Gothic: Culture, Subculture, Counterculture – A Two-Day Conference
Strawberry Hill House, 8-9 March 2013
Location / Hosted by: St Mary’s University College, Twickenham and Strawberry Hill House
Confirmed Speakers:
• Michael Snodin (The Victoria and Albert Museum)
• Prof John Bowen (University of York)
• Prof Avril Horner (Kingston University)
• Prof Allan Simmons (St Mary's University College, London)
This conference, held in the Gothic mansion at Strawberry Hill, west London, will interrogate the many and varied cultures of the Gothic that were largely set in train by the owner of this mansion, Horace Walpole, in the mid-eighteenth century. As Walpole’s projects well exemplify – an aesthetic rebellion against a classical orthodoxy, which nonetheless looked implicitly to the restoration of some former social order – Gothic’s cultural poetics have always been difficult to place politically.
To what degree have Gothic tendencies in Literature, Art, Architecture and Screen Media been participants in, adjuncts to, contesters of, or alternatives to cultural and political mainstreams, and how might such relationships be assessed by historians and critics? If Gothic was the Enlightenment’s naughty, child, to what extent is its rebelliousness mental or political, and is it ultimately co-opted by the order that it appears to resist?
This is a multi-disciplinary conference, and proposals for papers are invited in response to such questions in the fields, amongst others, of literature, screen media, art, architecture and popular culture. Participants will be offered the chance to see Horace Walpole’s Gothic mansion, now resplendent in its recently-renovated state, and to dine there during the conference. Preference will be given to papers that are suitable for an enthusiastic amateur audience, as well as specialists in the appropriate field.
A bursary will be offered to cover conference fees for the best proposal by a postgraduate student.
200-word proposals for papers of 20-25 minutes, should be sent, by 30 October 2012 to:
Ms Jessica Jeske
St Mary’s University College
Waldegrave Road
Strawberry Hill
London
TW1 4SX
More information can be found here.
'Nature': College English Association's Division of Nineteenth-Century British Literature 44th annual conference
4-6 April 2013, Savannah, Georgia
In earlier centuries, “Nature” set the parameters, as Philip Round states, “of conversations about everything from church doctrine to village order.” Often discussions of gender, character, authorship, and even civil discourse turned to questions of “customary precedent and natural law.” By the twentieth century “nature” was used to delineate the new literary study of “nature writing,” while also used in broader terms to question the changing nature of our society with the onset of the digital age,
postmodernism, new views of gender and race construction, and even changes within academia. What is the “nature” of the academia today? How has the “nature” of publishing and authorship changed with the digital age? How has the “nature” of our profession changed? In what ways does “nature” define us? Or do we define “nature?” For our 2013 meeting, CEA invites papers and panels that explore the literary, the pedagogical, and the professional “nature” of our field.
General Call for Papers
CEA also welcomes proposals for presentations in any of the areas English departments typically encompass, including literature criticism and scholarship, creative writing, composition, technical communication, linguistics, and film. We also welcome papers on areas that influence our work
as academics, including student demographics, student/instructor accountability and assessment, student advising, academic leadership in departments and programs, and the place of the English department in the university. Submission Dates: August 31-November 1, 2012.Submit your proposal here. For inquiries about CEA's Division of Nineteenth Century British Literature please direct your correspondence to Robin Hammerman. For more information about how to submit, please see the full CFP here.
Home and Nation: Re-imagining the Domestic, 1750-1850
A three-day conference at the University of Leeds, 22-24 March 2013
The domestic is an expansive concept. Denoting both the home and the nation, it exerts a powerful organisational force upon the formation of gendered, national, and racial identities. Under the influence of Jürgen Habermas, literary critics and historians have explored the role that the domestic plays in constructing – and deconstructing – the opposition between the public and the private spheres. Similarly, feminist investigations of this category have complicated the enduring notion of the ‘domestic woman’, bringing more complex and mobile forms of gender identity into clearer definition. Recognising the way in which the domestic mediates between the home and the nation has also had implications for critical work on national identity: as a process, domestication entails the regulation and assimilation of the alien and the other.
This three-day conference aims to take stock of recent critical approaches to this topic, and to explore the various ways in which the domestic interacts with ideas of privacy, publicity, the home and the nation. We invite proposals for papers (of 20 minutes) that address these issues with reference to the literature and culture of the period 1750-1850. We welcome papers that take an interdisciplinary approach to the subject. Possible topics might include (but are not limited to):
• The relationship between the home and the nation
• The boundaries of the home
• The representation of domestic space
• The relationship between domesticity and gender identity
• The domestication of the other / the alien
• The relationship between domestic and professional labour
• Consumerism, commerce, and the home
• Theorisations of the public and the private
Confirmed plenary speakers: Karen Harvey (University of Sheffield) and Harriet Guest (University of York)
Proposals (of approximately 250 words) are welcome from established scholars and postgraduate students. Please email your proposal to Richard De Ritter by Monday, 7th January 2013.
“For Instance . . . : Eighteenth Century Exemplarity, Its Practice and Limits”
12th Bloomington Eighteenth-Century Workshop, Indiana University, 8-10 May 2013
The Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Indiana University is pleased to announce the twelfth Bloomington Eighteenth-Century Workshop, to be held on May 8-10 2013. The workshop is part of a series of annual interdisciplinary events that has been running since 2002, with 12-15 scholars presenting and discussing papers on a broad topic in a congenial setting.
Our topic for 2013 is “For Instance. . . : Eighteenth-Century Exemplarity, Its Practice and Limits.” In the seventeenth century, cultural authority could often be established through the skillful negotiation of examples past and present. Through this process, men and women could aspire to exemplary status, as the present instance in a long tradition of examples. One could “stand in” for others. This relationship of “standing-in-for,” or exemplarity, played a central role for institutions of learning, knowledge, and morals; for the political and religious order; and for individuals’ understanding of history and art. In this workshop, we want to explore what happens to these cultures of exemplarity, modeling, and emulation in the long eighteenth century
Exemplarity is not a simple relationship. On the one hand, as in the case of absolutism, the king aimed to become an exemplary “one” who encompassed all others for whom he could, in turn, become an ideal model. On the other hand, exemplarity could also invoke a radical equality, that of the “sample,” where everyone can be an example for everyone else. In the light of such complexity, we ask what happens to the culture of the example in the eighteenth-century as new ways of understanding the correlation of the “one case” and “all the others” gain prominence, as discourses of individuality, probability, experience, experiment, representation, radical democracy, and revolution hold sway. If the past stops serving as an example for the present, if the one no longer stands for all others, what alternative modes of thought serve? What happens when examples become unruly? Or should we think instead of transmutations and reinventions in some broader culture of exemplarity?
The focus of the workshop will be an age when presumably exemplarity was under pressure and examples became unruly. We want to examine the practices and limits of exemplarity in different areas, such as politics, religion, fiction, and the so-called experimental sciences. Papers may explore (but are not limited to) the following questions:
- How does “standing in for something” shift in meaning throughout the eighteenth century?
- To what extent did eighteenth-century men and women think that the experiences of one person could apply to others? How does the language of experience change through the long eighteenth century? How does the discourse of probability inflect that of experience and/or example?
- To what extent do political actors stop modeling their acts on past examples? If they do, what replaces the rhetoric of exemplarity in political discourse?
- Can Christ and the martyrs still be “examples” in an era when exemplarity is only one of many modes of teaching?
- In the worlds of design and technology, how do constructed models or patterns – of buildings, terrain, or ships; fabric, furniture, or china – alter or expand the concept of the example?
- Amazons, Hottentots, wild children, mad women, sea monsters, and extraordinary beasts of all sorts: what can one make of these unruly examples?
- In what ways do eighteenth-century narratives –fiction or history – engage the work of exemplarity? To what extent do characters and storylines provide readers with good/bad examples?
- How does the logic of exemplarity, rooted in tradition, relate to categories such as novelty, modernity, or innovation? Does exemplarity foster, justify, or contest innovation?
The workshop format will consist of focused discussion of four to six papers a day, amid socializing and refreshment. The workshop will draw both on the wide community of eighteenth-century scholars and on those working in this field at Indiana University-Bloomington. The workshop will cover most expenses of those scholars chosen to present their work: accommodations, travel (up to a certain limit), and most meals.
The dealine for application is 7 January 2013. The application consists of a two-page description of the proposed paper as well as a current brief CV (no longer than three pages). Please email or send your application to Dr. Barbara Truesdell, Weatherly Hall North, room 122, Bloomington, IN 47405, email voltaire@indiana.edu. Further information can be found here or you can find us on Facebook.
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