The Stylistics Research Group at Sheffield Hallam University (UK) are pleased to announce the CFP for our upcoming conference Style and Response: Minds, Media, Methods which will take place on Friday 11th and Saturday 12th November 2016. 

Keynote Speakers:

Dr. Ranjana Das, University of Leicester.

Prof. Melanie Green, University of Buffalo.

Dr. David Peplow, Sheffield Hallam University and Dr. Sara Whiteley, University of Sheffield.

Dr. Bronwen Thomas, Bournemouth University.

For more information about the conference including how to submit an abstract, please visit the conference website: https://blogs.shu.ac.uk/styleandresponse/ 

Style and Response: Minds, Media, Methods is hosted by the Stylistics Research Group at Sheffield Hallam University and sponsored by Sheffield Hallam University’s Humanities Research Centre and the international Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA).

Perkins Prize for Books Published in 2015

Established in 1994, the Perkins Prize honors Barbara Perkins and George Perkins, the founders of both The Journal of Narrative Technique and the Society itself. The prize, awarded to the book making the most significant contribution to the study of narrative in a given year, consists of $1,000 plus a contribution of $500 toward expenses for the winning author to attend the Narrative Conference where the award will be presented. 

The Perkins Prize is conceived as a book prize rather than an author prize. Thus all books on the topic of narrative, whether edited collections, collaboratively written books, or monographs, are eligible to compete. If an edited collection or collaboratively written book is selected, the prize goes to the editor(s) or the collaborators. The winner of the competition for books published in 2015 will be announced at the Philadelphia MLA Convention in 2017, and the prize will be presented at the Narrative Conference in Lexington, KY, in March 2017. 

To nominate books with a copyright date of 2015, please send an email with “Perkins Prize” in the subject line to the Chair of the judging committee: Jan Alber <janalber@aias.au.dk>. Publisher, third-party, and self-nominations are appropriate. Copies of books must be sent to each of the three judges. Please indicate in the nominating email whether the publisher or the author will send the books. The deadline for nominations and for receipt of books by the judges is June 1, 2016. 

Books should be sent by authors or their publishers directly to each of the three members of the judging committee: 

PD Dr. Jan Alber

Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies

Aarhus University
Høegh-Guldbergs Gade 6B, building 1630
8000 Aarhus C
Denmark

Dr. Alice Bell

Sheffield Hallam University

Humanities Department

1122 Owen Building

City Campus

Sheffield, S1 1WB

England, UK

Prof. Dr. Thomas Pavel

Centre de l’Université de Chicago à Paris

6, rue Thomas Mann

75013 Paris

France

Call for Papers

DIEGESIS 6.1

Date of publication: June 2017

Topic: “Narration and Knowledge”

Deadline for the submission of abstracts: March 31st, 2016

Deadline for the submission of articles: December 31st, 2016

About the TOPIC:

DIEGESIS 6.1 (2017) explores the nexus of narration and knowledge. Over the last few

years a lively discussion has revolved around the relationship between literature and

knowledge, focusing on literary representations of knowledge produced in the natural

sciences and other disciplines, on the narrativity of scientific discourse in the natural

and social sciences, and on the epistemological status specifically of literature itself.

Concurrently, narrative theory has emphasized the cognitive potential of storytelling

(e.g. as a means of representing events or of constructing personal identities). The

upcoming issue of DIEGESIS seeks to connect these various discussions and we

accordingly invite proposals addressing any of the following questions:

• Is narration a specific and irreducible epistemological discourse in its own right?
• Which forms and modes of knowledge can properly be regarded as narrative? Does narration generate theoretical rather than practical knowledge?
• Are there specific types of content that lend themselves more readily to narrative representations (such as representations of historical events or personal identities)?
• Can literary fiction produce knowledge at all, and if so, does literature generate a specific kind of knowledge or epistemological insight?

DIEGESIS Interdisziplinäres E-Journal für Erzählforschung

Interdisciplinary E-Journal for Narrative Research

https://www.diegesis.uni-wuppertal.de

Contributions to DIEGESIS 1/2017 should approach these questions, or related issues,

either from a theoretical and systematic angle, or by means of exemplifying case

studies.

We invite abstracts of approximately half a page (DIN-A4) by March 31st, 2016 at the

latest. Please send your abstract, along with a brief CV, to the editorial team of

DIEGESIS: diegesis@uni-wuppertal.de. The editorial team and the editors will decide

on the acceptability of proposals by April 30th, 2016. Contributions have to be submitted

by December 31st, 2016. The issue will be published in June 2017.

In addition, we always welcome REVIEWS of new works (i.e. works published in the

last three to four years) in the field of narratology; we specifically welcome cross-disci-
plinary contributions in addition to contributions from those working in the fields of

language and literature. Recommendations for reviews can be sent to the aforemen-
tioned e-mail address at any time; in your e-mail, you should name the book(s) you

would like to review and provide a brief overview of your academic career.

Furthermore, we would also like to invite suggestions for CONFERENCE REPORTS

on any events in the field of narrative research. If you want to send us proposals for

such reports please include brief information on the topic, venue, date, and organizers of

the event as well as a short outline of your academic career.

About DIEGESIS:

DIEGESIS is the first interdisciplinary journal dedicated to narrative research that pro-
vides free online access to full-text articles and reviews (www.diegesis.uni-
wuppertal.de). The high standard of work published in DIEGESIS is ensured by a

combination of competitive calls for papers and a peer review process.

DIEGESIS is published at the University of Wuppertal and in cooperation with the local

Centre of Narrative Research (CNR) (www.zef.uni-wuppertal.de) by Matei Chihaia

(Romance studies), Sandra Heinen (literature and media studies), Matías Martínez

(German studies), Michael Scheffel (general literary studies) and Roy Sommer (English

and American studies).

The Forum on Transdisciplinary Connections between History and Literature is soliciting papers on the topic of historical approaches to “writing resistance” or “writing rebellion”. We construe the topic broadly to encompass the narrative construction of historical incidents of resistance, but also the practice of writing history as a form of resistance, or, in yet another vein, the resistance to historico-literary approaches in our discipline. Papers that problematize the location of historical practice (Global North or South, for example) are also of interest. Furthermore, we welcome papers that address different media, including film and the digital, as well as papers that address material from a broad historical span. This is an open call for the Forum’s guaranteed MLA panel. Proposals are due on March 10 to Marguerite Helmers (helmers@uwosh.edu).

Eleni Coundouriotis

Professor

Department of English

University of Connecticut

215 Glenbrook Rd

Storrs CT 06269-4025

Phone 860 486 3050

Transgressive Textualities: A Postgraduate Symposium

Department of English, University of Malta

20–21 May 2016

Call for Papers

https://www.facebook.com/events/907457572630392/

www.um.edu.mt/events/tt2016

[T]he Text cannot stop (for example, at a library shelf); its constitutive moment is traversal….

        – Roland Barthes

[L]iterature seemed to me, in a confused way, to be the institution which allows one to say everything, in every way.

        – Jacques Derrida

[I]n London the most interesting literary activity is happening outside the book.

        – Tom McCarthy

Language is transgressive. Any act of comprehension is in effect the demonstration of a dissatisfaction with the bounds of the mere graphic inscription or sound of words. To render sense we ‛transgress’ beyond the marks on the page, beyond the auditory phenomenon. An experience of the limit is, then, right at the (transgressively dispersed) heart of language.

Literary language multiplies and amplifies this originary transgression. It foregrounds and celebrates the potentially radically unstable metaphoricity of language that not only cannot be contained within limits, but is most what it is at the point of traversal through and beyond limits. Literary language, animated by what Wallace Stevens called ‛the intricate evasions of as’, is, it might be said, nothing if not transgressively exorbitant.

The ubiquitous word ‛text’ perhaps most starkly articulates this dual limit-and-transgression nature of language. On the one hand text is the material existence of language, but on the other it is simply that which is readable, and can only be experienced as a production, as an activity that happens beyond the page. The material text is simply the occasion of this transgression.

But literature is changing and we might now ask what new or alternative forms of material instantiation of the readable now invite transgression towards signification? Is the site of the limit experience of the literary still predominantly the printed text, or is the literary migrating elsewhere, in the ultimate act of self-transgression, to be hosted and facilitated by new and emerging forms of textuality? Where, it might be asked, do we find transgressive textualities today?

And then there are the perennial forms of transgression associated with literature, whatever the context of its manifestation – the ways in which literature can challenge social and institutional structures, cultural and moral conventions and, indeed, law itself. Provocative and controversial, literature has always been something of an outlaw discourse, saying the unsayable, thinking the unthinkable….

This interdisciplinary Symposium is interested in exploring transgressive textualities through their various forms and manifestations, including literature and literary theory, language, cultural criticism, film, digital art, digital video games, performance, the internet, philosophy and other approaches.

Papers may discuss, but need not be limited to, issues like the following:

Taboo and censorship

Literature and protest

Intertextuality

Posthumanism

Transgression and subjectivity

Electronic literature

Body as a site of transgression

Multimedia adaptations of the literary

Queer literature

Fan fiction / fandom

Translation

Power, discourse and radical politics

Participatory culture

Appropriation of language

Violence and psychosis

Humour and horror

The carnivalesque

Apocalypse fiction

Transgressive philosophies and philosophies of transgression

Transgressive art and the art of transgression

Proposals of around 300 words, accompanied by a short biographical note not exceeding 100 words, should be emailed to transgressivetextualities2016@um.edu.mt by 18th April 2016. The organisers are planning to publish selected Symposium papers in the postgraduate journal Antae (https://antaejournal.com).

Dr Giuliana Fenech

Department of English

Rm313, Faculty of Arts

University of Malta

Here is a cfp for a special session at the 2017 MLA:

Interrelations of Narrative and Lyric in Romantic Literature

(special session organized by the North American Society

for the Study of Romanticism [NASSR] and the International

Society for the Study of Narrative [ISSN])

This panel addresses the interaction between narrative and

lyric in different genres of Romanticism. It explores the

place of event sequences within lyrical poetry and the role

of the lyrical in narrative texts.

Please send paper proposals (250-300 words) by February 15,

2016 to:

Jan Alber (janalber@aias.au.dk) and David Collings

(dcolling@bowdoin.edu)