theories of Reading, The
Phenomenology of Reading, Cognitive Approaches to Reading, New Historicism, Deconstruction,
and New Formalism;
• Reading Across the Disciplines: Reading in Cinema Studies, Reading and Philosophy, Reading
Music;
• Reading Sites: Marginalia, Commonplace Books, Anthologies, Periodicals, Children’s
Literature, Online Reading;
• Reading Spaces: Transatlantic, Hemispheric, and Global Contexts

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Gothic CFPs

CFP: [Science] Constructing the Body, Constructing the Text: Literary and Scientific Discourses of the Human Body

Proposals of no more than 250 words should be sent t by February 1st, 2008.

Constructing the Body, Constructing the Text:
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Albany, NY
Keynote speaker: TBA

The University at Albany English Graduate Student Organization invites papers for its annual conference. This year’s conference will explore the intersections of literature and science of the human body in Western culture. Throughout much of history, the body has been a priority for writers of philosophy, science, and literature. Indeed, prior to modernity, inquiry about the body was a vital part of philosophy in its broadest sense. From prolific thinkers as varied as Hippocrates and Judith Butler, Jonathan Edwards and Marquis de Sade, Foucault and Luce Irigaray, the body and its behavior have generated a sprawling discourse in the humanities which has lead to an evolving understanding of the body’s importance to notions of subjectivity.

Problems posed by writers, physicians, and philosophers of the body quickly leave their textual confines to become central concerns for the culture at large, in many ways dissolving the binary composed by what we have traditionally considered as either “scientific” or “literary” discourses. The ways in which the body gets written into society define how we think about pain and suffering, torture and corporal punishment, reproductive rights, war, and poverty. Part of this conference’s task, inevitably, will be to provoke the boundaries of literature, philosophy, medicine, and law today, to see where responsibility for the discursive body lies. Our aim will not be to assent to one conceptualization of the body; rather, participants should offer new ways to understand how study of the body remains vital to the humanities today.

Essays are sought on any aspect of bodily discourse, although particular topics for consideration might include:

• Anatomical and physiological influences on literary texts
• Philosophical contemplations of the body
• Explorations of the intersections of medicine and literature
• Rhetorical studies of the body
• Disability studies
• Disease/epidemiology and literature
• Gender studies, emphasizing both femininity and masculinity
• Colonialism and the body
• Studies of historical and contemporary bio-cultures
• The interface of religion, the body, and literature
• The sexual body
• Literature by physicians
• The artifice of the body and/or the artificial body

Proposals of no more than 250 words should be sent to egsoalbany_at_yahoo.com by February 1st, 2008.  Please label email subject as "2008 conference." For more information, visit our website: http://www.albany.edu/english/egso.shtml.

CFP: [Travel] Travel Writing: Borders & Crossings 10th Anniversary Conference

Please send a 200 word abstract before February 15, 2008

The Borders & Crossings / Seuils et Traverses Bilingual Conference will be held on 16-19 July 2008 at the University of Melbourne (Australia).

We welcome papers on a wide range of topics related to travel writing and tourism studies and encourage participants from a variety of disciplines, including cultural geography, anthropology, history, literature and the creative arts.

In addition to the academic programme, there will be public events involving presentations by travel editors and authors of travel writing. A travel writing workshop is also envisaged as an optional event open to the public as well as conference attendees and participants.

Please send a 200 word abstract, including your name and title, institutional and disciplinary affiliations before February 15, 2008 to the following address: jacqueline.dutton_at_gmail.com

Languages for presentation and publication are English and French.

For further information, please see the website: http://www.languages.unimelb.edu.au/research/conferences/borders_crossings/index.html

Convenor: Dr Jacqueline Dutton (French Studies)

CFP: [Theory] Knowledge, Violence, Discipline: (Re)Thinking Politics and the University

Submission deadline: Tuesday, February 15, 2008.

We acknowledge our inheritance of various critiques of the Academy, in which the Academy has been conceived multiply: as an ideological instrument bent on creating capitalist workers, as the technological bedfellow of the military-industrial complex, as a site that systematically elides alterior narratives and reinscribes hegemonic processes, as a location predicated on a disassemblage of the ‘theoretical’ from the praxical. We seek in this conference to provide a dialogic space in which to critique and reconfigure these radical analyses of ‘knowledge-production,’ as well as to engage knowledges and epistemic formations which have been deemed illegitimate or simply supplemental, and as a result have been concomitantly tokenized, ghettoized, or ignored altogether.

For, despite the thorough deconstruction of a notion of the University as a politically neutral site, we have also mythified the moments of student revolt that have sought to introduce radical political praxis in the space of the University. This mythification fails to move us to rethink and concomitantly enact effective resistances to current politico-economic conditions, while additionally forcing a re-membering of student revolt which elides instantiations of resistant strategies and radical pedagogical practices both historically and currently taking place in terrains which fall either ‘beneath’ or ‘beyond’ the radar of the Euro-/Westo-centric Academy. A rethinking of Politics and the University, we suggest, entails a consideration of ‘disciplinarity’ which takes seriously the specific violences which attend the institutionalization of ‘knowledge’ – violences which both open up and close off certain ways and modes of knowing.

We seek submissions that both implicitly and explicitly engage these issues. Topics to consider include:

• How do we understand/combat the instrumentalization and militarization of knowledge in the context of an increasingly ‘entrepreneurial’ academy?

• What are the contemporary possibilities of forming inter-, intra-, and para-institutional collectivities, or of political engagements that reside in but transcend the space of the University? How do these current possibilities relate to many legacies of resisting violence and transforming not just the academy but the social at large?

CFP: [Children] Young Adult Literature and Blood

CFP: Critical Perspectives on YA Literature, Culture, and Blood (REVISED)

*We are especially interested in depictions of blood in realistic contemporary fiction. Furthermore, we are willing to consider articles utilizing children’s literature/culture.*

Email a detailed 2-page proposal, working bibliography, and curriculum vita to: 

Jennifer Miskec
jennifer.miskec_at_cnu.edu

and 

Chris McGee
mcgeecw_at_longwood.edu

NEW Deadline for submissions: February 28, 2008

CFP: [20th] Silence; UK (03/01/08; 05/10/08)

Send abstracts (no more than 250 words) for proposed 20 minute papers by 1March 2008

CFP: Silence; UK) (03/01/08; 05/10/08)
Call for papers for a one-day conference
At University of Hull, England
Saturday 10 May 2008

Theme: Silence

Keynote speaker: Dr Maria Aristodemou, Birkbeck University of London

This conference will examine the relationship between literature and silence. The literary text is often charged with the duty of speaking on matters otherwise silenced. In the moving testimonies of war-survivors, literature combats death in giving voice to the silenced. What is at stake when literary criticism renders eloquent the gaps and silences of the literary text? 

One reference point for the conference will be the implications of the change in the law in England and Wales regarding the right to silence on arrest. While the individual may choose to remain silent, the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 curtailed the right to remain silent. Silence on arrest may therefore be subject to interpretation.

To what extent is silence desirable? The mechanisms of silencing, in acts of deliberate, state-sanctioned censorship as well as those of unconscious and guilty suppression, will be identified in a range of literary texts from any period to the present day. 

Proposal for papers are invited on literature and silence in any period.
Any related topic is welcome but papers may explore any of the following:

* Silent witnesses: making the evidence speak; vocal bodies
* Censorship and taboos: from silent correction, the blue pencil to
legal prohibition
* Silencing literature (especially in legal trials and public fora)
Howard Brenton, Radclyffe Hall, D. H. Lawrence, Satanic Verses, Oscar
Wilde, Behzti
* Silence and war-time patriotism (keeping mum; careless talk costs
lives)
* Official secrets and spy stories
* Historic silences
* Uncanny silences
* Silent approval and disapproval
* Quiescence, quietude
* The power of silence: silence as a rhetorical strategy
* Degrees of silence; absolute silence 

Send abstracts (no more than 250 words) for proposed 20 minute papers by 1
March 2008 to

Dr Katharine Cockin, English Dept, University of Hull, Cottingham Rd, HULL
England. HU6 7RX UK

Email: k.m.cockin_at_hull.ac.uk Fax : 01482 465641
Tel : 01482 465611 

CFP: [20th] Cannibal, Sadist, Addict: W. B. Seabrook and the Popular Cultures of U.S. Imperialism

Please send a brief proposal and cv to Susan Zieger at susan.zieger_at_ucr.edu. For ASA, by Jan. 21; for MLA, by Mar. 1.

William Buehler Seabrook (1884-1945) was an adventurer and best-selling Lost Generation writer whose influence on U.S. and global popular culture has been massive but critically neglected. Seabrook was best known for his sensational anthropological adventures, The Magic Island (1929), a chronicle of his stay in U.S. occupied-Haiti and participation in voudun; and Jungle Ways (1930), a record of his immersion among several tribal peoples in the Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, and Mali, in his quest to commit cannibalism in a racially authentic setting. The Magic Island inspired the first wave of zombie films of the 1930s, most notably White Zombie (1932); his memoir of his residence in a clinic to cure his alcoholism, Asylum (1932), inaugurated the genre of the rehab memoir. Seabrook, who also dabbled in the occult, sensory deprivation, and sadism, consistently sought out the limits of human experience, which he frequently conceived as the white experience of racial alterity. He was thus also obsessed with white men who had figuratively become black: Faustin Wirkus, the U.S. marine who became “the white king of La Gonave” during the U.S. occupation of Haiti, and Père Yakouba, the Frenchman he immortalized as The White Monk of Timbuctoo (1934). Seabrook is ripe for critical revival beginning with a panel at MLA in San Francisco in December – or if you’re quick to respond, ASA in Albuquerque in October – because his oeuvre engaged popular and elite attitudes to the relationships between racial identity, U.S. imperialism, masculinity, the avant-garde, and sexual freedom. Papers on any Seabrook text or aspect of his work and life are welcome. Please send a brief proposal and cv to Susan Zieger at susan.zieger_at_ucr.edu. For ASA, by Jan. 21; for MLA, by Mar. 1

CFP: [Film] Sex with James Spader: Impotence, Deviance, and Images of Male Sexuality in American Film

Interested panelists should submit 250 word abstracts via E-mail by March 10, 2008

Papers sought for a proposed special session for MLA Annual Meeting, 2008. 

In the 1986 teen movie Pretty in Pink, Molly Ringwald’s Andie Walsh is pursued by three high school boys: Duckie, Blane, and Steff. It is Steff who is simultaneously the most threatening and the most thrilling of her suitors. Played by James Spader in all of his blonde glory, Steff stalks the high school like a sexy, grown up beast. Resplendent in t-shirts and suit jackets, Spader’s Steff looks more like a brooding adult male than the smooth-faced teen he is supposed to be. In comparison to Andrew McCarthy’s bland Blane and Jon Cryer’s spunky Duckie, Steff is clearly a threatening presence: angry, smoking, and very ready for sex. The character of Steff was clearly written to be the boy teen girls would love to hate, but the role is given more edge by Spader’s all-American beauty and the undercurrent of perversion that beauty ultimately brings. His good looks are unsettling and his palpable horniness, read as disturbing by Ringwald’s Andie, is for adult viewers watching the film now, exhilarating. His performance is a tiny patch of sexual brightness
in an otherwise sexually safe film.

In understanding attitudes toward filmed representations of male sexuality, Spader’s career proves to be instructive. Whether he is the
cruel drug dealer suggesting Robert Downey, Jr. pay off his debts in a certain bodily manner in Less Than Zero (1987); the impotent filmmaker in Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989); a man sexually aroused by car crashes and their victims in Crash (1996); or an S&M inspired boss in Secretary (2002), Spader plays the American male as a gorgeous, sexually obsessed, complicated animal. What can Spader’s roles teach us about approaches to male sexuality in American film? Why is Spader often cast as a disruptive counterpoint to more tame examples of male sexual expression? What about him is so challenging or unsettling? And how can we use Spader’s work as a way to understand contemporary formulations of American masculinity in general? 

For this proposed special session, papers can include but are not limited to the above-mentioned films. Investigations of Spader’s roles on The Practice or Boston Legal will also be considered. Interested panelists should submit 250 word abstracts via E-mail by March 10, 2008 to Sharon Becker at Claremont Graduate University (sharon.becker_at_cgu.edu). Queries welcome. All panelists chosen for participation must be members of the Modern Language Association by April 7, 2008

CFP: [General] Spectral Identities: Ghosting in Literature and Film (4/01/08; collection)

Please send abstracts of 300-500 words and a brief CV to Melanie Anderson at
mranders_at_olemiss.edu by April 1, 2008.

Spectral Identities: Ghosting in Literature and Film (4/01/08; collection) 

“What does it mean to follow a ghost? And what if this came down to being followed by it, always, persecuted perhaps by the very chase we are leading?” (Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx)

Ghost hunting is not as recent as popular television programs might make it seem. The figure of the ghost has changed many times over the past centuries. From Ann Radcliffe’s “explained supernatural”—ghosts who were not even real—to the dead reaching out to the living in contemporary films like The Sixth Sense, ghostly characters often serve to reflect the changing fears and anxieties of the cultures in which they reside. In our present moment, ghosts have invaded our popular culture, literature, and academic and critical discourse. These ghosts, however, do not have to be traditional supernatural apparitions. In works such as The Turn of the Screw and The Haunting of Hill House and films like The Others and, more recently, The Orphanage, the hauntings are open to interpretation and psychological in nature. Moreover, critics including Kathleen Brogan and Avery Gordon have specifically commented on the social, political, and cultural aspects of haunting. Through a type of “ghosting,” silenced individuals and peoples can fulfill the role of the specter. 

We are seeking abstracts for a proposed essay collection that will analyze these liminal, elided, and/or repressed individuals, and, through this conduit of analysis, explore the ever-changing role of the ghost. To this end, we would like to expand the discussion to include instances in literature, film, and/or folklore. For this purpose, proposals should go beyond ghostly or spectral appearances in a “fireside-ghost-story” sense, and move toward analysis of spectral tropes and/or “ghosted” characters in literature and film that may or may not initially seem to be overtly supernatural. Using the metaphor of the ghost, where are characters silenced, marginalized, and how do they struggle through the liminal space or renegotiate the space into one of power? As Avery Gordon notes, “To write stories concerning exclusions and invisibilities is to write ghost stories.”

Topics may include, but are not limited to:
• Transgenerational hauntings
• Social ghosting (invisible, excluded, “throwaway” characters and elided history)
• Ghosts and gender
• Memories and Trauma
• Temporal and spatial subversion; time travel
• Global Gothic (ethnic and multicultural dimensions, specters in Japanese, Australian, South
African Gothic, etc.)
• Ghosts and hybridity
• Spectrality and spectral moments
• Self-erasure and/or doubling
• Gothic theories related to hauntings in lit and film not readily identifiable as “Gothic” 

Please send abstracts of 300-500 words and a brief CV to Melanie Anderson at mranders_at_olemiss.edu by April 1, 2008.

E-mail is preferred, but landmail submissions can be sent to Melanie Anderson or Lisa Sloan at:
The University of Mississippi
Freshman English Department
103 Somerville Hall
University, MS 38677

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Gothic CFPs

The below Calls for Papers are sourced from University of Pennsylvania English CFP website where there are many more categories to search and more detailed information on each CFP. 

The Gothic in Literature, Film and Culture (11/6/06; National PCA/ACA Conference, 3/19/08-3/22/08) Louis.H.Palmer_at_sas.upenn.edu, III (Sun Oct 07 2007 – 10:07:47 EDT)

CFP: [20th] The Gothic in Literature, Film and Culture (11/6/06; National PCA/ACA Conference, 3/19/08-3/22/08)
 
NATIONAL POPULAR & AMERICAN CULTURE
ASSOCIATIONS 2008 JOINT CONFERENCE
 
March 19-22, 2008
San Francisco Marriott
San Francisco, CA

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: NOVEMBER 6, 2008

 We welcome papers and presentations on any aspect of the Gothic in film, literature, or other forms of cultural expression. All critical approaches are welcome.
 
You can propose an individual paper or a session of three or four presenters. Graduate students are especially encouraged to submit papers or panels.

 Individual papers will be grouped into sessions based on historical, thematic, disciplinary or critical affinities. Participants will be asked to serve as session chairs. Sessions are scheduled in one-and-a-half hour slots, ideally with four papers or speakers per session, so individual papers should be limited to a length of approximately 15 minutes.
 
 Submit a one-page (200-300 word) proposal or abstract  (via regular mail, fax, or email) complete with your name, affiliation, and contact information by November 6, 2008, to:
 
Louis H. Palmer, III
English Dept.
6 Alumni Drive
Castleton State College
Castleton, VT 05735
Louis.palmer_at_castleton.edu
 
w(802) 468-1341
fax (802) 468-6045
h(518) 639-8593

 All presenters must be (or become) members of the PCA or ACA and must register for the conference. Membership and registration forms will be sent upon presentation acceptance. Paper acceptance obligates participants to present the paper at the conference, and multiple submissions to different areas are not allowed. Please note that you must be present at the conference to read your own paper. For more information on the PCA/ACA, please go to:
 http://www.h-net.org/~pcaaca OR www.pcaaca.org.

The Madwoman in the Attic After 30 Years Annette Federico (Fri Oct 05 2007 – 11:51:05 EDT)

I welcome abstracts and full essays for a proposed edited collection which would reassess the influence of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic after thirty years. I welcome essays that explore thelegacy of this groundbreaking work for feminist theory and nineteenth-century literary studies through rereadings of the primary texts; readings of other works through the book’s critical paradigm; and explorations of its critical history, especially when placed in relation to competing theories and critical voices.

Abstracts should be approximately 500 words long. Please submit abstracts or full essays by email attachment to Annette R. Federico at federiar_at_jmu.edu. Please include a CV as a separate attachment. I will consider previously published material or revisions if they suit the focus of the collection. The deadline for submissions is December 7, 2007.

International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts Graham J. Murphy (Mon Oct 08 2007 – 18:15:47 EDT)

The 29th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts
                        
Delightful Horror and the Sense of Wonder:
Appreciating the Sublime in the Fantastic

[Feel free to distribute this updated Call for Papers]

The 29th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts will be held March 19-23, 2008, at the Orlando Airport Marriott in Orlando, Florida. The conference begins at 3pm on Wednesday and ends 5 pm Saturday, concluding with a conference banquet on Saturday night. The focus of ICFA-29 is on the relationship between the sense of wonder embodied by the sublime and the fantastic in literature, film, and other media. The sheer magnitude of the universe gives rise to the amazing, the astonishing, the astounding, the thrilling, and the wondrous. Edmund Burke argued it is “infinity [that] has a tendency to fill the mind with that sort of delightful horror which is the most genuine effect and truest test of the sublime.” It then should come as no surprise that the sublime has
been a mainstay in science fiction, fantasy, horror, and other related fantastic modes. Papers are invited that explore this topic.

As always, we also welcome proposals for individual papers and for academic sessions and panels on any aspect of the fantastic in any media. The new deadline is October 31, 2007 but we will be happy to consider papers until the original deadline (November 30).

Paraliterary Narratives: Reassessing the �Graphic Novel� (UK) (3/31/08; 6/6/08-6/7/08)Dr Lawrence Phillips (Mon Oct 15 2007 – 11:53:20 EDT)

From: Dr Lawrence Phillips <lawrence.phillips_at_northampton.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2007 11:53:20 -0400 (EDT)

Paraliterary Narratives: Reassessing the ‘Graphic Novel’

6-7 June 2008
The School of Arts, University of Northampton, UK

The term ‘graphic novel’ is an intensely contested term that covers the pop zeitgeist of American superhero comics to high conceptual art. Just how to define the genre is only one a series of critical conundrums that Samuel R. Delany’s term ‘paraliterary’ scarcely addresses, but offers a starting point for reconsideration. Alongside the complexity of definition comes the problem of critical vocabulary and approaches. That language and methodologies used to discuss prose, film, and non-narrative
visual art sometimes fit, but often don’t, is part of that issue. Just how are we to discuss an art form that has in the last 25 years gathered an increasingly serious readership and seen the emergence of many major new artists and writers, but struggles with critical credibility? It is, undoubtedly, a genre greater that the sum of its aesthetic parts incorporating drawing, narrative fiction and, perhaps, cinema, into an integrated, fully realised, artistic form that matches any other in terms of its expressive possibilities.

This conference is an opportunity to reassess ‘graphic novels’ and comic art more generally, about how to formulate an appropriate critical vocabulary, and how to assess their cultural impact.

Abstracts of 200 words for 20-minute papers by 31st March 2008 to: lawrence.phillips_at_northampton.ac.uk

Proposals for comprised panels of three speakers are also welcome.

Conference website:
http://www2.northampton.ac.uk/arts/research/GraphicNovel

GOTHIC Literature; a fixed genre or a fluid mode

Aim: To get both scholars and students in the UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico) and other institutions interested in the Gothic by showing them the richness in content as well as the recent growing in academic studies concerning Gothic works and writers. 

The Gothic is just in the first steps to be recognized among Mexican scholars as a rich literary field worth of study. However, the future seems very promising since, once the Gothic becomes of full scholar interest here, it can open some doors for the recognition of Gothic elements in the works of some Mexican and Latin American writers who are still to be discovered as having worked into the Gothic.

Dates: March 31, Abril 1 y 2, 2008 (Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday).

Place: ‘Salon de Actos I’, Philosophy and Literature Faculty (FFyL), National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Mexico City, Mexico.

Call for papers: We are calling all scholars interested in helping raise interest for the Gothic in Mexico to compose papers centered on the idea of the Gothic as a series of elements or conventions that adapt and appear in works of different genres, national literatures and historical periods.

Possible Topics:

. The evolution of Gothic Literature

. National Gothic Literatures (British Gothic, Scottish Gothic, American Gothic,   

  etc.)

. Gothic Literature in the last 50 years

. Gothic elements in Mexican Literature

. Postcolonial Gothic

. The future of Gothic Literature

. Gothic Film

. Gothic and Art

Those interested in taking part in the congress will be asked to send an abstract of their paper in 200 words, including its title; as well as a short summary of their academic background (50 words) with full name of the participant. The proposals will be received until December 1st, 2007.

The participants will be given around 20 minutes to read their papers. Works will be presented either in English or Spanish.

All proposals,  papers and questions are to be sent to:

aragorn_heir_of_isildur@hotmail.com     or     antonio.alcala@itesm.mx

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