The Sincerest Form: Literary Imitation, Adaptation, and Parody
Notre Dame English Graduate Student Conference
University of Notre Dame
South Bend, Indiana
March 3-4, 2011
Keynote Speaker: Professor Julie Sanders, University of Nottingham
From mash-up videos to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the refashioning of cultural artifacts is a primary mode of artistic expression in the twenty-first century. Such appropriative strategies are part of a long literary tradition, one shared by writers as diverse as Geoffrey Chaucer, Carlo Goldoni, Bertolt Brecht, and Jean Rhys. This graduate student conference will explore how writers from around the world reimagine European literature through imitation, adaptation, and parody, from the Middle Ages to the present. These texts, which often cross temporal, spatial, linguistic, and cultural boundaries, raise intriguing questions about the relationships between the past and the present, centers of power and peripheries, the canonical and the non-canonical, and the highbrow and the lowbrow. In addition, we will examine the role that these texts play in cultural interchange within Europe and between Europe and the rest of the world. We will consider as well how these texts disrupt traditional Western notions of intellectual property rights.
A keynote address will be given by Julie Sanders, Professor of English Literature and Drama at the University of Nottingham. Professor Sanders is the author of "Novel Shakespeares: Twentieth-Century Women Novelists and Appropriation" (2001), "Adaptation and Appropriation" (2005), and "Shakespeare and Music: Afterlives and Borrowings" (2007), and serves on the editorial board of "Adaptation," Oxford University Press’s journal on literature and film.
The conference will include a roundtable on the pedagogy of imitations, adaptations, and parodies. The roundtable participants are Professor Sanders; Professor John Sitter, chair of the English Department at the University of Notre Dame; and Dr. Abigail Palko, Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Gender Studies Program at the University of Notre Dame.
Please send abstracts to Lauren Rich at rich.12@nd.edu by December 17, 2010. Abstracts should be no more than 300 words for papers 15-20 minutes in length.
For more information, please contact James Creech (jcreech2@nd.edu) or Lauren Rich (rich.12@nd.edu).
