“What If?”: Reading Worlds of Possibility

June 14-15, 2018 | The University of Sydney, Australia

Academic work is not always thought of as a process of discovery so much as labouring over something that already has a foregone conclusion or endpoint. However at the upcoming conference, ‘“What If?”: Reading Worlds of Possibility’, we would like to invert this notion, to explore the ideas of possibility and play in academic work. This conference seeks to pose questions such as: How might we imagine things to be? How could things have turned out? What if something had gone differently? At this interdisciplinary conference organised by English literature postgraduates at the University of Sydney, we seek work that engages with potentiality and possibility, and new and inventive perspectives. We invite rereadings and reimaginings, as well as new research at early or late stages of development.

• Possible proposals could consider, but are not limited to:
• Rereading from a non-traditional perspective, field, or focus
• Rereading history
• Rereading recent and/or neglected texts
• Reading beyond Anglophone literature(s)
• Reimagining canonical works, authors, etc.
• Reimagining literary criticism
• Reimagining (non-)literary forms or genres
• Exploring fictional imaginations of alternative futures
• Exploring archives of possibility
• Exploring literary and linguistic edges or margins

We welcome proposals from Honours students, postgraduate students, and Early Career researchers in any discipline. However, we speak most directly to English studies, comparative literary studies, screen studies, theatre and performance studies, history, and philosophy.

We encourage pre-formed panels comprising of three twenty-minute papers. However, individual papers will also be considered.

If proposing a panel please send a single email including:
Full name, institutional affiliation, paper title, 250-word abstract, and up to 200-word author bio for each delegate’s paper
An overall title for the panel
Optional: a prospective chair for the panel (if you do not elect someone, or your choice is/becomes unavailable, we will organise an alternative chair)

If proposing an individual paper:
Full name, institutional affiliation, title, 250-word abstract, and up to 200-word author bio

Please send all proposals to usyd.english.postgraduates@gmail.com with the subject line ‘“What If?” Proposal’ by April 30, 2018.

Graduate travel bursaries will be available for some conference delegates based outside the Sydney region. Those who wish to be considered should notify us in their email.

This CFP and further conference information can also be viewed at usydenglishconference.wordpress.com or on Twitter.

Different parts, foreign countries
Remembering and recreating lost worlds in fiction, media and history
Friday 7 September 2018
Macquarie University, Sydney

A one-day symposium organised by The Centre for Applied History and the Department of English

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” This famous opening sentence from L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953) provokes questions of how the “pastness” of the past is remembered, recuperated and represented, especially in this postmodern age where the complications of reconstructing a plausible past are well-known: the problems of erratic and unreliable memory, for example; (hi)stories that are created from fragments of archival evidence and oral interviews; the deliberate choices writers make in emplotting historical narratives, whether fiction or nonfiction; and the role of the writer’s imagination in bringing a past world to life and making it relevant to a present-day audience – the task, in empiricist historian Herbert Butterfield’s words, of transforming a “heap of broken fragments” or a “jumble of pictures” caught from the windows of a passing train into the “spirit of the age” and a “literature of power”.

This one-day symposium focuses on how the lost worlds of the past are conceptualised and created in literature, film, television, digital media, art and history. We are particularly interested in the construction of historical worlds through narrative/story-telling in different genres and media. Possible topics include:

• close readings of historical fiction that explore the construction of particular communities
• analyses of the mise-en-scène or diegetic world of historical narratives
• the construction of Bakhtinian chronotopes of the past
• how a particular medium or narrative genre influences and/or creates the historical world being represented
• narratives of counterfactual history that re-imagine or re-invent past worlds
• the generic and narratological interplay between literary and historical writing
• reconstructing the narrative worlds of the individual, family or community through biography, oral history, family and community history
• the “archival turn” in narrativising and/or visually representing past worlds
• any other topic related to remembering and recreating past worlds

Please send a 150-200 word proposal to hsuming.teo@mq.edu.au or stephanie.russo@mq.edu.au by Friday, 4 May 2018.

For more information 

Call for papers: Shakespeare and the animal world

Call for papers for the 2019 French Shakespeare Society conference

Paris, Fondation Deutsch de la Meurthe, 10-12 January 2019

CFP online: https://journals.openedition.org/shakespeare/4058

Call for papers

In the title of a book published in 1973, Terence Hawkes spoke of “Shakespeare’s talking animals”. Language and communication are not, by far the only features which, for the playwright, served to differentiate men from animals. As the son of a Stratford glover, who, in his young days, must have attended the slaughter and suffering of beasts while being made an apprentice in the treatment of their skins, Shakespeare developed a personal sensibility and a particular attention to animals.

Animals occupy a prominent place in the canon, both by their presence on stage (one may here think of Crab, Lance’s dog in The Two Gentlemen of Verona or the bear in The Winter’s Tale) and in the reminiscence of the medieval world of heraldry and of the bestiaries, of hunting and sacrificial rites. In the historiae animalium of Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, Conrad Gesner or Edward Topsell, but also in the contemporary emblem books, Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights found many examples for his animal imagery as well as for various proverbs and ironical fables. Ovid’s Metamorphoses were another important source for the ass Bottom, the wolf Shylock, Orsino comparing himself to Acteon, Macbeth’s currish murderers, Lear’s ‘pelican daughters’ as well as Caliban, the fish-man of The Tempest. Desdemona and Othello, according to Iago, “are making the beast with two backs” and their “unnatural” love threatens Venice with a whole generation of monsters. But through its masks and many disguises, theatre encourages such metamorphoses, for laughs, but also in order to frighten the spectators or to give them food for thought, as in the case of De Flores’s dog face (in Middleton’s The Changeling) or the animal-coded names of the characters in Ben Jonson’s Volpone.

Is man “the paragon of animals” as Hamlet says to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in a fit of bitter irony? Beyond feelings of real compassion for the suffering, sentient beast which serve to illustrate melancholy or taedium vitae, animals are presented as possible models for man. In Henry V, the archbishop of Canterbury claims that honey-bees “teach / The act of order to a peopled kingdom”, while, for Cleopatra, the beauty and bounty of Antony is encapsulated in the image of the dolphin showing “his back above / The element”.

The word “beast”, which has 75 occurrences in the canon, differs from the word “animal” (only 8 occurrences) which etymologically refers to the breath of life (anima) responsible for motion. This raises the issue of taming and domestication, and thus that of the opposition between socialised and savage creatures. In The Taming of the Shrew, the Lord, who returns from a hunting party, takes loving care of his dogs while feeling nauseated by the sight of the drunken beggar Christopher Sly: “O monstrous beast, how like a swine he lies!” Shakespeare proves attentive to the singularity and diversity of individuals more than to the species or category to which they are supposed to belong, so that his animal kingdom leads to a dizzying multiplication of appellations as well as to great linguistic virtuosity. This world, for him, illustrates the idea of hierarchy and symbolises law and order as much as such subversive ends as Hamlet’s referring to the worm, “the only emperor for diet”, which, through the fish which it serves to catch, allows the beggar to eat of the flesh of the king.

The very same animals that are presented onstage as scenic objects or instruments at the service of living performances are also at the origin of the production of tools and objects of daily life. The drum, for instance, over which skins of goats, lambs, cows, fishes or reptiles had been stretched since early antiquity, retained in its emblems the characteristics of the animal used for its manufacturing. Contrary to this warlike instrument, the lute materialises the celestial power of harmony which elevates the soul and takes it closer to God. But with its strings made with animal guts and its tortoise-shaped sound-box, the instrument also connoted suspicious animal qualities, poles apart from the supernatural virtues attached to it.

This conference invites a vast range and variety of proposals on Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The following list, which by no means claims to be exhaustive, may serve to suggest possible topics and fields of investigation:

• The role of animal heraldry;
• The tradition of the fable and its subversion;
• The hunt, its rites, vocabulary and imagery;
• Domestication and savagery; domestic animals and wild beasts;
• The function of metamorphosis; animals in the world of imagination, of the dream or of the unconscious; hybrids and fantastic beasts; esoteric lore and its chimeras;
• Animal images of madness, possession and witchcraft;
• The animal kingdom as related to climate and the environment;
• The animalisation of man (and woman) and the humanisation of the animal;
• Puns, terminology, insults, lexical and linguistic combinations in the field of the animal kingdom;
• Meat consumption, slaughter and butchery; cruelty against vs. love of and pity for animals;
• Animals in sports, games and festivities; animal imagery in popular riots, carnivals and the world upside down;
• Animals as providing models or counter-models for social and political organisation; the animal kingdom as a mirror of law and order vs. the animal kingdom as image of chaos;
• Classifications, inventories and hierarchies: from the king of animals to pest, from nobility to the ignoble, from the admirable to the frightening or the revolting;
• Animality, bestiality, sexuality;
• Objects related to the animal world: pelts, furs, objects made out of horn, fetishes, weapons, musical instruments;
• Animals and music;
• Animals on stage and on screen.

Submission procedure

Please send your proposals to contact@societefrancaiseshakespeare.org by 10 May 2018, with a title, an abstract (between 500 and 800 words) and a brief biographical notice. A few words in the abstract should explain in what way(s) your paper intends to address the topic of the conference.