Category Archives

“Literature at Sea: Maritime Literary Currents,” 3-8 December 2016, deadline 15 June 2016

Norm and anomaly have long constituted a binary opposition whose boundaries are becoming increasingly blurry and open to scrutiny. What precisely does the ‘norm’ mean? Which political, economic, and social forces play a decisive role in producing the ‘norm’? How is the ‘norm’ endorsed through the construction of the ‘anomaly’? And how does the ‘anomaly’ contest the ‘norm’? Can the ‘norm’ be anomalous when viewed as a discursive practice and a form of ideological control? And can the ‘anomaly’ be an integral part of the ‘norm’ without losing its subversive and oppositional character?

This conference invites you to explore norm and anomaly from a variety of disciplinary and methodological perspectives in literary and cultural studies, linguistics and teaching methodology.

As a theme in literary and cultural studies, norm and anomaly pertain to representations of transformed and transformative spaces. These include eerie landscapes, geographies of hope and despair, and sites of post-human activity, all of which have featured prominently in such modes of writing as environmental, risk, and speculative fiction. We also invite papers that address forms of expression and repression in modern and contemporary British and US culture. The problem and problematic of order and chaos, autonomy and oppression, harmony and discord open up further avenues for exploring norm and anomaly through reference to theatre, film, visual arts, television, computer and video games.

The linguistic aspect of norm and anomaly relates to the regularities and/or irregularities of linguistic usage, and to the ways in which norms and anomalies affect linguistic form and meaning or limit language use, its study and understanding. We invite proposals from intra- and interdisciplinary perspectives, such as constitute all areas of theoretical and applied linguistics – from semantics and sociolinguistics through morphology and historical linguistics to pragmatics, translation studies, and lexicography.

As a concern in teaching methodology, norm and anomaly are inseparable from the status of English as a global lingua franca. Across the world, English is part of the school curriculum, which results in the need to test the students’ skills formally. However, the focus on fluency and communicativeness frequently weakens accuracy requirements, and the gravity of errors is assessed against non-native speakers’ subjective judgements. The gap between the ultimate yet not fully attainable goal and the reality of the ELT classroom calls for redefining the parameters of teaching English in response to a number of questions: Is there still one set of norms learners should follow? Or, do norms vary depending on the learner’s progress and learning environment? Which language is the ‘norm’ – the English of the social media or the English of the classroom?

Further possible topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

– Conventionality vs. nonconformity, normativity vs. transgression
– Order vs. chaos and anarchy, hegemony vs. opposition, protest and rebellion
– Evolution and continuity vs. revolution and disruption
– Alienation and appropriation vs. inclusion and communality
– Beauty and body cultivation vs. deformity and mutilation
– Language as a rule-governed system vs. language as a usage-based model
– Morphological, lexical, syntactic, and phonological variation
– Sociocultural norms (formality vs. informality/politeness vs. impoliteness)
– Transparency vs. opacity of meaning
– Equivalence vs. non-equivalence in translation
– Standard vs. non-standard varieties of English
– Idiomaticity vs. non-idiomaticity in the language classroom
– Accuracy vs. fluency
– Testing vs. assessment

Confirmed keynote speakers:
Prof. Dr hab. Helga Schwalm, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Prof. Dr hab. Liudmila Liashchova, Siedlce University of Natural Sciences and Humanities
Dr hab. Ireneusz Kida, University of Silesia in Katowice

The conference will take place in Siedlce, Poland, on 19-20 September 2016.

Proposals for individual 20-minute papers should include an abstract of 200-250 words, as well as the name, institutional affiliation, a 100-word biography of the author, and the title of the paper.

Please send proposals by 30 June 2016 to: normanomaly2016@gmail.com. All other enquiries may be addressed to Dr Joanna Stolarek at:stolarekj@uph.edu.pl. We aim to notify all applicants by 31 July 2016.

The conference fee of PLN 350 or € 80 will cover conference materials, coffee breaks, 2 lunches, and a wine reception.

Post-conference articles will be put forward for review. Selected articles will be published in a collective monograph in the ‘Transatlantic Studies in British and American Culture’ series by Peter Lang Verlag, or in Studia Anglica Sedlcensia in 2017.

Conference organizers

Prof. Dr hab. Leszek Kolek
Prof. Dr hab. Liudmila Liashchova
Prof. Dr hab. Roman Mnich
Dr Joanna Stolarek (conference secretary)
Dr Maxim Shadurski
Dr Jarosław Wiliński
Mgr Agnieszka Wróbel
Mgr Jowita Buńko

World Congress of Scottish Literatures: Dialogues and Diasporas

The second World Congress of Scottish Literatures will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada from June 21-25, 2017 and will coincide with the annual meeting of the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society. The Congress’s subtitle, “Dialogues and Diasporas,” speaks to the range of ways in which Scotland is articulated both at home and within a global context. At the same time, it acknowledges the multiple roles Scotland has played in the production of both globalism and localism.

The geographical location of the conference on the West Coast of Canada draws particular attention to two key themes of the conference:
1. Indigenous/Scottish relations and 2. Transpacific/Scottish connections

The steering committee invites proposals for papers that explore these or any of the following themes:
• Imagining Scotland at home and abroad
• Connections between Scottish/non-Scottish writers, texts, genres
• Diaspora, migration and immigration
• Scotland in/and empire
• Globality, locality, glocalism
• Scottish literature/world literature
• Teaching Scottish literature in the world/teaching world literature in Scotland
• Scotland and the transatlantic
• Internal dialogues in Scottish writing
• Scottish literature and the dialogue across time
• Scotland, race and indigeneity
We also welcome pre-organized panels on any of these topics. In keeping with the conference’s focus on dialogue and in order to maximize discussion and participation, panel organizers are encouraged to explore alternatives to the traditional format of three to four papers: workshops, roundtables, lightning talks, pecha kucha.

Please note that in the interests of involving as many people as possible, participants are asked to present only one paper at the meeting; however, they may also serve on a roundtable/discussion or as a discussant.

Deadline for submissions of papers and panels: Oct. 1, 2016.

Further information about the conference is available athttps://dialoguesanddiasporas.wordpress.com/

Please send submissions to: Leith Davis at scotlit@sfu.ca

Traces and Memories of Slavery in the Atlantic World
University of Montpellier, France
1-2 December, 2016

Keynote Speakers

Ana Lucia Araujo (Howard University)
Christine Chivallon (Research Director, CNRS)

In Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity (2001),[1] Ron Eyerman explores the formation of African American identity through the cultural trauma of slavery. While trauma directly affected individuals who experienced slavery, Eyerman argues that, as a cultural process, trauma is “mediated through various forms of representation and linked to the reformation of collective identity and the reworking of collective memory”. This international conference seeks to examine the foundation, the mechanisms and the scope of these memorial processes. It endeavors to explore a reality of slavery that rests on human memory, on a (re)constructed memory of individual, collective or family trajectories and migrations transmitted from generation to generation.

The Traces and Memories of Slavery in the Atlantic World conference sets out to interrogate how descendants reconstruct the history of their ancestors when transatlantic slavery is one of the variables of the memorial process. The conference also aims at examining the extent to which, by a process of collectivization of personal or family memories and (hi)stories, social actors of the present not only partake in generating and consolidating group identities but also how they foster “the emergence of the memory of slavery in public space.”[2] In addition to assessing the cultural and symbolic redistribution which are enabled by the commemoration, the museification and the patrimonialization of the memory of slavery, this conference aims at probing the constraints which determine the inscription of this memory in the public sphere and the extent to which social demand, especially in the context of the obligation of remembrance, influences the production of historical knowledge and sometimes leads to conflicts of memory.

As Ira Berlin has argued, can it be contended that although “[h]istory and memory both speak to the subject of slavery […] they speak in different tongues” ?[3] In the traumatic and post-traumatic context of slavery, conflicting memories of interracial relationships, for instance, call for a specific attention: can the mechanisms of memorial (re)construction, whether it be from a psychological or historical point of view, claim or aim to be neutral? It will prove interesting to study the historical and strategic importance of places like Gorée – their symbolic and affective charge, as well as their memorial function. In the same vein, instances of what Ana Lucia Araujo refers to as “memory replacement”, whereby “a local population appropriates an existing building or site and assigns to it stories of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery as if it was an actual heritage site” will also be worth considering.[4]

The organizing committee of this international and interdisciplinary conference welcomes papers in the form of case studies, analyses aimed at identifying general trends or comparative approaches. The geographic scope of the conference – the Atlantic space – is purposefully broad, as the issue of memorial modernity transcends individuals, race, nations, space and time. As memory of facts dating back to several generations can only be transmitted, reconstructed and inevitably fragmentary in nature, the palimpsestic dimension of the memorial process will be given particular attention.

Papers may build on recent theoretical works on memory, such as those of Michael Rothberg (2009) [5] for whom memory is constructed on the basis of multidirectional focalizations and synergies between events that are seemingly disconnected in time and space (Multidirectional Memory), or of Max Silverman (2013) [6] who has described the relationship between past and present in the form of a “superposition and interaction of different temporal traces [that] constitute a sort of composite structure, like a palimpsest, so that one layer of traces can be seen through, and is transformed by another” (Palimpsestic Memory). It might prove interesting to unravel the threads of family memory construction by studying the trajectory of founding individuals. The archival traces of key moments will thus be identified in order to interrogate and retrace the historical context of these trajectories and/or shed light on parallel trajectories, such as those of better-known historical figures. Genealogical research offers a propitious ground to retrace memories as genealogy reveals the memorial mechanisms which allow to recreate, from the interstices left by factual elements, decipherable paths which are historically credible and psychologically acceptable. Finally, it will be interesting to assess whether the memorial prism is necessarily ethnocentric.

The themes this conference endeavors to explore include, but are not limited to:

– the history and memory of slavery;

– the memorialization of slavery;

– the canonization of the memory of slavery;

– representation(s) of slavery;

– the commemoration, the museification and the patrimonialization of the memory of slavery;

– places and conditions of the production of knowledge on slavery and its circulation;

– the legacy/cies of slavery and the (re)construction of (collective) identity;

– slavery and genealogy;

– sources and archives on slavery.

Submission guidelines

The languages of the conference are English and French. Please send proposals of no more than 300 words in English or French (for papers or panels) and a brief CV mentioning your institutional affiliation totraces2016@gmail.com by February 29, 2016. Notification of acceptance will be sent by March 31, 2016. We welcome papers that cover any region of the Atlantic World as well as proposals for round table discussions.

William Faulkner Society

‘Romanticism on Edge / Edgy Romanticism’ – a one day symposium on 9th April 2016

“Flows and Undercurrents: Dimensions of (Im)mobility in North America”, June 2-4, 2016 [Deadline: February 7, 2016]