CONVENTION AND REVOLUTION
Life writing by women in the 1800s and 1900s: archives, critiques and methods
29 November -1 December 2017 Warsaw, Poland

deadline for submissions: April 30, 2017

 
CONVENTION AND REVOLUTION – call for papers
CONFERENCE REGISTRATION FORM_1

Organizers: Institute of Literary Research, Polish Academy of Sciences, Digital Humanities Laboratory, University of Warsaw, Institute of Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences

Long hours in the archives. Raise your hand if you have never yawned over letters of journals written by women of the centuries past. (No hands go up.) The thoughts creep in: this is so boring, so conventional, so predictable – and there’s another pile of pages to read…Fighting sleep, we still entertain hopes of revolutionary finds, fantastic rebel women, unknown facts about those who gained fame, controversies hidden among the yellowing pages. Yet in adopting this attitude, we are missing out on a far greater point. The very gesture of writing, when made by a woman, constitutes rebellion, and the conventionality of the text should not obscure this fact. Anachronism is the greatest power of any revolution. Many women, locked (quite literally) in their homes, using a narrative that mirrored what they had learnt, dreamt of freedom for themselves and others, whether that were aware of it or not. When they sat down to write, they created a moment just for themselves, and in doing so, they carved out a space  of their own freedom – small at first, but gradually expanding – where they created themselves. They wrote themselves. With time, they became the subject of writing by other women, their biographers. Discovering, documenting and researching this chain of women’s lives suddenly no longer seems boring.

The international conference, scheduled to take place over three days, will focus on discussing the latest methods of working with women’s personal documents, biographies and letters written on their basis. We are interested in strategies developed in contemporary historiography and literature studies, in particular interdisciplinary women’s, gender  and queer studies. We also have a strong interest in the experiences of researchers of herstory, oral history, and life writing. As for historical periods, we are interested mainly in the 1800s and the 1900s up to World War II. However, the true chronology will emerge out of the  documents themselves. We have decided to focus on journals, letters, diaries and autobiographies of women in that period because it is, in our opinion, unique: this is when among Western elites the discourse of women’s emancipation was articulated and started gaining popularity. Most women at the time responded with great reserve and even hostility, choosing instead to support the traditional understanding of gender roles.

Personal documents written by women in the 19th century are an excellent reflection of the ambivalence of their authors towards emancipation. Since the 1980s, many scholarly papers have been written to demonstrate that these texts, while ostensibly fitting with the conventions of gender representation, in fact undermine the traditional gender roles. Submission and its subversion, conservative attitudes and emancipation (if not overt, then expressed through a variety of strategies to promote empowerment and women’s agency) – they meet, often in surprising ways, in these conventionalized, seemingly uninteresting practices of women’s life writing.

Using the existing findings in the area of gender studies as a starting point, during the conference we will give the floor to researchers who will present other possibilities for  reading women’s personal writings, and reveal how we can access what often remains hidden under the surface of the texts which require a critical, contextualized reading. Together, we will discuss the interpretations that facilitate finding the seeds of rebellion and social revolution, while seemingly adhering to patriarchal norms (including formal and literary conventions).

On the first day the conference, we will focus on novel, critical approaches to  reading journals, letters, memoirs, and autobiographies written by women. We will discuss what survival strategies were reflected in women’s life writing, what this writing offered to its authors, what purposes it served, and how it influenced the next generations of its female readers.

On the second day the conference, we will investigate women’s biographic writing. How can archives be used to write biographies of 19th century women? What are the most interesting

projects in this area, and what outcomes have they produced so far? What challenges are to be expected in this type of work?

On the third day the conference, we will look at the possibilities that the instruments of digital humanities offer in archiving and digitally editing women’s life writing. Can digital archives and databases restore the memory of the women that have been forgotten, or is the opposite true – are they just a digital reinforcement of the traditional divisions and power (im)balances? We will discuss the most exciting projects, the new research tools, and the opportunities they offer.

During the conference key-note lectures will be delivered by such researchers as,  Prof. Sidonie Smith and Prof. Julia Watson, authors and editors of the groundbreaking book entitled “De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography” , Prof. Cynthia Huff, author of many articles focused on women’s diaries and author of descriptive bibliographies of nineteenth-century women’s diaries, Prof. Andrea Pető, author of a biography of Júlia Rajk and author of books on women in Hungarian politics between 1945- 1951 and the female perpetrators in Hungary during World War II. The Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson lecture will be followed by a seminar devoted to their new book of essays,  which will be published in early 2017.

The conference is organized by the team behind the Women’s Archive, a division of the Institute of Literary Research, Polish Academy of Sciences (www.ibl.waw.pl) now engaged in a long-term project The Women’s Archive: writing (Archiwum kobiet: piszące). Co- organizers are the Digital Humanities Laboratory, University of Warsaw (www.lach.edu.pl) and the Institute of Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences (www.ispan.waw.pl).

The Conference “Convention and revolution. Life writing by women in the 1800s and 1900s: archives, critiques and methods” will take place at Staszic Palace in Warsaw, Poland November 27-December 1, 2017.

Conference fee for regular participants: 400 PLN/100 EUR
Conference fee for young scholars and PhD students: 200 PLN/50 EUR

Paper subissions please send till April 30, 2017 on email address:  convention_and_revolution2017@ibl.waw.pl

The Literary Encyclopedia is seeking articles in the field of Post-1945 Women’s Writing. Please see the full CFP for details: 
https://www.litencyc.com/php/scribd_document.php?id=3

 CFP DOWNLOAD

CALL FOR PAPERS – ANGLOPHONE AFRICAN WRITING AND CULTURE

The Literary Encyclopedia at www.litencyc.com is looking for qualified writers to enhance its coverage of Anglophone African Writing and Culture of Africa. The list below is not comprehensive  or final, and new proposals of writers/ works/context essays that are not currently listed in our database are also welcome. However, we will prioritize articles on writers and works frequently studied in university courses, and those that are highly topical and well-known.

In addition to publishing articles on canonical and much-taught literary works, the Encyclopedia is also interested in making available information about important writers and works that are often neglected, and in publishing articles about discrete historical events which are relevant to literary understanding. It also seeks to broaden its scope to include more research-oriented articles with a pedagogic function, such as ‘Critical issues in title‘ or ‘Critical readings of author/ title‘. If you are interested in contributing such an essay, please contact the relevant volume editor or the managing editor.

All offers of contribution should come accompanied by an up-to-date CV and, in the case of doctoral students who wish to offer a contribution, also a short writing sample. The overwhelming majority (about 90%) of our contributors are academic scholars, while the remaining percentage is made up  of highly endorsed doctoral students and independent researchers.

The Literary Encyclopedia aims to deliver a global understanding of world literatures and cultures within an adaptable and responsive digital platform that’s ethically conceived, minimalist, but packing great functionality. All our articles are solicited by invitation from specialist scholars in higher education institutions all over the world, refereed and approved by subject editors in our Editorial Board. The LE is thus uniquely selective, reliable and authoritative. Its online format allows for rapid publication and frequent updating of articles; its integrated digital resources (author life-chronologies, customisable timelines, thematic or course-oriented bookshelves, related article clusters, critical bibliographies) respond dynamically to teaching and learning demands.

More detailed information on the Encyclopedia – including its publishing model, editorial policies, specific information for authors etc. – can be found on its homepage at www.litencyc.com, under  the ABOUT tab. In order to explore the kinds of content we publish please log in using the case- sensitive username: ‘WinterGuest2017′ and the password: ‘chekhov1860’.

We hope that you will wish to join us in this enterprise. If you wish to contribute, please contact the volume editors: Dr Helen Cousins (H.Cousins@staff.newman.ac.uk), Dr Madhu Krishnan (madhu.krishnan@bristol.ac.uk); Dr John Masterson (j.e.Masterson@sussex.ac.uk); or Ronit Frenkel (particularly for South and Southern African literature – ronitf@uj.ac.za) or the managing editor, Dr Cristina Sandru (cristinasandru@litencyc.com).

LITERARY AND CULTURAL CONTEXT ARTICLES

• Farafina
• Cassava Republic
• FEMRITE
• Africa39

AUTHOR/WORKS

• Uwem Akpan
• Elechi Amadi Ayi Kwei Armah
• Sefi Atta
• Kofi Awoonor
• Doreen Baingana
• Igoni Barrett
• Brian Chikwava
• Achmat Dangor
• Amma Darko
• Sello Duiker
• Cyprian Ekwensi
• Akachi Ezeigbo
• Aminatta Forna
• Damon Galgut
• Goretti Kyomuhendo
• Jowhor Ile
• Kojo Laing
• Okey Ndibe
• Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ
• Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
• Tayeb Salih
• Taiye Selasi
• Lola Shoneyin
• Chika Unigwe
• Noo Saro-Wiwa

INDIVIDUAL WORKS

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

• Americanah

 Ayi Kwei Armah

• Beautyful Ones Are not Yet Born (1968)
• Fragments (1971)

Syl Cheney-Coker

• The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar
• Sacred River

 Aminatta Forna

• The Memory of Love

 Flora Nwapa

Novels:

• Efuru (1966)
• Idu (1970)
• Never Again (1975)
• One Is Enough (1981)
• Women are Different (1986) Short stories/poems collections:
• This Is Lagos and Other Stories (1971)
• Cassava Song and Rice Song (1986)
• Wives at War and Other Stories (1980)

Grace Ogot

Novels:

• The Promised Land: a novel (1966)

Short story collections:

• Land Without Thunder (1968)
• The Other Woman: selected short stories (1976)

Amos Tutuola

• Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952)

Yvonne Vera

• Why Don’t You Carve Other Animals (short stories) (1992)
• Nehanda (1993)
• Without a Name (1994)
• Under the Tongue (1997)
• Butterfly Burning (2000)
• The Stone Virgins (2002)

deadline approaching!

by Sunday 15 January 2017 

An open call for contributions to the following panel session, to take place at the  conference (Newcastle Upon Tyne, 5-7 July 2017):

 ‘Contemporary Women’s Writing: Apocalyptic Narratives’

Session Chair: Fiona Tolan

The contemporary moment, it seems, lends itself to apocalyptic narratives. Environmental damage and extreme weather events; the shifting of the political mainstream to the far reaches of left and right; the financial crash and the exposed vulnerabilities of a globalised economy; the migrant crisis and mass displacement of populations: real world events repeatedly contribute to a pervasive sense of anxiety and crisis that is productively explored in contemporary women’s writing. From the commodification of the biosciences in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, to the falling birth rate and falling temperatures of Maggie Gee’s The Ice People, contemporary women writers engaged in speculative fictions repeatedly utilise images of crisis and threat to explore political and cultural anxieties.

This panel brings together scholars interested in representations of apocalypse and apocalyptic scenarios in contemporary women’s writing. We invite contributions for papers that address women writers’ figuring of apocalyptic fictions in terms of themes such as (although not limited to):

• Ecological disaster narratives
• Post-humanism and cyborg identities
• Globalisation and financial instability
• New sciences and the reconfiguring of the ‘natural’
• Threats to the body and bodily autonomy
• Narratives of violence and threat
• Reimagining identity politics in unstable futures

Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words, plus a brief biographical note, to f.tolan@ljmu.ac.uk by 15 January 2017.

by Sunday 15 January 2017

This is an open call for papers for a pre-constituted panel at the
English: Shared Futures conference which will take place in Newcastle
Upon Tyne, UK, 5th-7th July 2017.

 Contemporary Women’s Writings: Archiving for the Future’

Session Chair: Rosie White

How is contemporary women’s writing being remembered now and how will it
be remembered in the future?  This panel will address current work on
archival materials regarding contemporary women writers.
Regarding contemporary writing the writer in question may still be
alive, organising her own archive and the creation of her own legacies.
What are the implications of using private materials/reading personal
diaries by and about a living subject? How reliable is archived material
curated by the writer herself?  These issues raise questions about the
dichotomy between the deceased – and at times more fetishized – writer
and the living author who can still approach her archive with some sort
of agency
Where are contemporary women writers’ archives being lodged and how is
women’s writing being preserved and recorded for future generations? 
What does ‘the archive’ mean for contemporary women’s writing?  Whose
work is being archived and who remains absent from such a record?
We invite contributions from academics working on the archived materials
of contemporary women writers, addressing issues such as access to and
availability of materials, copyright negotiations and archival absences.  

We also invite abstracts which address issues such as the gender
politics of archival work in contemporary literary studies, the role of
the archive in canon formation and the technology of archives in an
online environment.

Please send 300 word proposals to rosemary.white@northumbria.ac.uk by 15th January 2017, with a short biographical note.

by Sunday 15 January 2017

An open call for contributions to the following panel session, to take place at the  conference (Newcastle Upon Tyne, 5-7 July 2017):

 ‘Contemporary Women’s Writing: Apocalyptic Narratives’

Session Chair: Fiona Tolan

The contemporary moment, it seems, lends itself to apocalyptic narratives. Environmental damage and extreme weather events; the shifting of the political mainstream to the far reaches of left and right; the financial crash and the exposed vulnerabilities of a globalised economy; the migrant crisis and mass displacement of populations: real world events repeatedly contribute to a pervasive sense of anxiety and crisis that is productively explored in contemporary women’s writing. From the commodification of the biosciences in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, to the falling birth rate and falling temperatures of Maggie Gee’s The Ice People, contemporary women writers engaged in speculative fictions repeatedly utilise images of crisis and threat to explore political and cultural anxieties.

This panel brings together scholars interested in representations of apocalypse and apocalyptic scenarios in contemporary women’s writing. We invite contributions for papers that address women writers’ figuring of apocalyptic fictions in terms of themes such as (although not limited to):

• Ecological disaster narratives
• Post-humanism and cyborg identities
• Globalisation and financial instability
• New sciences and the reconfiguring of the ‘natural’
• Threats to the body and bodily autonomy
• Narratives of violence and threat
• Reimagining identity politics in unstable futures

Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words, plus a brief biographical note, to f.tolan@ljmu.ac.uk by 15 January 2017.

CFP for Latecomers: Anita Brookner Then and Now
by Friday 16 December, 2016

Latecomers: Anita Brookner Then and Now
Presented by The University of Melbourne
Venue: National Gallery of Victoria (International), 17-18 March 2017

Overview

 The work of Anita Brookner occupies an ambiguous place in the literary field. Brookner has a cult status, was a Booker-Prize winner and best-selling novelist, and yet her work received what she herself deemed ‘censorious’ reviews and limited critical attention. Brookner’s death was accompanied by conflicted accolades that appeared to celebrate her life while restating the predictable (and vexatious) reading of her identity as a lonely, single woman.

In addition to her 24 novels and one novella, Brookner authored a number of art-historical works and was a prolific reviewer of art and literature for over 60 years. The critical reception of Brookner is complicated by the question of how to interpret her work as an historian of eighteenth- an nineteenth-century French art. In a 1984 interview, Brookner explicitly denied a connection between her fictional and critical oeuvres, while at other times she spoke more openly about an intertextual literary practice, the significance of Romanticism in contemporary life, and her belief in unconscious processes.

Keynote speakers

• Associate Professor Patricia Juliana Smith, Hofstra University

• Professor Peter McPhee, The University of Melbourne

Call for papers

We invite papers on, but not limited to, the following topics:

• Brookner’s canons

• Brookner’s Romanticism

• Brookner’s Rococo

• Brookner’s art-historical oeuvre

• Brookner and the French Revolution

• Intertexuality

• Women’s writing

• Gender and sexuality

• Anachronism, temporality and periodisation

• The early novels, the middle period, the late period

• Brookner’s London

• Brookner’s Europes

• Brooknerines

Please email abstracts of no more than 250 words and a brief CV to the conference convenors, Dr Peta Mayer and Associate Professor Clara Tuite, The University of Melbourne. Email: latecomers@unimelb.edu.au

Please note: Closing date is Friday 16 December 2016.