Announce

24-26 May 2018 ; Proposals 15 December 2017

Organisers: Lille Catholic University, Liverpool Hope University and the ENSFR (European Network for Short Fiction Research)

Call for Papers

Literature, religion and art began with objects of desire and have never abandoned the theme. From Helen of Troy and the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden via Novalis’s blue flower to the throne of Westeros, numerous examples spring immediately to mind, and if the ten commandments tell people not to covet anything that belongs to their neighbours, this surely implies that they are highly likely to do just that.

As the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe defines it: “The primitive sign of wanting is trying to get,” (2000) which explains why desire provides the motive for action, in history and in literature. Every love story, but also every crime novel and every political empire starts with desire, and its object may be a person, a diamond or a continent. Although there is a certainly a difference between desiring the presence of God, desiring a million dollars and desiring a large ice cream, any and all of these may inspire the artist or the writer.

Opinions also differ on the desirability of desire. If Buddhists and Stoics tend to believe that we should seek to free ourselves from desire and Plato felt our desires should be put aside for the greater good, Freudian and Lacanian analysts encourage us to recognise our desires and many Christians, like Pascal and C.S. Lewis, have declared that “we are too easily pleased” (1941) and should desire far greater joy than we have yet known. Artists, writers and film directors still continue this debate, incarnating the good, bad and indifferent results of desire in their works.

Desire may be understood in relation to gender—do men and women long for the same things? Sexual attraction is a theme to be considered and so is the very idea of love. Carson McCullers has famously proposed a definition in “The Ballad of the Sad Café” (1943): “love is a joint experience between two persons — but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries.” Exploring these countries could give way to discussions that could use, as a starting point, Judith Butler’s approach in her first published book Subjects of Desire in which she analyzes the interplay between desire and identity. Looking at desire through the prism of gender studies will also make it possible to reflect upon ideals of femininity and masculinity, but also of beauty, the way they are (re)presented in the media, in advertisements…

What does the act of desiring tell us about the object of desire? Is the one who desires truly seeking love, beauty, wealth, immortality or power in the object and if so, are they right to do so or is the object merely the attractive facade of a powerful illusion or delusion? Do objects of desire exist through necessity? How are they created? What role do advertising or video clips accompanying popular songs play in their creation? Has the way objects of desire are represented changed over the centuries? Did particular periods of history have specific ways of portraying them?

We welcome proposals in French or English that explore the relation between short fiction and desire across different periods and genres, including flash fiction, the novella and short story cycles. As a concentrated and intense form of prose writing, short fiction lends itself very well to representations of desire. As Sarah Hall says, “The form is very good at unzipping the mind’s fly” (‘Sex, Death and the Short Story’). Think of Katherine Mansfield’s “Bliss” (1918): “For the first time in her life Bertha Young desired her husband;” or of J. G. Ballard’s “The Subliminal Man” (1963), where hypnotic techniques of advertising turn the desire for consumer items into an irresistible compulsion. The short story form itself may be driven by desire as a structuring principle, the desire for instance of the reader to explore its gaps and mysteries. In Towards the End (1985), for instance, John Gerlach suggests that closure may be an object of desire. Several critics have analysed desire and its objects in the novel. Peter Brooks speaks of “a dynamics of desire animating narrative and the construal of its meanings;”(1993). René Girard’s concept of “mimetic desire” suggests that a human instinct for imitation is what drives people. Do these ideas also apply to the short story or do desire and the short story interact in a different way?

We also welcome papers from other areas of literary studies, cultural studies (including cinema and television), philosophy, psychology, theology, communication, history and history of art.

Although we expect most proposals to be individual, panel proposals of three closely related papers will also be considered.

Proposals (250-300 words) should be sent to gerald.preher@univ-catholille.fr and suzanne.bray@univ-catholille.fr by 15^th December 2017.

Utopian and dystopian visions span Western intellectual history from Thomas More's coinage of the former term in 1516 to the powerful twentieth century literary dystopias that influence our understanding of the current political climate worldwide, such as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's 1984, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and Sheree Thomas' anthology Dark Matter.  Etymologically, utopia means "no place"--a place that does not (yet?) exist--but it is also a play on words, being close to the Greek for "good place," thus the association of utopia with an idealized society.  While the utopian genre began as a way to envision political alternatives and solutions for social and economic inequality, dystopias show the potential dangers of such experiments.

University of Warwick

9-10 July 2018

Public concerns about inequality have grown in recent years. They do so at a time when historians are turning their attention increasingly to political economy. Thomas Piketty’s Le capital au XXI siècle (2013) has been especially influential in sparking debates over the history of inequality and political economy, and it is to these debates that this conference seeks to contribute. How have political and economic cultures come together to create, reinforce or contest inequality? How has inequality been conceptualised in France and the francophone world? And what impact have wealth inequalities had on politics and culture? In engaging with these themes, participants should feel free to interpret them in the broadest possible terms.

Invited speakers include:

Michael Kwass (Johns Hopkins University), Marie-Emmanuelle Chessel (Sciences Po) and Jackie Clarke (University of Glasgow). There will also be a round-table on the conference theme as well as a special panel in honour of seiziémiste Mack Holt and another in memory of Richard Bonney, a founding member of the Society and founding editor of the associated journal, French History.

In addition to the conference theme, we also invite papers or panels on any aspect of French history from the early medieval to the contemporary period and we welcome contributions that reflect the broad diversity of the history of France and its former colonial empire.  

We invite proposals for twenty-minute papers in English or in French. Panels of three papers are especially welcome, as are contributions from postgraduate students and overseas scholars. Paper proposals should comprise a title, abstract of 300 words and a one-page CV in a single pdf file. The deadline for submission of proposals is 15 December 2017. Please send these to the organising committee: Pierre Purseigle, Penny Roberts and Charles Walton: SSFH2018@warwick.ac.uk   

Queen’s University Belfast, 9–10 March 2018

Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Prof. Holly Tucker (Vanderbilt) and Dr Larry Duffy (Kent)

Deadline for proposals: Friday 24 November 2017

The aim of this conference is to consider the reciprocal influence of French and francophone medical and cultural texts in shaping popular and professional understandings of illness, disease and the patient experience. We invite proposals for papers focussing on the ways in which French cultural texts (literature, film, graphic novel, blog, documentary...) engage with developments in medical research, as well as the role played by cultural texts in representing the pathogenic origins, contagious action and lived reality of a wide range of diseases from the early-modern period to the present day.

Questions to be addressed include:

• How do medical and cultural texts develop a mutually-reinforcing understanding of illness and disease? 

• How is disease textually transmitted across genres and disciplinary boundaries?

• How do first-person narratives of illness engage with medical texts or theories, and vice-versa?

• How do cultural representations of disease influence medical and scientific concepts of health and disease, and vice-versa? 

• In what ways do cultural texts comment on the patient experience of national healthcare systems and their potential flaws? 

• How do physician-writers use cultural texts to engage the public in the work that they do? 

Proposals of c. 250 words for 20-minute papers (in French or English) that deal with any aspect of the above questions should be emailed to the conference organiser, Dr Steven Wilson (steven.wilson@qub.ac.uk), by Friday 24 November 2017.

This event is supported by the British Academy and the Modern Languages Core Disciplinary Research Group at Queen’s.