Cultural Literacy in Europe looks for web-manager/social media correspondent

Please see attached Call for further information. CLE web manager ad sent out 25 Feb 2019 (deadline 6 March)

Overview
Organized by the Centre for Modern European Literature at the University of Kent, this summer school will offer intensive training in the principles and practices of comparative literature. Following the success of the inaugural CHASE summer school in comparative literature in June 2018, this second iteration will build on the first event while taking its intellectual focus in a new direction. The programme is designed for humanities students working on comparative research projects who wish to broaden their knowledge of the discipline, and their use of comparative methodologies, in the light of both classical comparativism and more recent theoretical frameworks within the emerging discipline of world literature and the rise of the global South. The summer school will bring together postgraduate students working in the various fields of comparative/world literature, introducing them to leading specialists in the discipline and offering them a valuable opportunity for both intellectual training and institutional networking.

Programme
The training programme will be delivered through seminars spread across three days. On the morning of the first day, students will be asked to give brief introductions of their current projects; on the afternoon of the third day, they will give full presentations on how these projects can be enriched by including lessons learned from the summer school. Days one and two will conclude with keynote lectures by figures of international standing, conceived as case studies in the theory and practice of comparative/world literature.
For more on the Centre for Modern European Literature, please see:
https://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/researchcentres/eurolit/index.html

Student profile
Applications are invited from postgraduate students, either currently undertaking a PhD or about to start a PhD, working in the field of comparative literature broadly defined. The school is fully funded by CHASE (Consortium for the Humanities in South-East England); accommodation costs and tuition fees of successful applicants will be covered. Students will stay on campus for the duration of the school (3 nights) and will be expected to participate fully in all aspects of the programme.

Application process
Suitably qualified students should submit a brief CV and a one-page outline of their project to: chasecomplit@kent.ac.uk Deadline for submissions is 12 April 2019; admission decisions will be communicated by early May. Up to 15 students will be admitted. Informal enquiries should be directed to: Dr Patricia Novillo-Corvalán p.novillo-corvalan@kent.ac.uk

Programme Directors
– Ben Hutchinson: Professor of European Literature at the University of Kent, Member of the Executive Committee of the BCLA, and author of Comparative Literature: A Very Short Introduction (2018)
– Patricia Novillo-Corvalán: Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent and author of Modernism and Latin America: Transnational Networks of Literary Exchange (2018)
– Francesca Orsini: Professor of Hindi and South Asian Literature at SOAS, Member of the Executive Committee of the BCLA, Editor of Comparative Critical Studies, and PI of ERC project ‘Multilingual Locals and Significant Geographies’

Keynote Lecturers
– Rosinka Chaudhuri, Professor of Cultural Studies and Director of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC), Kolkata.
– Jessica Berman, Professor of English; Language, Literacy, and Culture; and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
CALL FOR APPLICATIONS

EMEL Workshop

Friday, February 15, 2019 – 17:00 to 19:00
TBC
In Hilary Term 2019 OCCT is running a workshop for European and Middle Eastern Languages undergraduates, in order to encourage and help students embarking on comparative literature work for the first time. Participants will be asked to give a 15 minute presentation of a paper connecting authors across different languages and cultures, with senior members of the OCCT Discussion Group acting as respondents. The aim of the workshop is to get undergraduates involved in the activity of the Discussion Group and give them the opportunity to receive feedback from more experienced researchers. The EMEL workshop will be held in Week 5.

For more info please email the co-conveners, Yousif or Mariachiara at mariachiara.leteo@lincoln.ox.ac.uk.

Considered for centuries a marginal dramatic genre straddling the high and low-mimetic modes, with the seminal essay The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (1976) by Peter Brooks melodrama has been credited the status of a dominant narrative form of mass culture. It is now clear that melodrama is a declination of modern imagination oriented to elaborate plots marked by a sharp ethical polarization, by an uninhibited taste for excess (lingering in absolute and devouring passions, as well as in extreme situations to the limit of representability) and by a smug aesthetic of amazement: in short a Manichean and boosted device which from the late Eighteenth century vaudeville spreads, during the Nineteenth century, in opera, in the currents of visionary, historical and social romantic painting, in the realist, naturalist, decadent novel, touching the modernist one, and, during the Twentieth century, explodes in the cinematic melo and then in the television seriality.
Literary studies, visual studies, film studies and television studies offer today many glances. sometimes contradictory, but always stimulating, on this complex phenomenon which has always been transversal to codes, genres and media.

Starting from the study of the historical origins of melodrama, the forthcoming issue of Testo a fronte aims at stimulating research contributions able to focus on its meta-historical, theoretical and intermedia dimension, studying in depth the most resilient archetypical structures and the evolving practices of the contemporary melodramatic universe. What about melodrama in after-postmodernism literary fiction, with its massive return to typically modern mimetic forms? What about melodrama in movies after the crisis of the Hollywood system of genres? What about melodrama in the very articulate system of genres and sub-genres of television fiction? What about melodrama in painting beyond abstraction and in general in the age of digital art?

We invite submissions from different scholar perspectives; possible topics can include but are not limited to:
– reconstruction of important moments in the history of melodrama
– identification and description of the archetypal and metahistorical features of melodrama
– implementation of the notion of melodramatic imagination
– definition and mapping of the intermedia dimension of melodrama
– analysis of melodramatic (literary, visual, audiovisual etc.) texts

Proposals, in Italian or in English (max 400 words), should be sent to: testoafronte@iulm.it, by February 10th, 2019. Please attach a brief biography (maximum 150 words) and an optional selected bibliography (up to 5 titles) relevant to the issue theme.

Notification of acceptance will be sent to authors by February 20th, 2019.

Full papers will be due June 20th, 2019 and will be submitted to double blind peer review.

The Arts of Decadence
on Tue 12 Feb 2019 from 6.30pm
in the Chancellor’s Hall, Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU
(nearest tube station Goodge Street on the Northern Line)

Featuring speakers Martin Sorrell, Lene Østermark-Johansen, Peter Manson and Helen Abbott, along with live performances by Kate Howden (mezzo-soprano), Edmund Danon (baritone) accompanied by Satoshi Kubo (piano) from the National Opera Studio

Music will include fabulous song settings by the French composers Fauré, Ravel, Debussy and Dupace

https://mailchi.mp/ec25efb95508/rimbaud-and-verlaine-foundation-the-arts-of-decadence-tues-12th-feb?e=a3f64c38e7

The Decadent Movement in arts and literature reached its height in the 1890s and early 1900s. It was characterised by fin de siècle style and a questioning of accepted social, political and sexual values and norms. Its most famous representatives include French poets like Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Verlaine, but its influence spread rapidly to the English-speaking world thanks to the tireless advocacy of Arthur Symons and figures such as Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley and WB Yeats. Its impact was also felt across the arts including fine art, architecture and music.

This special event is a celebration of the multifarious arts of decadence and their contribution to the development of new art forms and cultural movements across the English-speaking world.

Martin Sorrell is Emeritus Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Exeter, and has a special interest in decadent literature;

Lene Østermark-Johansen is Associate Professor of English literature at the University of Copenhagen, with a special interest in decadent art;

Peter Manson is a Scottish poet and translator based in Glasgow, whose works include Stéphane Mallarmé: The Poems in Verse, published to acclaim by Miami University Press in 2012;

and Helen Abbott, Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham, who specialises in 19th century French poetry and music, and who leads the Baudelaire Music Project.

Music will be performed by National Opera Studio (NOS) singers Kate Howden (mezzo-soprano) and Edmund Danon (baritone) accompanied by Satoshi Kubo (piano). NOS exists to train a select group of talented young musicians each year to become the leading artists of their generation with the aim of making a significant contribution to the opera ecology and the wider creative and cultural life of the UK through the provision of top-quality professional training.

This event is held in partnership with the AHRC Network: ‘Decadence and Translation’, led by Dr Matthew Creasy (University of Glasgow) and Professor Stefano-Maria Evangelista (Trinity College, Oxford).

This public event concludes the ‘Publishing Decadence in Translation’ conference being held at the Senate House earlier the same day. This one-day roundtable event is bringing together scholars, translators and publishers to discuss the practicalities and pitfalls of publishing Decadent texts in translation for a contemporary market.

How to Book

The event will be held from 6.30pm on Tuesday 12th February in the Chancellor’s Hall, Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU.

The event itself will commence promptly at 7.00pm, and will last about 90 minutes, without an interval.

This event is free of charge but please RSVP in advance to info@rimbaudverlaine.org to reserve a place. Please reserve your place now to avoid disappointment!