CFP: DIEGESIS, Interdisciplinary E-Journal for Narrative Research "Historical Narratology" (9/30/2013)

DIEGESIS. Interdisziplinäres E-Journal für Erzählforschung / Interdisciplinary E-Journal for Narrative Research 3.2

Date of publication: December 2014 Theme: Historical Narratology

Structuralist narratology has mainly focused on systematic aspects of narrative texts and on developing a universally valid terminology for the analysis of narratives. However, the history of storytelling is also a history of narrative forms. How can narratology account for historical change and variety in narration? A possible solution might be to regard formal aspects of narratives not as neutral containers of variable content, but as features themselves determined by the cultural and historical contexts in which they occur.

This issue focusing on historical narratology will investigate the historical semantics of narrative forms by looking at representative cases. Suitable contributions for this issue include, for example, diachronic studies on the development of specific motifs, themes, genres or forms of writing, such as providence vs. contingency, the fantastic vs. the neo- fantastic, the development of unreliable narration, the development of omniscient narra- tion, and the development of perspectival narration. Contributions can examine ancient, medieval and/or modern writing, both literary and non-literary.  Also welcome are sys- tematic contributions or those reflecting the history of a discipline, which consider the possibilities and problems of a historical narratology.

DIEGESIS invites abstracts of approximately half a page (DIN-A4) by September 30th, 2013 at the latest. Please send your abstract, along with a brief CV, to the DIEGESIS editorial team: PD Dr. Matthias Aumüller or Dr. Filippo Smerilli (diegesis@uni-wuppertal.de). The editorial team and the editors will decide on the acceptability of proposals by November 30th, 2013. Contributions (approx. 15-20 pages) have to be submitted by June 30th, 2014. The issue on historical narratology will be published in December 2014.

In addition, always welcome are REVIEWS of new works (i.e. works published in the last three to four years) in the field of narratology, specifically cross-disciplinary contributions in addition to contributions from those working in the fields of language and literature. Recommendations for reviews can be sent to the aforementioned e-mail address at any time; in your e-mail, you should name the book(s) you would like to review and provide a brief overview of your academic career.

About DIEGESIS:
 DIEGESIS is the first interdisciplinary journal dedicated to narrative research that provides free online access to full-text articles and reviews (www.diegesis.uni-wuppertal.de). The high standard of work published in DIEGESIS is ensured by a combination of competitive calls for papers and a peer review process.
 DIEGESIS is published at the University of Wuppertal and in cooperation with the local Centre of Narrative Research (CNR) (www.zef.uni-wuppertal.de) by Matei Chihaia (Romance studies), Sandra Heinen (literature and media studies), Matías Martínez (German studies), Michael Scheffel (general literary studies) and Roy Sommer (English and American studies).

CFP: Connected Histories of Empire (1/25/2013; 7/15-16/2013)

Connected Histories of Empire Conference – Second Call for Papers

Centre for the Study of Colonial & Postcolonial Societies, 

University of Bristol, 15-16 July 2013

Please note the closing date for proposals is 25 January 2013

Over the last two decades, scholars have begun to characterise the British Empire as a complex patchwork of interacting and dynamic agencies, rather than as a homogenous monolith. As a result, the traditional spatial framework based on a stable division between the metropole and the periphery seems increasingly outmoded. Instead, historians, literary critics, scholars of globalisation, and philosophers have been writing about the webs, networks, and circuits in which people, objects, and ideas moved. This conference will interrogate the idea of an empire of connections, considering the possibilities opened up by thinking in terms of global interaction, as well as the challenges of incorporating the myriad interconnections of empire into coherent historical narratives.

The conference is the culmination of a year of events at the University of Bristol which have focused particularly on the memorialisation and commemoration of the British Empire. As scholars have begun to uncover the intricately woven interconnections of empire, a central concern of the conference will be to consider how this might influence how empire has been, and is, remembered and memorialised in Britain and elsewhere.

We would like to invite proposals for papers and panels that speak to the following broad themes:

• The commemoration and memorialisation of different imperial sites, events and phenomena
• Links between imperial port-cities/global cities
• Flows of people, goods (physical and cultural), and cash
• The movement, preservation and display of imperial artefacts and archives
• Imperial networks and imperial careering
• Imperial audiences and public spheres
• The links between global history and imperial history

We would like to encourage broad discussion of connections and comparisons between different modern empires: proposals need not be restricted to the British empire.

We welcome papers from a range of academic disciplines.

To apply please send a 250 word abstract to the organisers at connectedhistoriesofempire@yahoo.co.uk.

Conference organisers:

• History: Ms Emily Baughan, Prof Robert Bickers, Prof Peter Coates, Prof Tim Cole, Dr Simon Potter, Dr Jonathan Saha, Dr Rob Skinner
• Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies: Dr Matthew Brown, Dr Joanna Crow
• English: Dr John Lee
• Archaeology & Anthropology: Prof Mark Hortonl networks and imperial careering

CFP: Gramma special issue "The History and Future of the 19th-Century Book" (12/31/2012)

Gramma Journal of Theory and Criticism

http://www.enl.auth.gr/gramma/

Special Issue "The History and Future of the 19th-Century Book" number 21 (2013)

In the period between 1740 to 1850, the systematization of the entire process of making and selling books through a network of printers, publishers, booksellers, writers, readers, and critics led to the evolution of the book trade into a profit-making machine. The resulting professionalization and commodification of literature created not only professional authors and critics, making authorship itself undergo significant change,  but set up an entirely new way of conceiving of reading, writing, and selling literary materials. The changing nature of books, media, information and communication defined the literary culture of the period and was central to the establishment of national identity.

Today, the late twentieth-century emergence of digital media has led to a massive-scale migration of our paper-based inheritance to digital forms, forcing a return to textual scholarship and its various problematics, as well as placing literature within a complex interactive matrix of multiple collaborating agents, individual as well as institutional. Though digitization was not a concern in the nineteenth century, the drastically changing relationship of literature to its socio-historical milieu invites parallels with today’s re-inventing of the writing and dissemination of literature and of the digital transformation in the humanities. The debate becomes even more urgent as more and more eighteenth and nineteenth-century print literary materials are being modeled in digital environments. What does digital technology has to offer literary and cultural history? What are the stakes involved in the translation of print materials into digital forms?

For the 2013 volume of Gramma on the history and future of the book with a focus on British and American 19th-century literary materials, papers are invited on the following or related areas:

• book production and publishing history
• gender, class, and audiences as mediated by print/digital text
• authorship and its redefinition
• periodicals; serial publication; copyright and pirated editions
• editing 19th-century British writers
• interfaces, platforms, and technologies of 19th-century books
• archiving, preserving, and collecting material and digital records
• the impact of digitization on teaching and scholarship in 19th-century studies
• bibliography, textual criticism, and digital technologies
• the public domain and the creative commons for the 19th and 21st centuries

Papers should not exceed the length of 7,000 words (including footnotes and bibliography) and should be double spaced. They should adhere to the latest MLA style of documentation and should be submitted electronically in the form of a Word document to the editors of the issue, Maria Schoina and Andrew Stauffer, at the following email addresses: schoina@enl.auth.gr and amstauff@gmail.com

Deadline for submissions: 31 December 2012

CFP: “The Ends of History,” Special Issue of Victorian Studies (9/15/2012)

“The Ends of History,” Special Issue of Victorian Studies

In the 1980s and 1990s, literary critics and historians occupied a relatively integrated conceptual space through the rise of cultural studies and the “new historicism.” If this interdisciplinary framework was never seamless, “historicization” nonetheless represented a critical project equally palpable to history and literary criticism. The last decade or so, however, has found many critics seeking the revival of form as a key axis for literary study as against a perceived overemphasis on (or reduction to) historical context or ideological content. An early catalyst, MLQ’s 2000 special issue on the topic found Susan Wolfson attempting to “rehabilitate formalist criticism” without simply “cross-dressing it as a version of historicist criticism.” More recently, Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best’s 2010 special issue in Representations questioned the Jamesonian “political unconscious” while opposing the reading of “surfaces” to that of “symptoms,” thus inviting a rigorous rethinking of the mandate to “always historicize.” In a more polemical vein, Rita Felski’s essay “After Suspicion” and her lecture “Context Stinks!” appear to equate historicism with suspicious reading and to find both irreconcilable with the need to “respect . . . what is in plain view.” Still other critics urge “distant reading”: methods like Franco Moretti’s turn to graphs, maps, trees, and (more recently) network theory; or Heather Love’s Latour-inspired “descriptive turn.” Latour’s critiques of “suspicious” reading and “context” have exercised enormous influence across the fields of social-scientific and historical studies (for example, Tim Mitchell, Rule of Experts, and Tom Bender and Igancio Farias, eds., Urban Assemblages). This “descriptive turn” has its own advocates in the historical social sciences which may also provoke questions about what kind of historical analysis befits the formalist exploration of texts (literary and otherwise) and vice versa.

While defenders of suspicion have already come forward (for example, John Kucich, “Unfinished”), this special issue invites essays that take a somewhat different tack. Rather than positions for or against neoformalist, “surface,” and “descriptive” critical practices, the essays we seek will ask what these discussions portend for Victorianist historicism. We ask: Need the turn toward form be a turn away from history and, if so, what does it mean to pursue “Victorian” studies ahistorically or posthistorically? What is the legacy of the “new historicism” and is it incompatible with “what is in plain view”? Do historical writings embed their own hermeneutic instructions independently of critics’ distinctions between depth and surface, close and distant reading? What does history tell us about formalism and what does form tell us about history and historicism? In what new relation to each other are literary studies and history to stand in the wake of a formalist turn?

The deadline for submissions is September 15, 2012. Essays of not more than 8,000 words (including endnotes) should be prepared in MLA Style. We encourage submissions not only from literary scholars and historians, but from those in any field (including, for instance, the history of art or of science) whose work engages with relevant questions and issues. Submissions and inquiries should be sent directly to both of the issue’s guest editors by email attachment.

Lauren M. E. Goodlad, University of Illinois, lgoodlad@illinois.edu

Andrew Sartori, New York University, asartori@nyu.edu

Works Cited

Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations108.1 (2009): 1-21.

Farfas, Ignacio, and Thomas Bender, eds. Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies. New York: Routledge, 2009.

Felski, Rita. “After Suspicion.” Profession (2009): 28-35.

—. “Context Stinks!” Portland Center for Public Humanities at Portland State University. Portland, Oregon. November, 2011. Lecture.

Goswami, Manu. “Rethinking the Modular Nation Form: Toward a Sociohistorical Conception of Nationalism.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 44.4 (2002): 770-99.

Kucich, John. “The Unfinished Historicist Project: In Praise of Suspicion.” Victoriographies 1.1 (2011): 58-78.

Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2004): 225-48.

Love, Heather. “Close but not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn.” New Literary History 41.2 (2010): 371-91.

Mitchell, Timothy. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkley: U of California P, 2002.

Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. New York: Verso, 2005.

—. “Network Theory, Plot Analysis.” New Left Review 68 (2011): 80-102.

Wolfson, Susan J. “Reading for Form.” Modern Language Quarterly 61.1 (2000): 1-21.

CFP: History and Humour – 1800 to Present (10/15/2011; 7/6-7/2012)

CfP: History and Humour – 1800 to Present
International Conference at Freiburg University, 6-7 July 2012

One tends to associate history with serious modes of presentation (academic, heroic, tragic) rather than with humorous ones. Yet Clio also smiles and laughs out loud: Comic renderings of historical events and figures have made a significant contribution to ‘popular’ history since around 1800. We find them in all European cultures and in a wide range of texts, images and performances, in styles both coarse and refined. History has been the subject of caricature, satire, the cartoon and comic book, stage and television/film comedy, and the parody history textbook as exemplified in the British classic, 1066 and All That. There are special national
traditions which the conference seeks to explore and compare. But it will also address questions of a more general nature. Theories of humour are diverse but agree in a number of elements: On the intellectual level, laughter seems to be an elementary reaction to incompatible or contradictory frames of reference and interpretation. On the emotional level, laughter releases apprehension and tension, and it discharges feelings of aggression and contempt. It is aroused by the deformed and unfamiliar, it exposes and punishes the unsocial, and it deflates the grand. To what purpose have such elements been employed in the humorous presentation of history? From what contexts do humorous presentations arise? At what audiences are they directed, and how have they been received? We invite participants who would like to explore these and other questions with reference to specific case studies from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. 300-word proposals in English should be sent to the organisers (Barbara Korte, English Department and Elisabeth Cheauré, Slavic Department) by 15 October 2011:

barbara.korte@anglistik.uni-freiburg.de
elisabeth.cheaure@slavistik.uni-freiburg.de

For information on our research group Historische Lebenswelten please see
http://portal.uni-freiburg.de/historische-lebenswelten/