Calls for Papers, Articles, Translations

CFP: Polyphonie (Multilingual Web Portal)

Polyphonie, Multilingual Web Portal

The editors Beate Baumann (University of Catania), Michaela Bürger-Koftis (University of Genoa) and Sandra Vlasta (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz) kindly invite contributors to send proposals for the multilingual web portal, Polyphonie. Mehrsprachigkeit_Kreativität_Schreiben (http://www.polyphonie.at, ISSN 2304-7607).

This international research project investigates the many and diverse connections between multilingualism and creativity in writing systematically and from an interdisciplinary perspective. The aim of the project is to explore the more or less close relationship between individual/social multilingualism and creativity in general, and in particular literary creativity.

On the web portal’s publication platform contributions from the fields of biography studies, research on multilingualism, neurolinguistics, applied linguistics, translation studies, literary studies, comparative studies, media and communication studies are published. New contributions are being published twice a year, the platform is updated in June and December.

Contributors are kindly invited to send their proposals for contributions for the issue to be published in December 2016.

The contributions should comply with the web portal’s research focus and correspond to one of the fields present on the web portal. Please send your abstract (500 words) together with your contact details and a short academic CV to the editors. Contributions are welcome in English, German and Italian.

The final contribution should not exceed 7.000 words and should be introduced by an abstract (max. 100 words) in English.

Deadline for abstracts: September 30, 2016

Acknowledgement by the editors: October 15, 2016

Deadline for contributions: December 5, 2016

Events of Interest, Workshops

Responding to Crisis – Workshop and Poetry Reading

Responding to Crisis: Forced Migration & the Humanities in the 21st Century, AHRC-funded project, Keele University, 5th October 2016

  1. Workshop: ‘Contemporary crisis of values and ‘necropolitics’ (12.00-16.00)

This  workshop consists of  5-10 minute presentations from speakers which include academics, practitioners, activists and artists (among which are Neelam Srivastava, Maggie O’Neill, Anthony Good, Roger Bromley, Jerome Phelps, Robert Hampson, Saradha Soobrayen, Carolina Albuerne).

Participants will illustrate the ways in which their current/recent work and activities engage with the deathly context of contemporary migration to Europe, which results in both literal and social deaths. As re-evaluations of humanism and humanitarianism continue, what role can/does the humanities play in discourses of forced migration? What methodologies do different sectors use to approach mass migration and displacement?

The overall aim of the workshop is to explore diverse approaches among activists, practitioners and academics to  the current ‘crisis’; hence, a key part of the workshop includes a roundtable to engage in a discussion on multidisciplinary, multi-agency responses among all participants and attendees. (venue tbc)

2) Poetic Responses to Contemporary Migration (17.00-20.00)

An evening of poetry on the theme of contemporary migration will be hosted at Keele as part of the AHRC-funded international project Responding to Crisis: Forced Migration and the Humanities in the Twenty-First Century. Readings by Saradha Soobrayen, Robert Hampson, David Herd, among others will engage the audience with the challenges of forced displacement. A selection of poems by Keele Creative writing students will also be presented along with an exhibition of photography and placement poetry. This will be hosted in the beautiful setting of Keele Hall. All participants are warmly invited to the wine and canapé reception after the readings. All welcome.

Sign up to both sessions or to one; all events are free, but numbers are limited. So, please make sure you let us know!

Further details can be found here.

The project Responding to Crisis, led by Mariangela Palladino (Keele) and Agnes Woolley (RHUL), aims to develop cultural responses to the current crisis. The arts and humanities have a vital role to play in shaping current debates on forced displacement – this is not only a crisis of geopolitics, but also of values. What role do the arts and humanities play in this critical context? How do we interpret, represent and conceptualise forced migration in the twenty-first century, and how do criticism and the arts play an active role in political transformation?

Calls for Papers, Articles, Translations, Seminars

CFP: ACLA, Multilingualism and Theory; Literary Studies on the Move

Multilingualism and Theory: Critical Intersections and Literary Studies on the Move, American Comparative Literature Association, Utrecht University, the Netherlands July 6-9, 2017

Multilingualism and Theory: Critical Intersections

Multilingualism has emerged in the past few years as a site of critical attention within comparative literature and world literature. The myth of monolingualism and the presumed equivalency between nation and national language have given way to a new mode of scholarship that privileges the plurality and heterogeneity of languages and cultures. Despite this proliferation of critical attention, the methodological framework for discussing multilingualism remains undefined. To this effect, this seminar invites papers that address wider theoretical issues that surround multilingualism, especially with regard to the revisiting of the key terminology of the debate. Papers may examine this phenomenon on the level of text, the literary production of a single author, several authors or society as a whole.

How are multilingual competencies manifested in a text? What are the playful, covert or transgressive ways that are languages creatively deployed in a seemingly monolingual text? How can we read these texts ‘multilingually’, in the words of Gustavo Pérez Firmat? What is the relationship between language and form, and how does multilingualism impress itself on the very structure of the text? How do interlingual and translingual practices work to create a poetics of the liminal? Can we begin to speak about a uniquely multilingual aesthetic?

In the wake of Reine Meylaert’s view that ‘at the heart of multilingualism, we find translation’, we seek to explore the complexity of translating multilingual literature and the practice of self-translation. Why is multilingualism often associated with untranslatability? Turning to fictional representations of multilingualism, how do writers create the illusion of other languages in a monolingual text? How is translation without the original constructed in these instances? Can multilingualism challenge our understanding of binary concepts of target and source text/language/culture in translation studies?

How do multilingual writers utilize their linguistic competencies to push back against hierarchies of power and hegemonic practice? What are the intersections between multilingualism and post-colonial studies? How can we address the multiple linguistic competencies of an author in critical scholarship and why is this often overlooked?  How does translation of a multilingual text impact processes of canonization? In what ways can multilingual criticism challenge and dislodge the concept of the ‘native speaker’? What is the interplay between gender, class and linguistic competencies? What role should languages of mobility, prestige languages and accent play in critical theory? Are identity politics still relevant in studies of critical multilingualism?

We welcome papers that take these questions as a point of departure as well as other theoretically innovative approaches to multilingualism and linguistic complexity in literary analysis. Potential participants are encouraged to contact the organizers before submitting abstracts through the ACLA portal.

Seminar Organisers: Visnja Krstic, University of Belgrade and Kate Costello, University of Oxford

Deadline for abstracts is 11:59 PM Pacific Time on 23rd September.

Literary Studies on the Move

The purpose of this seminar is to explore case studies of how literary scholarship and scholars move across contrasting languages and cultures. What happens when the practices and methods honed in one location of the discipline get tried out in a distant institutional and cultural setting? What are the political and social contexts that have shaped such instances of importation, exile, or translation? How are once canonical assumptions re-applied to texts or students in a different cultural domain? The scholarly trajectories of Auerbach or Spitzer have been central to debate about transnational literary studies. Yet the broader history of scholarly and intellectual migration has been rarely brought into comparative perspective. This seminar invites analyses of relocation between any of the disparate past or present sites that test our sense of the positioning of literary scholarship.

Seminar Organisers: Na’ama Rokem and Stefan Uhlig.

More information about the seminar can be found here. As above, the ACLA’s online portal will accept paper submissions from 1 September through 23 September.

NB: the wide range of seminars at the 2017 ACLA Annual Meeting can be found here.

 

Calls for Papers, Articles, Translations, Seminars

CFP: ACLA, Refiguring Romanticisms

Refiguring Romanticisms: Cross-Temporal Translations and Gothic Transgressions, American Comparative Literature Association, Utrecht University, the Netherlands, 6-9 July 2017.

Cross-temporal translation and Gothic transgression are present in Romanticism from its beginnings. In the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth maintained the superiority of English Romanticism, presenting German Gothic as a corruption of literary tradition. In turn, Poe’s poems and tales exemplify a ‘dark’ Romanticism partly inspired by the German E.T.A. Hoffmann. Beyond the Romantic era, Kandinsky called his art ‘today’s romanticism’, while Angela Carter’s reinvention of French and German fairy tales is a ‘bloody revision of the Romantic aesthetic’ (Kramer Linkin, 1994). More recently, the Spanish-Argentine Andrès Neuman advertised his 2009 novel Traveller of the Century as ‘a post-modern interpretation of Romanticism’. Despite their great diversity, these examples are linked by ‘the persistence of Romanticism’ (Eldridge 2001), a phenomenon that seemingly ignores geographical and temporal boundaries. This seminar will examine refigurations of Romanticism across chronological and national boundaries, and in its transgressive sister genre of the Gothic.

Our primary aim is to interrogate how and why aesthetic, formal, and philosophical aspects of Romanticism have been re-appropriated and transformed to fit differing agendas, from the early revisions of the Gothic to postmodern and contemporary manifestations of the Romantic. Which aspects of Romanticism express modern concerns under a new guise, and how far do translations or transgressions of Romanticism depart from their models to promote a new aesthetic? Finally, what do such translations and transgressions tell us about what we as critics conceptualise as Romantic? We hope to discuss Post-Romanticisms as a range of cross-temporal, cross-cultural, and Gothic reworkings that project Romantic ideas, forms, and styles differently for new audiences.

Questions / topics may include:

Romantic cosmopolitanism and world literature: how does Romanticism project within/beyond Europe? How can we understand Romanticism’s transnational origins?

Rewritings of Romantic works and genres in new contexts (e.g. postcolonial) and new media: which aspects of Romanticism are privileged / suppressed? How and why have Romantic forms (e.g. the fragment, the fairy tale, the Kunstmärchen) been revived?

Gothic texts as transgressions of the boundaries of Romanticism: how do Gothic tropes and figures subvert, reaffirm or revise the ‘romantic ideology’ (McGann 1983; cf. Hoeveler 2014)?

Critical interrelations of Romanticism and Gothicism: is their long ‘relationship of mutual antagonism and suspicion’ (Townshend and Wright 2016) being refigured now? How relevant is the opposition of ‘high’ Romanticism / ‘low’ Gothic (Gamer 2002)?

Romantic philosophy and theory then and now: how are Romantic ideas of perfectibility, revolution, nature, or the author translated across time and space?

If you are interested in participating in this seminar, please get in touch with the organisers over the summer with your ideas/ abstract before formally submitting an abstract via the ACLA website. Contact Joanna Neilly and Gero Guttzeit.  Submissions for abstracts open from 1st September, with a deadline of 23rd September.

More information about the seminar can be found here.

 

Calls for Papers, Calls for Papers, Articles, Translations, Journals

CFP: The Wenshan Review, Special Issue on Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations

The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture, Vol. 11. No. 2 (June 2018)

Special Issue: Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations, 1776 to the Present

Guest Editors: Dr Li-hsin Hsu (National Chengchi University, Taiwan) and Dr Andrew Taylor (University of Edinburgh, UK)

 

This special issue seeks essays of 6,000 to 10,000 words engaged in debate around historical, cultural and literary issues in the Atlantic World. Whilst national narratives have often sought to assert the truth of universal values, a more self-conscious focus upon the methodological framework of the transnational Atlantic world concerns itself explicitly with ways in which diverse and competing local or national paradigms might contest the kinds of ideological assumptions that underwrite narratives of progress, civilisation and modernity.

The editors are keen to receive submissions that explore what happens when the assumptions of a nationalistic model of doing literary and cultural criticism, in which geography is allegorised as the autonomous locus of all possible meaning, are challenged by forms of encounter and contagion that disrupt and expand our frames of interpretation. How might the Atlantic space map a series of textual disruptions and contagions during the period? In what ways does transatlanticism open up possibilities for thinking about literary comparison as a critical practice? How do the crossings of people, objects and ideas complicate our sense of literary and intellectual inheritance? What kinds of relationship does the Atlantic world have with other spatial paradigms—the Pacific, the Orient, Australasia? The essays in this special issue seek to explore the meshed networks of interaction—aesthetic, ideological, material—that constitute the space of Atlantic exchange. This, we hope, will result in a wide-ranging, geographically diverse collection that displays much of the best research being undertaken in this exciting and vibrant field.

Possible areas of interest may include, but are not limited to:
– Ecology and landscape
– Migration and travel
– Nature and nation
– Asia/Orientalism and transatlanticism
– Social reform
– Class and conflict
– Gender and sexuality
– Art and aesthetics
– Slavery and empire
– Science and technology
– Nationalism and cosmopolitanism

 

Articled are to be submitted online by 30 June 2017. Submission guidelines can be found here.

Li-hsin Hsu is Assistant Professor of English at National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan. She holds a PhD in Transatlantic Romanticism from the University of Edinburgh and specialises in transatlantic studies, ecocriticism, and Orientalism. She received the 2014 Emily Dickinson International Society (EDIS) Scholar in Amherst Award and has published in journals such as Symbiosis: A Transatlantic Journal and The Emily Dickinson Journal.

Andrew Taylor is Senior Lecturer and Head of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He specialises in 19th- and 20th-century North American literature and intellectual history, and has an interest in the intersection of historiography and contemporary American fiction. He’s the author of Henry James and the Father Question (Cambridge UP, 2002), Thinking America: New England Intellectuals and the Varieties of American Experience (U of New Hampshire P, 2010), and co-author of Thomas Pynchon (Manchester UP, 2013). He’s the co-editor of several books including Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader (Johns Hopkins UP, 2007), Stanley Cavell: Literature, Philosophy, Criticism (Manchester UP, 2012), and Stanley Cavell, Literature and Film: The Idea of America (Routledge, 2013). An awardee of the Leverhulme Trust Project Grant, Dr Taylor is a series editor of the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Atlantic Literatures and Cultures, published by Edinburgh UP.
 
*The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture (www.wreview.org) is a Scopus-indexed journal of interdisciplinary nature based in the Department of English, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan.