Tuesday, June 28, 2011

[REMINDER] Locating Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century (Abstracts Due: 6/30/11)

Locating Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century (working title)
Editors: Kelli Marshall and Gabrielle Malcolm / Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
William Shakespeare has long been a global cultural commodity, but in the twenty-first century "Shakespeare" is oft positioned as a social concept with the man almost forgotten amidst the terminology that surrounds the criticism, tourism, adaptation, and utilization of the plays. For instance, the plays themselves are as often re-worked and adapted as performed wholly in their own right on stage. Moreover, there are currently well-established alternative strands, identities, and locations of "Shakespeare" (e.g., metanarratives, gender-reworking, inter-cultural adapting, online streaming), and the growth is as widespread and fast as technology, performance, social networking, and cinema will allow. It is this new and exciting approach to "Shakespeare," which clearly suits both the adaptation process and the technology and mindset of the twenty-first century, that our volume will consider.
Potential topics for the anthology include the following:
--- Shakespeare depicted on film and TV "outside" the mainstream: reality TV documentary from prison, schools, etc.
--- Adaptation online: podcasts, webcasts, webisodes (e.g., Second City's Sassy Gay Friend series), YouTube Shakespeare, Shakespeare on Twitter (e.g., Such Tweet Sorrow)
--- Streaming live theatre: the National Theatre Live and not-so-live Hamlet and Lear experiments
--- Meta-narratives of Shakespeare, positioning the works through embedded and presumed knowledge in adaptations
--- Global Shakespeares located within and for national identities
--- Shakespeare as illustrated text: graphic novels, animation, special effects
--- And of course, any other ways of "locating Shakespeare in the twenty-first century"
Please send a 500-word abstract/synopsis of the project to Kelli Marshall (kellirmarshall_at_gmail.com) by June 30, 2011. Complete essays of approximately 5,000 words would be expected around September 1, 2011.

10th Medieval English Studies Symposium (MESS10): Princes and Paupers: Class, Money and (social and physical) Otherness in medieval and medievalist literature in English.

10th Medieval English Studies Symposium, organised by the School of English, Adam Mickiewicz University will be held in Poznań from 19-20 November, 2011. Mess 10th welcomes papers in both areas, literary and linguistic studies. The literary section concerns mostly class and wealth and their literary representations in the form of endorsements as well as admonitions. Princes and Paupers feature in secular literature of advice as well as in religious works on sins and transgressions, both types offering insight into the nature of medieval social life. We will welcome papers in these and all other areas of research connected with medieval English literature and language. 500-word abstracts should be submitted by the end of August 2011, preferably by e-mail (mess@ifa.amu.edu.pl).

Providing Healthcare in European Cities, cfrom the Middle Ages to the Early Nineteenth Century

Providing Healthcare in European Cities, 
from the Middle Ages to the Early Nineteenth Century
Main session call for papers proposal (M9) – European Association for Urban History (Prague, August 29-September 2012)
Co-organizers :
- Christelle Rabier, The London School of Economics christelle.rabier@normalesup.org
- Philip Rieder, University of Geneva Philip.Rieder@unige.ch
- Patrick Wallis, The London School of Economics P.H.Wallis@lse.ac.uk
- Chloé Deligne, Université libre de Bruxelles Chloe.Deligne@ulb.ac.be
Call for sessions proposal
How did the structures and form of provision of medical services develop in European cities from the Middle Ages to the early nineteenth century? In what ways did the demand for medical services among the population change? And how did the distinctive characteristics of urban settings and individual cities shape the ways in which healthcare was provided to their inhabitants? Cities have long been recognised as nodal points in medical systems, containing concentrations of practitioners, medical institutions, and training alongside high numbers of sick inhabitants. However, recent work on healthcare has begun to reveal radical changes in the supply and demand for medical services in some parts of early modern Europe. These changes were intertwined with developments in international and local trade systems, consumption patterns and welfare institutions, including poor relief and hospitals. The aim of this session is to identify and explore those changes in healthcare provision that occurred in cities, with a view to uncovering the distinctive trajectory of systems of healthcare in urban contexts, cities’ roles as centres of trade and production of medical goods and services, and city inhabitants’ evolving patterns of engagement with commercial, state and community suppliers of medical care. We are particularly interested in papers that develop new methodologies or explore new sources for analysing medical provision, with a view to offer new comparative perspectives. Papers may focus across the full array of medical provision, from assistance and hospital care to individual transactions between individuals and their social groups and practitioners.
Suggested themes:
- Measuring healthcare over time: how can historians measure levels of healthcare provision within the city, whether at an individual or institutional level, within the household or an hospital?
- Urban geographies of healthcare provision: how was healthcare organized within the city? What was the city’s role in providing healthcare to its hinterland? What role did cities play in redistributing medical services and commodities, such as drugs globally traded and locally retailed?
- Urban healthcare providers: shifts in who provided medical services in cities, how their work was organised, and the services and commodities that were provided?
- The urban sick: how did patients’ demands for medicine change over time? How was demand shaped by wealth, age and gender?
- Institutional healthcare provision: how did city regulation and provision of healthcare develop? What were the role of smaller civic groups and institutions, such as guilds or congregations in providing healthcare?
Submissions are to be made via the conference website, with copy to the organizers:
http://www.eauh2012.com/sessions/call-for-paper-proposals/

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Tudor and Stuart Ireland: Culture, Identity and Power. An interdisciplinary conference. University College Dublin, 2 - 3 September 2011.

The Tudor and Stuart Ireland Conference will take place in University College Dublin on Friday and Saturday, 2 - 3 September 2011. Registration is NOW OPEN.
Early Modern Ireland is a flourishing field of research and this conference will provide all scholars interested in the period with an opportunity to share their ideas in an interdisciplinary forum.
Details of the conference programme, speaker biographies and abstracts are now available on our website.
Speakers will include:
Prof. Ciaran Brady (TCD)
Prof. Nicholas Canny (NUIG)
Dr Bernadette Cunningham (RIA)
Prof. Raymond Gillespie (NUIM)
Prof. Marian Lyons (NUIM)
Prof. Mary O'Dowd (QUB)

Tudor and Stuart Ireland Conference, 
c/o School of History and Archives, 
University College Dublin, 
Belfield, 
Dublin 4, 
Ireland.
Email: info@tudorstuartireland.com
Visit the website at http://www.tudorstuartireland.com

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Call for Papers: "New Approaches to Old Texts: Studying Medieval and Early Modern Women and Gender" 2012 Northeast Modern Language Association Conference (NeMLA)

"New Approaches to Old Texts: Studying Medieval and Early Modern Women and Gender." Northeast Modern Language Association Conference, Rochester, NY March 15-18, 2012.
This panel seeks to elicit new interpretations and approaches to studying women and gender in medieval and early modern Europe. Submissions on how to re-evaluate new or existing texts about/by/for medieval and early modern European women are especially welcome as are works that intend to use new technologies such as the internet.

Shakespeare and Memory (22-24 March 2012)

2012 Conference of the Société Française Shakespeare (March 22-24, 2012)
Shakespeare and his contemporaries invent new styles, interpretations or imaginary models by tapping the most ancient sources of collective memory, those most frequently imitated, in literature, history, legend, mythology, iconography… Simultaneously, an unprecedented crisis in learning and representations questions the validity of creative methods based on such acquired knowledge, saturated with references to the past Europe was built on, thus shaking its constitutive cult and culture of memory. Montaigne, although he had no objection himself to repeating and borrowing, denounced its oppressive weight: “There's more ado to interpret interpretations than to interpret things, and more books upon books than upon any other subject. We do but enter-glose our selves. All swarms with commentaries; of Authors there is great penury. Is not the chiefest and most famous knowledge of our ages to know how to understand the wise?”
In their age of paradoxes, Giordano Bruno, a philosopher who gave much thought to the technical workings of Artes memoriae, chose to break with the stifled memory of “the wise”, heirs and commentators of Aristotle, in favour of a liberating logic, and invent an infinite universe of many worlds. His provocative style challenged all literary inheritance with satires of conventional rhetoric, a good indication that memory itself stood at the centre of the crisis. With the advent of printing, the Artes memoriae that used to store and safeguard knowledge had lost much of their urgency, perhaps their relevance. Memory was now required in the service of new acquisitions, casting doubt on the very notion of inheritance – a crisis affecting the values of humanism, religious unity, political governments around Europe, moving away from the clerical basis of learning, having tapped dry and subverted heavy predecessors like the inescapable Petrarch. In the manner of Janus, an Elizabethan icon, memory then looks at the past to decipher an undecided, unreadable future, perhaps invent a new memory or new history: the tale of Troy’s woes will provide a founding legend, and a fake heroic memory, to all the nations of Europe. New rules of writing and dramaturgy will be drawn from Aristotle’s Poetics and Horace’s Ars poetica in numerous essays and treatises. Ovid’s more archaic myth of Acteon will add to the voluptas dolendi inherited from Petrarch, the better to express the pleasurable discontent of mannerist waverings, an epitome of the poet’s delight in subverting and corrupting the most revered literary models. Plutarch supplies material for a baroque rewriting of Antony and Cleopatra’s tragic love, spiced up with a touch of Horace’s reluctant admiration for the “frenzied Queen”. The more recent Plantagenet saga suggests keys to the still unresolved threat of an open succession. Machiavelli combines the lessons of Livy and Tacitus with what he has learnt at various Italian courts to evolve a thoroughly modern theory of power that will serve as basis to portrayals of “politic”, i.e. Machiavellian, monarchs in reconstructions like Shakespeare’s Henry IV: the kind of usurping but efficient ruler Essex might turn into if he did succeed in his bid for Elizabeth’s throne. Memory also invites itself as an obsessive fear, the voice of a guilty conscience that haunts the stage of Richard III, Macbeth, Hamlet in ghostly shape.
Translations from the Latin, Greek, Italian and French arrive upon cue to freshen up the faded, blurred memories of influential texts, imbuing them with new dynamics: “the world is a theatre” to Epictetus, whose Manual is translated in 1567, long before his metaphor becomes a free for all cliché on the Elizabethan stage, in the service of wholly different ends. The discovery of paintings in Nero’s buried Domus Aurea fires imaginings of the “grottesche” whose discontinuities will lead Montaigne to call them an emblem of his own writing. Translations of the Bible appear central to the Reformation programme, suffused with a will to “re-memorize” this founding text under different lights. Myths of pre-lapsarian times, edens and other golden ages of humanity are endlessly revisited, to stress either the “fall into time” caused by Adam’s “sin”, or the violent birth of history in a new “iron age”, in which memory is torn between idealizations of the past, distrust of the present, anxiety and even terror of the future.
The fields to explore are vast and many: the workings of memory and its cult in Shakespeare’s days; the woven memory of old texts into any new one, of another’s text into one’s own; the memory of self born from rehearsed Petrarchan laments, or the Psalmist’s descant on David’s doleful “I”; the study of innovative links between memory and history, memory and knowledge, science, religion, writing, memory of self and autobiography in the first tales of conversions, memory and the history of memory itself; the geography of memory through the use of “loci”, i.e. the imaginary location of memorised objects; or early medical enquiries into the exact location of memory in the brain…
No doubt other areas of research will spring to mind, for instance the remembrance of Shakespeare by his contemporaries, like the admirative yet unquiet tribute to his work of Jonson: the thought that it rests on “little Latine and lesse Greeke” is as good, or as bad, to him, as no memory to speak of. On the other hand our own contemporaries might well need, to paraphrase Charles Mauron’s psychocriticism, to track an “obsessive metaphor” in themselves: has Shakespeare’s absolute conquest of global memory reached the heights of a “personal myth” where he stands immune from any interpretative criteria according to conservative anglophone criticism? Or has he so penetrated the imagination of English-speaking writers that a number of them depend on him to illuminate their own “personal myths”?
Gisèle Venet
Université Paris-III Sorbonne Nouvelle
Call for Papers
Please send your proposals (title and 1/2 page abstract) by 30 September 2011 to : contact@societefrancaiseshakespeare.org

[UPDATE] Conference on the Literary Essay from Montaigne to the Present

Conference on the Literary Essay, London, July 2-3
Speakers: Adam Phillips, Geoff Dyer, Gillian Beer, Andrew O'Hagan,
Hermione Lee, Karl Miller, Jeremy Treglown, Ophelia Field,
Markman Ellis, Peter Howarth, Ophelia Field, Felicity James, Uttara Natarajan, Stefano Evangelista, Adam Piette, Kathryn Murphy, and Sophie Butler.
Subjects include Montaigne, Bacon, Addison and Steele, Hazlitt, Lamb, Carlyle, Macaulay, Pater, Stevenson, Woolf, the Cold War Essay.
Tickets and details available at:
Queries can be addressed to: essay.conference@gmail.com

Open Call For Papers - This Rough Magic (www.thisroughmagic.org)

This Rough Magic (www.thisroughmagic.org) is a journal dedicated to the art of teaching Medieval and Renaissance Literature. As such, we are seeking pedagogically driven, teachable articles that new and veteran faculty may integrate into the classroom.
This is an open call for papers for our fourth issue. Aside from longer articles, book reviews and short essays on integrating non-traditional texts into the classroom are also welcome.
New and veteran faculty are encouraged to submit, as are graduate students. For more information, please check us out on the web:

Space in Early Modern Drama (Collection, special issue of JMEMS) (due 07/01/11)

Complete essay drafts (20-40 pp. double-spaced) are invited for a collection of essays to appear in the Winter 2012-13 issue of Journal for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, edited by Lloyd Kermode and Janette Dillon. The topic of "space" is conceived broadly; we currently have essays on physical theatrical spaces, notions of sacred and secular space, domestic space, bodily relations with urban and environmental space, the relationship of space and place, psychological space. Please email ompkete essays as Word attachments to Lloyd Kermode at lkermode@csulb.edu. Decisions and reports will be returned within three weeks. Final versions of accepted papers are due early summer 2012.

POETIC AND POLITICS OF PLACE IN PASTORAL (MARCH 29-31)

POETIC AND POLITICS OF PLACE IN PASTORAL
International Conference, Université d’Orléans (FRANCE), March 29-31, 2012
(Co-sponsors: REMELICE, Université d’Orléans, and FORELL, Université de Poitiers)
“Historically, pastoral has sometimes activated green consciousness, sometimes euphemized land appropriation. It may direct us toward the realm of physical nature, or it may abstract us from it” (Lawrence Buell. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture).
“Pastoral’s ancient and universal appeal – to come away – requires new examination in an age in which there is no away” (Glen A. Love. Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment).
“Yet the ideas and the images of country and city retain their great force. This persistence has a significance matched only by the fact of the great actual variation, social and historical, of the ideas themselves” (Raymond Williams. The Country and the City)
__________________________________
This conference aims at bringing together scholars studying different genres and aspects of the pastoral in the English-speaking world, either in its historic or its contemporary forms, and thus to achieve an overview or mapping of contemporary work in the field.
Papers should try, in particular, to address the question of how a sense of place informs pastoral writing and art: there are as many versions of Arcadia as there are versions of the pastoral. The notions of poetics and politics in the conference title are meant to draw attention to the way form and ideology conjoin in pastoral evocations of place.
Contributions could therefore concern the following topics, though the list is not inclusive:
- Pastoral is a form of localism (or regionalism): it celebrates being rooted in rural and sometimes bucolic and idyllic places. And yet pastoral writing is also nostalgic about a place that is always elsewhere, in the past of some golden age. What is the relation between the local and the universal in pastoral writing?
- Is pastoral necessarily connected to a place? Are there nomadic versions of the pastoral in which place becomes space?
- Pastoral may be sentimental and allegorical but also practical and specific (for instance, the farmer’s connection to the land); it may dream of a return to nature, a life “close to nature”, or voice concern over the evolution and fate of a specific place. What is the relation between the specific and the allegorical in pastoral writing?
- Pastoral may refer to a specific literary genre (the idyll, the eclogue, pastoral comedy, etc.) or to an attitude (pastoralism). What is the relation between genre and the evocation of place in pastoral writing?
- Pastoral has been variously described as “an island experience”, “a retreat”, a form of “escape” (or escapism). What is the relation between the protected, isolated or marginal sphere of the pastoral and the larger historical context (the court, the city, industrialism, international and colonial commerce, etc.)?
- Pastoral place and pastoralism are frequently presented as alternatives to established and/or hegemonic forms of society and social relations. What are the effects of race, class and gender on the sense of place in pastoral? To what extent may those relations turn a pastoral place into an anti-pastoral one?
- Pastoral is traditionally associated with rurality. Can pastoral place also be evoked in other settings: urban or suburban, colonial, global, extraterrestrial? What are the aesthetic and ideological stakes of relocations of the pastoral?
The conference organisers welcome contributions from scholars in various fields: literature, cultural studies, environmental history, film studies, art.
We will privilege proposals that clearly contribute to the debate over the importance and significance of place in pastoral.
The conference language will be English.
Please send your proposals (300 words and a brief bio) by September 10, 2011 to Thomas Pughe (thomas.pughe@univ-orleans.fr) and Bénédicte Chorier-Fryd (bfryd@univ-poitiers.fr)

[UPDATE] CFP: Shakespearean Reverie (6-8 October, 2011)

The Shakespeare in the Park Festival is a highlight on the cultural calendar of the scenic Darling Downs in Queensland, Australia. In 2011, the Festival has moved to October, to follow the famous Carnival of Flowers, making the parkland venue even more appealing than ever before. For the first time, an academic symposium is being held in conjunction with the Festival on 6-8 October, 2011. The symposium theme is Shakespearean Reverie. Confirmed keynotes for this event, to be held at the magnificent Cobb & Co Museum, are:
• Mary Floyd-Wilson (North Carolina), author of English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama
• Paul Yachnin (McGill), former President of the Shakespeare Association of America and author of The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England: A Collaborative Debate (with Anthony Dawson), and Stage-wrights: Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and the Making of Theatrical Value
In the year that the Shakespeare-in-the-Park performance will focus on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it seems appropriate to reflect on the theme of “reverie” in Shakespeare’s theatre. In our world, “reverie” captures the idea of being lost in thought, even daydreaming, and we get this sense of the word from the early moderns. But in many other senses in which the term “reverie” is now obsolete, the early moderns also understood it as something less fanciful. In its French origins, “reverie” denoted madness, wildness, uncontrollable rage or, for that matter, uncontrollable delight, revelry and absurdity. We welcome presentations that treat any of these aspects of early modern “reverie” in Shakespeare’s theatre, including, for example:
• Revelry and the public theatre companies;
• Representations of wildness, the grotesque, or supernatural;
• Early modern cognition and dreaming;
• Performance of the passions and the actor’s body;
• A Shakespearean theatre of the absurd.
Following some queries arising in relation to the initial CFP, the symposium convenors wish to emphasise that we are interested in papers that deal with any play or historical phenomena and are happy to accept papers that do not touch on Midsummer. We therefore invite further abstracts (300 words maximum) for papers of 20 minutes duration or proposals for panels on any aspect of the theme of “Shakespearean Reverie,” to be submitted by 10 July, 2011, via email to: Shakespeare.Symposiums@usq.edu.au
For more information, please contact the symposium convenors, Dr Laurie Johnson (johnsonl@usq.edu.au) or Dr Darryl Chalk (darryl.chalk@usq.edu.au), and follow updates on the symposium web site:http://www.usq.edu.au/shakespeare/symposium

Inarticulacy: An Interdisciplinary Early Modern Conference

Inarticulacy: An Interdisciplinary Early Modern Conference
University of California, Berkeley
November 12 - 13, 2011
When Cordelia responds to Lear with “Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave/My heart into my mouth” she both does and does not follow her own resolution to “Love, and be silent.” Like Hamlet before her, Cordelia has “that within which passeth show,” however, as a character on the stage, she is bound by literary convention to speak. Yet broader conventions, perhaps even necessity, compel human expression to manifest in human voice. As some philosophers have argued, to see and to be seen is not the only activity that provides the objective reality to subjective experience, but also to hear and to be heard. But what happens when words do not seem to suffice? And how can a scholarship dependent on reconstructed 'presence' interpret such absences, silences, and imprecisions in literary texts, the historical record, and visual media?
This conference concerns such moments at the intersection of speech, silence, and wordless expression, inviting papers of eight to ten pages (approximately 2,000 words) on the topic of inarticulacy in the Early Modern period. Aspects to consider include:
Gaps and silences in written records
The visual arts
Translation and its attendant anxieties
Material historicism
Reading or staging silence
The role of material objects or landscape
Religious writing and the limits of human knowledge
Incorporating others’ words (intertextuality)
Ekphrasis
Quantification and taxonomy
Stage history
Protestant logocentrism and its discontents
The inexpressibility topos
Representations of grief and trauma
Censorship and surveillance
Unfinished works
Please submit paper titles and abstracts of no more than 250 words toBerkeleyEarlyModern@gmail.com by September 1, 2011. If you have any questions feel free to contact the conference organizers at the same address. We’ll look forward to reading your submissions!
Stephanie Bahr
Rebecca Munson
Stephanie Moore
Trudy Obi
Jane Raisch
Jason Rozumalski

Filming Shakespeare(s) NeMLA 2012

This panel seeks papers about modernist and/or postmodernist film versions or adaptations of Shakespearean or Renaissance plays. We will examine how these films negotiate between contemporary cultural/ideological concerns (expressed in the films) and those of Shakespeare’s time (expressed in the plays). Papers about non-Anglophone film adaptations are also welcome, especially if they deal with (post)modern concerns. Please send 200-300 word abstracts to Phillip Zapkin, pzapkin@mix.wvu.edu, by 30 Sept. 2011.
NeMLA 2012 will be hosted by St. John Fisher College in Rochester, NY, from 15-18 March. The conference will take place at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown Rochester.

[REMINDER] Essay Collection: Film & Digital Adaptations of Shakespeare's The Tempest. Due: July 1, 2011

Essays for a forthcoming collection on Film & Digital Adaptations of Shakespeare’s The Tempest
Due: July 1, 2011
Melting into Air: Film and Digital Adaptations of Shakespeare’s Tempest
Edited by Jennifer L. Ailles and Donald G. Moore, Foreword by Daniel Fischlin
2011 marks the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. We are looking for essays to commemorate this event by reflecting on the legacy of The Tempest in film. Essays should seek to define the status of The Tempest in today’s digital and socially networked world as well as explore the meaning of modern forms and adaptations of the play. How have film and the digital modes of access changed the way The Tempest circulates and influences imaginations in today’s globalized entertainment market? We are seeking essays that are as rigorously theoretical as they are eminently accessible, with no particular restrictions on theme or methodology. For example, essays might explore how recent versions of The Tempest represent and respond to the following issues: empire and international politics, political upheaval, economics, violence, religious diversity, race, ecology, theatricality, gender, queer and pomosexuality, plasticity, aesthetics, the materiality of film and digital culture, temporality, fetishization, rhizomatic intersections, allegories of Otherness and its allergies, and the process of adaptation. While the focus should clearly be on film and digital adaptations of The Tempest, all essays should be historically oriented to reflect the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s last official play.
We are very interested in analyses of neglected or little-known, international, non-Western, independent, children's, music videos, television, and non-mainstream films, along with web- and cloud-based adaptations including Twitter and YouTube (i.e. "Lego Tempest").
We are also looking for a few essays that give *NEW* readings and perspectives of classic versions, from the earliest silent films to Taymor’s 2010 adaptation and beyond. Think: what is new for 2011?
We have already secured several essays and are currently looking for seven to ten more to complete the project.
Completed essays should be 20-25 pages, MLA format. Include contact information and a brief 3-4 sentence biography with submission. Please email to both editors as a Word attachment to: jenniferailles@yahoo.com andmooredonaldg@gmail.com by July 1, 2011.

Educating the Imagination: A Conference in Honour of Northrop Frye on the Centenary of His Birth October 4,5,6 2012

Twenty years after his death, Northrop Frye, the author of Fearful Symmetry and Anatomy of Criticism, continues to be one of the most read and the most quoted of literary critics. His attention to form, specifically to genre and mode, and his understanding of literature as a totality have directly influenced two later generations of critics, including Hayden White Fredric Jameson, and Franco Moretti. In order to celebrate this ongoing legacy, the Department of English and the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, Frye’s home throughout his career, have organized a three-day symposium in his honour.
Keynote speakers:
Ian Balfour, York University, author of Northrop Frye (1988), The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy (2002)
Robert Bringhurst, poet, author of A Story As Sharp As a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World (1999) and Selected Poetry (2009)
J. Edward Chamberlin, University of Toronto, author of Come Back to Me My Language: Poetry and the West Indies (1993) and If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? (2003)
Michael Dolzani, Baldwin-Wallace College, editor of Frye’s Notebooks
W.J.T. Mitchell, University of Chicago, editor of Critical Inquiry and author of What Do Pictures Want? (2005) and Picture Theory (1994)
Gordon Teskey, Harvard University, author of Delirious Milton (2006); Allegory and Violence (1996)
There will be panels devoted to Frye’s specific legacy, which we are now in a better position to appreciate because of the completed publication of the Collected Works in thirty volumes. But we also invite speakers to take inspiration from Frye and to consider literary and cultural topics such as:
1. Educating the Imagination when the Humanities are under threat
Frye and Comparative Literature
2. the place of Western Literature and theory in a global context.
The spread and the provincialization of Europe.
The limits of the Great Code
3. Contemporary manifestations of traditional literary modes:
the popular romance
contemporary tragedy
irony after postmodernism
4. creative responses to the Bible in an era of fundamentalism and secularism
5. The survival of the literary imagination in a digital age
6. Canadian literature in a postnational age
7. The Great Code and Islam
8. History as Narrative
9. Nature in an era of environmental crisis
10. Local literature, local forms
Proposals for papers or panels of papers are welcome. Abstracts of 200 words (for papers) are due January 31, 2012. Please send them by e-mail tofrye.2012@utoronto.ca
Organizers: Alan Bewell, Chair, Department of English (a.bewell@utoronto.ca)
Neil ten Kortenaar, Director, Centre for Comparative Literature (neil.kortenaar@utoronto.ca)
Germaine Warkentin

Shakespeare and Memory (22-24 March 2012)

2012 Conference of the Société Française Shakespeare (March 22-24, 2012)
Shakespeare and his contemporaries invent new styles, interpretations or imaginary models by tapping the most ancient sources of collective memory, those most frequently imitated, in literature, history, legend, mythology, iconography… Simultaneously, an unprecedented crisis in learning and representations questions the validity of creative methods based on such acquired knowledge, saturated with references to the past Europe was built on, thus shaking its constitutive cult and culture of memory. Montaigne, although he had no objection himself to repeating and borrowing, denounced its oppressive weight: “There's more ado to interpret interpretations than to interpret things, and more books upon books than upon any other subject. We do but enter-glose our selves. All swarms with commentaries; of Authors there is great penury. Is not the chiefest and most famous knowledge of our ages to know how to understand the wise?”
In their age of paradoxes, Giordano Bruno, a philosopher who gave much thought to the technical workings of Artes memoriae, chose to break with the stifled memory of “the wise”, heirs and commentators of Aristotle, in favour of a liberating logic, and invent an infinite universe of many worlds. His provocative style challenged all literary inheritance with satires of conventional rhetoric, a good indication that memory itself stood at the centre of the crisis. With the advent of printing, the Artes memoriae that used to store and safeguard knowledge had lost much of their urgency, perhaps their relevance. Memory was now required in the service of new acquisitions, casting doubt on the very notion of inheritance – a crisis affecting the values of humanism, religious unity, political governments around Europe, moving away from the clerical basis of learning, having tapped dry and subverted heavy predecessors like the inescapable Petrarch. In the manner of Janus, an Elizabethan icon, memory then looks at the past to decipher an undecided, unreadable future, perhaps invent a new memory or new history: the tale of Troy’s woes will provide a founding legend, and a fake heroic memory, to all the nations of Europe. New rules of writing and dramaturgy will be drawn from Aristotle’s Poetics and Horace’s Ars poetica in numerous essays and treatises. Ovid’s more archaic myth of Acteon will add to the voluptas dolendi inherited from Petrarch, the better to express the pleasurable discontent of mannerist waverings, an epitome of the poet’s delight in subverting and corrupting the most revered literary models. Plutarch supplies material for a baroque rewriting of Antony and Cleopatra’s tragic love, spiced up with a touch of Horace’s reluctant admiration for the “frenzied Queen”. The more recent Plantagenet saga suggests keys to the still unresolved threat of an open succession. Machiavelli combines the lessons of Livy and Tacitus with what he has learnt at various Italian courts to evolve a thoroughly modern theory of power that will serve as basis to portrayals of “politic”, i.e. Machiavellian, monarchs in reconstructions like Shakespeare’s Henry IV: the kind of usurping but efficient ruler Essex might turn into if he did succeed in his bid for Elizabeth’s throne. Memory also invites itself as an obsessive fear, the voice of a guilty conscience that haunts the stage of Richard III, Macbeth, Hamlet in ghostly shape.
Translations from the Latin, Greek, Italian and French arrive upon cue to freshen up the faded, blurred memories of influential texts, imbuing them with new dynamics: “the world is a theatre” to Epictetus, whose Manual is translated in 1567, long before his metaphor becomes a free for all cliché on the Elizabethan stage, in the service of wholly different ends. The discovery of paintings in Nero’s buried Domus Aurea fires imaginings of the “grottesche” whose discontinuities will lead Montaigne to call them an emblem of his own writing. Translations of the Bible appear central to the Reformation programme, suffused with a will to “re-memorize” this founding text under different lights. Myths of pre-lapsarian times, edens and other golden ages of humanity are endlessly revisited, to stress either the “fall into time” caused by Adam’s “sin”, or the violent birth of history in a new “iron age”, in which memory is torn between idealizations of the past, distrust of the present, anxiety and even terror of the future.
The fields to explore are vast and many: the workings of memory and its cult in Shakespeare’s days; the woven memory of old texts into any new one, of another’s text into one’s own; the memory of self born from rehearsed Petrarchan laments, or the Psalmist’s descant on David’s doleful “I”; the study of innovative links between memory and history, memory and knowledge, science, religion, writing, memory of self and autobiography in the first tales of conversions, memory and the history of memory itself; the geography of memory through the use of “loci”, i.e. the imaginary location of memorised objects; or early medical enquiries into the exact location of memory in the brain…
No doubt other areas of research will spring to mind, for instance the remembrance of Shakespeare by his contemporaries, like the admirative yet unquiet tribute to his work of Jonson: the thought that it rests on “little Latine and lesse Greeke” is as good, or as bad, to him, as no memory to speak of. On the other hand our own contemporaries might well need, to paraphrase Charles Mauron’s psychocriticism, to track an “obsessive metaphor” in themselves: has Shakespeare’s absolute conquest of global memory reached the heights of a “personal myth” where he stands immune from any interpretative criteria according to conservative anglophone criticism? Or has he so penetrated the imagination of English-speaking writers that a number of them depend on him to illuminate their own “personal myths”?
Gisèle Venet
Université Paris-III Sorbonne Nouvelle
Call for Papers
Please send your proposals (title and 1/2 page abstract) by 30 September 2011 to : contact@societefrancaiseshakespeare.org

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

PhD Fellowships in Digital Renaissance and Early Modern Studies in Cork, IE

PhD Fellowships in Digital Renaissance and Early Modern Studies


A PhD program in Digital Humanities with a focus on Renaissance studies based at University College in Cork and utilizing resources of Trinity College in Dublin, NUI Maynooth, NUI Galway, QU Belfast, is now offering four-year fellowships of 16,000 euro plus tuition.

Program foci
Phd projects may be devoted to any aspect of Renaissance and Early Modern cultural history (Continental Europe, Britain, Ireland), keeping in mind the relevance to Digital Humanities.
http://www.ucc.ie/en/cacsss/

Program coordinator:
Brendan Dooley, Professor of Renaissance Studies http://www.ucc.ie/en/cacsssgrads/staff/acad/ProfessorBrendanDooley/
Program resources
Resources at the major locations include the Libraries of UCC (Special Collections, including Sources for 17-19C historical studies and early printed books, St. Finn Barre’s Cathedral Library collection), NUIG; TCD, in addition, Marsh’s Library, Dublin; the National Gallery of Ireland, etc.

The Program
The first two years include technical and subject training within the PhD program, Digital Arts and Humanities, accompanied by project work, followed by focus on completing dissertation: http://www.ucc.ie/en/cacsssgrads/grep/DigitalArtsandHumanities/

APPLICATIONS:
Include a 1500 project description.
Digital Renaissance @ University College Cork

UCC staff has wide experience in digital arts and humanities, especially in regard to Irish and European history and humanities computing. Some current projects and collaborations in the field at UCC include: CELT, a corpus of online texts for Irish history, literature and politics; LOCUS a new Historical Dictionary of Irish place names and tribal names Online; CELTIC DIGITAL INITIATIVE, which aims to make scarce resources (such as texts, images and bibliographies) available in an electronic format to students and scholars; ArCH which aims to create a series of facsimile editions online of the major historical Irish manuscripts.

Thursday, June 9, 2011

[UPDATE] The Chivalric Knight in Literature - RMMLA Panel (Oct 6-8, 2011) Deadline June 24th

“The Chivalric Knight in Literature”, a special session at the annual meeting of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, which will take place October 6-8, 2011 in Scottsdale, AZ, is looking for papers that deal with any aspect of the presentation of chivalric knights in literature, focusing on works from the Medieval and Early Modern Periods.
Please forward 250-350 word proposals, including title, professional affiliation, address (especially e-mail), and phone number by June 24, 2011 to the following email address: RMace-RMMLA@hotmail.com. Hard copies of submissions may also be sent to Richard Mace, English Department, Pace University, 861 Bedford Road, Pleasantville, NY 10570.
Electronic submissions are encouraged and notifications will be sent out by June 25th.
Non-RMMLA members may propose a paper, but membership in RMMLA is required of all presenters by July 1. Feel free to contact me with any questions.
For more information, visit the 2011 RMMLA conference site:http://rmmla.wsu.edu/conferences/conf11Scottsdale/default.asp
Themes include and are not limited:
Male masculinity
Female masculinity
Historic approaches
Knights as husbands and lovers
Knights as warrior
Travel

The Winter's Tale symposium -- 12 November 2011

This one-day Symposium is a part of the larger month-long Liverpool Winter’s Tale Festival (www.liv.ac.uk/the-winters-tale) celebrating the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. It aims to enhance our understanding of this complex play, and papers presented at the symposium may focus on the text at the moment of production, its relationship with its predecessors and contemporaries, both within Shakespeare’s own writing and beyond, its transmission through editorial processes, as well as its interpretation through contemporary performances and re-readings. Confirmed speakers include Helen Cooper (Cambridge), Subha Mukherji (Cambridge) and Lori Humphrey Newcomb (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).
We warmly invite proposals for 15-20 minute papers. Proposals for papers, including titles and abstracts (of no more than 300 words) should be sent to Nandini Das (ndas@liverpool.ac.uk) before 31st July 2011.
We are also delighted to offer up to 3 bursaries of £100 each, which will be awarded to postgraduate speakers courtesy of the Society for Renaissance Studies, www.rensoc.org.uk.

The Notion of Friendship in Dante and Medieval Italian Writers.

The Notion of Friendship in Dante and Medieval Italian
Writers.

The representation of friendship and its theoretical background (as found in works by Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine and others) has not yet been sufficiently probed in the field of Italian literature. This panel seeks to foster critical discussion on friendship in Dante and other medieval authors.
Abstracts of 150 words to Francesco Ciabattoni by September 30th.

Monday, June 6, 2011

Christopher Marlowe in Performance (15 - 18, Apr 2012, deadline Sep 30, 2011)

This panel seeks to examine the stage history of Christopher Marlowe’s dramatic works, considering the literature as the product of a theatre artist. Papers will be asked to approach Marlowe's plays from a theatrical standpoint, in order to discuss what we might learn from by examining the force of performance as a shaping factor in the reception of Marlowe’s small but vibrant body of work. Papers that discuss cinematic treatments of the plays, as well as considerations of Marlowe’s place in Elizabethan stage history are also welcome. Please send abstracts of 250 words to Louise Geddes atLGeddes@adelphi.edu. Deadline for submissions is September 30, 2011.

Women and Texts During the Middle Ages (Special Session), MMLA

The special session seeks submissions that focus on how certain medieval women negotiated their place in the work through the writings, through the writings of others about them, or through the imitation of textual female models.  Papers may focus on any historical or fictional female figure from the medieval period.

Faculty members and graduate students are welcome to submit a detailed abstract to dragiyski@wustl.edu

deadline:  July 10, 2011.

Imagining Magic and Witchcraft in Medieval and Early Modern Literature

The Medieval and Early Modern English Studies Association of Korea and the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Seoul National University will co-host an international conference under the title of “Imagining Magic and Witchcraft in Medieval and Early Modern Literature.” In medieval and early modern society, magic and witchcraft provided sources of popular and literary imagination and objects of both sheer fascination and collective anxiety, as well as pretexts for political and religious persecution. They also marked the frontier of scientific inquiry and human understanding. Imagining magic and witchcraft was an attempt to map the unmappable—the supernatural, the unknown, and the prohibited. It was also inseparable from imagining (and policing) alterity because stigmatizing the supernatural was in a nutshell concomitant with supernaturalizing the stigmatized. The discourse of magic and witchcraft thus inevitably overlapped and colluded with ideological discourses on gender, sexuality, race, and religion. The conference will explore how medieval and early modern texts—either European or non-European—imagine/represent magic and witchcraft and how such imagining/representation interacts with the ideologies and mentalities of the periods. It will be a small yet lively forum accommodating a maximum of fifteen speakers. Travel grants (covering three-day hotel expenses) will be available on a limited basis. To apply for participation, email your title, abstract, and CV to the conference organizer by July 15, 2011. Graduate students are welcome to participate.
Conference Organizer:
Hyonjin Kim
Associate Professor of English Literature
Seoul National University
Seoul 151-745, Republic of Korea
Email: hyonjin@snu.ac.kr
Phone: +82-2-880-6086
Fax.: +82-2-887-7850

Special Session Topic "Seriously Different: Playing the Foreign in Early Modern Drama" November 3-6 St. Louis, Missouri

People and commodities from abroad played a vital role in Renaissance London's urban scene, and their influence made their way into the era's theaters as well. The panel aims to explore how early modern dramas played with the foreign. How are foreign people, texts, and commodities represented in the Renaissance theater? How do these dramas play with the notion of foreigness, and to what effect? Papers can explore playhouse invocations, appropriations, and exploitations of the foreign, as well as ways in which early modern drama invited audience members to lay claim to the foreign. Please submit 250-word abstracts to Carol Mejia LaPerle at ‎carol.mejia-laperle@wright.edu‎ and Hillary Nunn at nunn@uakron.edu by July 11, 2011.

Prayer and Performance: acts of belief as symbolic communication (1450-1650), April 23-24 2012, Aarhus, Denmark

This project seeks to explore aspects of prayer as a performative act in European culture during the late medieval and early modern period, considering these findings in light of the most current theoretical and anthropological perspectives. An intentionally interdisciplinary effort, it will draw together studies of literature, material culture and religious anthropology. The project intends to answer the following questions:
How was prayer represented in literature, plays or works of art?
How do prayers in plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe and Middleton, for example, register responses to the controversies and debates about what constituted true or effective prayer?
How did communities utilize prayer as a distinguishing feature for their religious identity, and how were these forms policed?
How was prayer bound up in the material culture of religious practice (funeral rites, for example) and the social practices that determined social status of different periods?
More importantly, how might these literary, social and material gestures serve as a marker for shifting social perspectives and customs, especially during the Reformation?
Papers are invited from those who work on prayer during this period, either through language, material culture, social practice or from a more theoretical perspective. The aim will be share research, whether it be an examination of the architecture created to facilitate prayer, the texts created to preserve, stimulate, guide or police prayer (poetry, hymns, sermons, or polemic), or more scientific attempts to define a person or community’s relationship to the practice of prayer.
Please submit proposals of approx. 150 words for papers of 20 minutes in length. Panels on specific aspects of early modern prayer will also be considered and should include a brief summary of the panel focus with 150 word proposals of each paper included in the panel. All submissions should be made via email (prayer@hum.au.dk) by 15 October 2011.

Forbidden Places and Prohibited Spaces in English Women’s Writing (1640-1740) Abstracts due 9/30/2011; NEMLA: March 15-18, 2012

In early modern England, travel has the disruptive potential to alter the female traveler as well as to question, defy, and change the shape, rules, and parameters of her social space. Physical journeys open up opportunities for more impalpable travel, including but not limited to social, political, and internal journeys. As Rosi Braidotti has said, “some of the greatest trips can take place without physically moving from one’s habitat. It’s the subversion of set conventions that defines the nomadic state, not the literal act of traveling” (Nomadic Subjects, 5). This panel seeks to draw a connection between the physical act of traveling itself and the variety of figurative journeys that ensue because of a woman’s movement in the world. We will discuss travel as including the more subtle movements through immaterial social and hierarchical boundaries. Early modern texts are full of narratives, both fictional and real, of these journeys into prohibited places and spaces. This panel will explore the transformative effects of travel on women. In what ways does physical movement permit other immaterial types of movement and create a space for subversion? How does movement within society, across its social and hierarchical boundaries, challenge existing beliefs and practices? How do intangible journeys alter the landscape of power in which women operate? Please send 300 word abstracts to Andrea Fabrizio or Ruth Garcia atFabrizioGarciaabstracts@gmail.com by September 30, 2011.
Please include with your abstract:
Name and Affiliation
Email address
Postal address
Telephone number
A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee with registration)
43rd Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
March 15-18, 2012
Rochester, New York – Hyatt Rochester
Host Institution: St. John Fisher College
Keynote speaker: Jennifer Egan, 2011 Pulitzer Prize winner, A Visit from the Goon Squad
The 43rd annual convention will be held March 15-18th in Rochester, New York at the Hyatt Regency Hotel downtown, located minutes away from convenient air, bus, and train transportation options for attendees. St. John Fisher College will serve as the host college, and the diverse array of area institutions are coordinating with conference organizers to sponsor various activities, such as celebrated keynote speakers, local events, and fiction readings.
Interested participants may submit abstracts to more than one NeMLA session; however, panelists can only present one paper (panel or seminar). Convention participants may present a paper at a panel and also present at a creative session or participate in a roundtable.http://www.nemla.org/convention/2012/cfp.html