CFP: “We Are Not Amused”: Victorian Comedy and Humour (11/1/2012; 6/1-4/2013)

CFP for the Victorian Studies Association of Ontario's ACCUTE (Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English) member-organized panel:
“We Are Not Amused”: Victorian Comedy and Humour

Abstracts due: Nov 1, 2012
Conference date and location: June 1-4, University of Victoria, BC

Comedy is under-explored in Victorian literary criticism, but it is pervasive in the texts of the era, from brief moments—Dickens’ caricatures and Thackeray’s asides—to more extended treatments, in Lear’s nonsense verse and Jerome K. Jerome’s widely popular Three Men in a Boat.

This panel invites papers that explore comedy, humour and laughter in Victorian literature and cultural productions. What functions did comedy serve in Victorian texts? When is its humour riotous and anarchic, and when does it reinforce norms? How comfortably did comedy sit alongside the period’s idealization of moral and artistic solemnity? What effect does laughing at, or laughing with, texts and characters have upon our understanding of them? Why are the comic features of a scene or moment important?

Papers may consider such topics as:

• Parody, burlesque, farce and satire
• Ditties, jokes, word-play, wit and puns
• Black humour and the grotesque
• Clowning, the circus, and comic performance
• “Serious cheerfulness” and the mixing of wit and gravity
• Savoy Operas and the music hall
• Eminent Victorians and depictions of Victorian earnestness          
• Failed humour or humourlessness
• Caricatures and stereotypes
• Comedy as social critique or subversive force
• Sentimental humour
• The science and philosophy of Victorian laughter

ACCUTE requires the following of all proposed papers: 

• a 700-word proposal or completed paper (of approximately 8-10 double-spaced pages, not to exceed 20 minutes in presentation). Please note that because of our policy of blind vetting, ACCUTE cannot accept proposals or papers that include identifying marks. These include information in headers, references to your work or to your collaborations with others, your rank or institutional affiliation, or any other information that might identify you to a vettor.
• a completed Proposal Submissions Information Sheet, available from the ACCUTE website: http://www.accute.ca/generalcall.html
• a 100-word abstract of the proposed presentation
• a 50-word bio-bibliographical note on yourself

Email address for submissions: VSAOatACCUTE@gmail.com

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/