Literature, Space and Geography

Inquire: Journal of Comparative Literature

3.2 ‘Neither Here Nor There: The (Non-)Geographical Futures of Comparative Literature’

In this special issue, Inquire invites article submissions that consider the relationship between geography and the study of literature. As always, Inquire encourages intellectual discussions that approach the text from inside and outside, considering the movement of literary artifacts across geographical spaces as well as the significance of geographical movement within literature.

The following lines of inquiry are of particular interest:

1) Border crossing books: the spatiality of minority and exilic literatures; the post-spatial and the post-human; transnational transgender; the online persistence of virtual cultural geographies; literary dissemination and book migration; cultural diaspora; &c.

2) Literary representations of geography: city, space and the nation in literature (e.g., post-9/11 reactionary literature, WW1 or WW11 literature, propaganda materials, etc.); racial and ethnic experiences of space; writing in exile; power relations in different geographical scales; gender politics of space; the body as political and cultural space; geography in postcolonial and diasporic literatures; space and place; urban and rural spaces in modern literature; &c.

3) Consequences for literature and theory: the ongoing construction of “world literature”; the future of postcolonialism; geographical boundaries and genre boundaries; the relationship of post-national and pre-national patterns of cultural exchange; &c.

4) Liminality and the discipline: national Comparative Literature departments and intra-national research projects; the unequal institutional distribution of given discourses between departments or between nations; impacts for the discipline, its researchers and its students; academia in flux; Comparative Literature in flux; &c.

5) Precipices of methodology: theory and practice; linguistic limits to the “return of the aesthetic”; detteritorializing the comparative method; new frontiers of trans-disciplinary methodologies; comparing without borders; &c.

Submission deadline: May 15, 2013

Any graduate student of Peking University or University of Alberta who presented at the colloquium, held at the University of Alberta in April 2012, on the subject of how the discipline of comparative literature can continue to reorient itself in a world where the nature of human relationships to geography are in constant reconfiguration, is eligible to submit expanded versions of their presentation to this special issue. All articles must meet the guidelines for submission (see below). Submission Guidelines

Inquire accepts article submissions by graduate students relevant to the current call for papers. All submissions must meet the following guidelines: original work not submitted elsewhere, complete articles in English, 5,000-7,000 words (including works cited list and endnotes), MLA formatting, 12-pt Times New Roman, double-spaced, justified. Please include a separate cover sheet with name, institutional affiliation, email address, and a short biography (max 60 words). Send inquiries and submissions to inquire@ualberta.ca.Please check our website for updates and information:http://inquire.streetmag.org/

Meet Ella.

Ella S. Mills is a third year doctoral student at the University of Leeds researching British artists Lubaina Himid and Maud Sulter, and the connections and interventions of ‘B/black’ women artists in 1980s Britain.  An interdisciplinary scholar, Ella’s research draws on cultural studies, history, sociology, feminism, and curatorial studies.  She holds a Masters in History of Art from Leeds, a BA in Fine Art & Art History from the University of Plymouth, and a BA in English Literature from the University of East Anglia.

Ella has been lead organiser of Otherwise Engaged: Legacies and Questions of Marginal and Mainstream Visual Arts Strategies, an international, post-graduate symposium (3 December 2011, University of Leeds): http://www.otherwiseengaged.leeds.ac.uk/

It is our pleasure that she is attending our April symposium to take on the role of lead reporter. She is an active scholar in Art and Literature and we very much look forward to welcoming her in Liverpool. As we are preparing for the symposium, 19th-C Aetiologies, Exoticism, and Multimodal Aesthetics, we are collecting your words, and subjects to be discussed in advance and to put them forward for discussion during the event to follow up later in April. Ella will be taking these questions, connecting you with our multidisciplinary symposium. If you have any proposals, queries, suggestions, etc. please email painpara@liv.ac.uk and we will get back in touch with you.

Legacy: Mythology and Authenticity in the Humanities

Legacy: Mythology and Authenticity in the Humanities, 28 June 2013

Centre for Adaptations and Centre for Textual Studies at De Montfort University

This conference focuses on the influence of cultural ‘legacies’ within current humanities research. By highlighting the work of postgraduates and early career researchers, this interdisciplinary conference will examine the various ways in which ‘legacies’ are created, restructured, perpetuated and even rejected. It will also question whether newer disciplines respond to cultural mythologies by establishing their own ‘legacy’ as a means of achieving academic authentication.

The recent confirmed identity of Richard the III, Faber’s choice of cover illustration for its anniversary issue of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and the recent film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit are just a few of the numerous examples that demonstrate how cultural legacies evolve within academic research and the public forum.

These inherited cultural legacies are continually being redefined, rebranded and reevaluated, creating a cyclical pattern that challenges the ways in which we approach and define them. This brings into question the social and political significance of ‘legacy’ and its relevance within the humanities, both as a research theme and as a lens by which to view the progression of our respective disciplines.

The conference will conclude with a roundtable discussion with Professor Dominic Shellard the Vice-Chancellor of De Montfort University, Dr Will Buckingham of the School of Humanities at De Montfort University, and Mr Sam Causer of the Leicester School of Architecture.

We invite 20 –minute papers from early career academics, post-doctoral researchers and doctoral students which might address, though not limited to, the following areas:

•Folkloric ‘legends’ and the academic ‘legacy’ •The creation of oral and written legends •National identity and institutional ‘legacies’ •The development of individual, theoretical, and collective ‘legacies’ • ‘Legacy’ and institutional validation •Obedience and Iconoclasm towards ‘legacy’ in contemporary humanities studies •‘Legacy’ and the curated archive

Please email abstracts, of not more than 200 words, along with a short biographical statement to Anna Blackwell and Elizabeth Penner by 16 April 2013.

Email: dmulegacyconference@gmail.com Official Website: dmulegacyconference.wordpress.com Conference Date: 28 June 2013 Conference Fee: £15 including lunch and refreshments

Hosted by the postgraduate students at:

Centre for Adaptations

Centre for Textual Studies

De Montfort University

The Gateway Leicester, UK, LE1 9BH

Bred for purpose

Bred for purpose – the inherent, situational and pathogenic vulnerability of animals in contemporary biomedical research

 A reminder of the Friday afternoon talk by Dr. Jane Johnson (Macquarie University, Sydney): “Bred for Purpose: the Inherent, Situational and Pathogenic Vulnerability of Animals in Contemporary Biomedical Research.”

Dept. of Film Studies

School of Languages, Linguistics and Film

Queen Mary, University of London

Mile End Road

London E1 4NS

A.Pick@qmul.ac.uk

Tel: +44 20 7882 8290

http://qmul.academia.edu/AnatPick

http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14786-6/creaturely-poetics

Laughter

Laughter

What is laughter? What is laughter?
It is God waking up! O it is God waking up!
It is the sun poking its sweet head out
From behind a cloud
You have been carrying too long,
Veiling your eyes and heart.

It is Light breaking ground for a great Structure
That is your Real body – called Truth.

It is happiness applauding itself and then taking flight
To embrace everyone and everything in this world.

Laughter is the polestar
Held in the sky by our Beloved,
Who eternally says,

“Yes, dear ones, come this way,
Come this way towards Me and Love!

Come with your tender mouths moving
And your beautiful tongues conducting songs
And with your movements – your magic movements
Of hands and feet and glands and cells – Dancing!

Know that to God’s Eye,
All movement is a Wondrous Language,
And Music – such exquisite, wild Music!”

O what is laughter, Hafiz?
What is this precious love and laughter
Budding in our hearts?

It is the glorious sound
Of a soul waking up!

Hafiz

 

Workshop on Anxiety at the University of Sheffield

Keynote speakers: Professor Lynda Mugglestone, University of Oxford and  Professor Jon Mee, University of Warwick

In 1755, Samuel Johnson devoted a considerable amount of space in the first edition of his Dictionary to the contemplation of anxiety. Drawing upon the authorship of Alexander Pope and John Dryden, Johnson described anxiety as the anticipation of a future event.

Anxiety is a state of mind and authorship that can be traced throughout the critical writings of literature, language and linguistics. While for Johnson himself in 1755, one can trace anxiety to ‘the contamination of the English language’ by its French neighbour, the francophobia exhibited in his Preface further anticipated the outbreak of the Seven Years War in the following year. Anxiety about forms of social change (imperialism, war, revolution and treason trials) can be registered either through literary and linguistic transformations, or else through a desire to retrench against impending changes, to preserve indigenous grammars, literary traditions and political constitution. In his study of anxiety in relation to Romantic imperialism, for example, Nigel Leask argues that whether authors of the Romantic period supported or decried imperialism is less pressing than exploring how they registered their anxiety. Such anxiety, Leask argues, ‘registered a sense of the internal dislocation of metropolitan culture . . .[and] could also lend support to its hegemonic programme.’This can ‘sometimes block or disable the positivities of power’ but is ‘just as often productive in furthering the imperial will.’The eighteenth century offers an important anchor for productive anxieties for researchers. From Enlightenment philosophy, to imperialism, invasion, nationhood, revolutions inAmerica and France, to the innovative new poetics of Wordsworth, the anxieties of the period offer a conceptual framework useful to researchers from across different time periods, disciplines, and theoretical positions.

Our workshop will involve two keynote talks to be given by distinguished eighteenth-century scholars Professors Lynda Mugglestone and Jon Mee. Further speakers from the School of English will include: Dr Jane Hodson, Dr Hamish Mathison, Dr Marcus Nevitt, Dr Ranjan Sen, and Dr Richard Steadman-Jones, and Dr Angela Wright.

For more information, please contact Dr Joe Bray, Dr Madeleine Callaghan, and Dr Angela Wright at anxiety@sheffield.ac.uk.

Women in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien

Women in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien

edited by Janet Brennan Croft (Mythlore@mythsoc.org) and Leslie Donovan (press@mythsoc.org)

The place of women in Tolkien’s world is a perennially troublesome topic. On the surface, Tolkien’s major works seem to ignore women or place them on unattainable pedestals, and popular criticism of Tolkien often focuses on this issue. But a closer look can be quite revealing; the deeper one delves into the legendarium and other works, the more prevalent, complex, and powerful the female characters turn out to be. Additionally, male characters often exhibit and are valued for what might be seen as feminine characteristics, and characters who balance feminine and masculine traits are held up as ideals. This collection will bring together several classic essays on Tolkien’s portrayal of women and the feminine with new takes on the topic.

Projected publication date: Spring 2014 Deadline for abstracts: May 30, 2013 Deadline for finished papers: September 1, 2013

Dante and Milton – National Visionaries and Visionary Nationalists

Dante Alighieri and John Milton, the two vernacular composers of epic poems, hold firm positions in the literary canons of Italy and England respectively. Both authors have also become universal cultural icons deeply engrained in the world‘s cultural memory, with their importance extending vastly beyond their literary and political influence: on the one hand, Dante as the exiled avenger of sins and crimes, on the other, Milton as the blind polemicist and observer of current political affairs.

This conference aims to explore the synchronic as well as the diachronic constructions of Dante and Milton as cultural icons, and so the main focus of analysis is the production of cultural memory, national and transnational alike. What makes this production and perpetuation of cultural memory so interesting is the variety of cultural techniques and media involved, from the highbrow to the lowbrow, scholarly articles to computer games.

We invite papers that explore the motivations, mechanics, and symbolic processes that perpetuate certain images of Dante, Milton, and the relationship of both. The juxtaposition and comparison of Dante and Milton should invite a broader perspective that goes beyond the merely national contexts and also touches on the question of the emergence of a European Dante and a European Milton. At the same time, this comparison allows us to explore the opposite of cultural memory, namely processes of forgetting and side-lining authors or parts of their respective histories, which both authors have been subjected to throughout their literary reception. We therefore invite papers on the respective relations of these authors to, and their translation into, cultural icons as well as case-studies on the inter-relation or comparison of both.

Please send an abstract (max 300 words) by 28 June 2013 to christoph.lehner@daad-alumni.de or csinger@mail.uni-paderborn.de

Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Nick Havely, University of York Andrew Sanders, University of Durham

Conference Organisers: Christoph Lehner (University of Regensburg) Christoph Singer (University of Paderborn)

Possible topics may include: What is the synchronic/diachronic function of Dante and Milton in regard to cultural memory? Dante/Milton and national identities Dante and/or Milton and the literary canon the role of Dante and/or Milton in contemporary culture Dante and/or Milton as subjects in contemporary public education Dante and/or Milton in contemporary pop-culture “Milton’s Bogey”, cultural memory and gender-roles the politics of memorization Milton/Dante and the Modernists (T.S.Eliot, Ezra Pound) Dante as the political icon of Italy‘s reunification Form follows function? Dante/Milton and the epic narrative Dante/Milton as European epic poets? Dante’s influence on Milton Dante/Milton and visual art

Pacific Ancient and Modern Languages Association (PAMLA)

Most literary works take place within the context of some sort of constructed space, e.g. a house, an office, a transit node, a place of worship, a place of performance. The constraints and opportunities of such a setting often contribute to our understanding of characters, actions and ideas. Architecture also provides a rich system of tropes by which readers and writers can define important elements of text either literally or figuratively. This panel seeks papers on literary works from any genre, region or time period that consider the treatment of architecture as background, foreground, structural model or other component of the literary work or works in question.

Please upload proposals (approximately 500 words) on the PAMLA website at www.pamla.org. Deadline: April 15, 2013.

Questions can be directed to Christina Stevenson at stevensonlushbaugh@gmail.com

Spring and ‘A Gift’

A Gift

Just when you seem to yourself

nothing but a flimsy web

of questions, you are given

the questions of others to hold

in the emptiness of your hands,

songbird eggs that can still hatch

if you keep them warm,

butterflies opening and closing themselves

in your cupped palms, trusting you not to injure

their scintillant fur, their dust.

You are given the questions of others

as if they were answers

to all you ask. Yes, perhaps

this gift is your answer.

Denise Levertov