Call For Papers: Performing Greece
Performing Greece: the 1st International Conference on Contemporary Greek Theatre Saturday 9 May 2015 School of Arts, Birkbeck College, University of London Keynote Speakers: Anastasia Revi (Artistic Director of Theatre Lab Company) Dr. Marilena Zaroulia (Senior Lecturer in Drama, University of Winchester) Contemporary Greek theatre is relatively unknown outside of Greece, while the classic dramas of Ancient Greece continue to be regularly performed in theatres around the world. Given that in the recent years the country has gained global attention due to the financial crisis, it is only natural that its artists join the debate. We may then ask how does contemporary Greek theatre and culture contribute to the image of Greece outside the country? How is contemporary Greek theatre produced and received in Greece and beyond? What impact has the crisis had on the work of Greek artists and theorists and also non-Greeks who write about the country? This conference aims to bring together academics, critics, writers and performers to discuss these and other questions concerning contemporary theatre and culture from and about Greece, especially artistic work that deals with the crisis, immigration, and Greek politics. Performing Greece will be a one-day event and will take place on Saturday 9 May 2015 at Birkbeck College, University of London. Those interested are welcome to submit proposals for individual papers or performances on any topic related to Contemporary Greek Drama and Culture. Topics might include, but are not limited to: Modern and contemporary Greek playwrights Art and theatre about contemporary Greece The work of Greek directors within and beyond Greece The relationship between ancient and contemporary Greek drama Greek theatre and the crisis The conference welcomes proposals for presentations and performances from any discipline and theoretical perspective. Please send a title and a 300 word abstract for a 20 minute paper or 5-20 minute performance (rehearsed reading or screening) along with your name, affiliation and 100 word biography to performinggreece@gmail.com by 31 March 2015. Performing Greece is organised by Dr. Christos Callow Jr, Associate Tutor, Department of English and Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London. http://birkbeck.academia.edu/ChristosCallowJr Supported by the Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/our-research/bcct Tweet Banner image by dimitris plantzos under a CC BY-NC...
Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel
by Pieter Vermeulen The novel, it is safe to say, is not what it used to be. The contrast between the form’s current status and its illustrious past is probably most apparent to those of us who both read novels for pleasure and study, teach, or research them for a living — or the hope of a living. In the last decades, it seems that the pleasure of reading has become an ever more rarified affair — beleaguered as it is by the newly available gratifications provided by visual and digital media; at the same time, and in marked contrast, the academic study and teaching of the novel, as it has come to focus ever more on the traffic between the literary and the social, has not ceased to remind us of the novel’s formative role in shaping and sustaining many of the crucial institutions of modern life: the bourgeois individual, the nation-state, empire, and the police. Without the modern novel, we simply wouldn’t have modern life as we know it. It is hard to say the same about the novel and early twenty-first-century life. Yet novels continue to be written and read, and many of them are not nearly as defeated or exhausted as the mismatch I sketched above would suggest. Indeed, what if the patent absurdity of claiming a crucial cultural role for the contemporary novel in fact liberated contemporary writers to imagine different forms of life? What if contemporary fiction decided to inhabit the aftermath of the traditional novel and of the forms of life it used to imagine and support and to instead explore new forms of experience, of life, and of affect, and design new formal possibilities? Not a robust individualism, but a form of creatural life constitutively exposed to human and nonhuman others; not redemptive experiences of empathetic identification, but awkward sensations that do not fit existing emotive registers; not the satisfaction of cosmopolitan connectedness, but the terrifying confrontation with radically nonhuman scales. My new book, Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel (Palgrave, 2015), tries to map the paradoxical productivity of such attempts to render the traditional operations of the novel inoperative. Many contemporary novels, I found, deliberately neutralize the devices through which the novel has traditionally done its cultural work — things like psychological depth, sociological scope, emotional solicitation — in order to force themselves into the uncharted territory beyond novelistic comfort, and beyond unraveling modern forms of life. A concern with the traditional cultural role of the novel form and with its current diminished prospects helped me make sense of some of the literary projects that have, in recent years,...
Call For Papers: Living, Thinking, Looking – An International Conference on the writing of Siri Hustvedt
23 October 2015 Call for papers In October 2015, Birkbeck’s Centre for Contemporary Literature will host the first academic conference to focus on the writing of the highly acclaimed American author, Siri Hustvedt. A writer of increasing cultural and critical significance, Siri Hustvedt has written six novels and a considerable body of non-fiction, including essays, academic papers, lectures and autobiographical works. Birkbeck’s conference takes its title from her most recent book of essays, Living, Thinking, Looking (2012), which showcases her widerange of multidisciplinary interests. These include gender identity, visual art, feminism, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, philosophy and literature. Hustvedt’s fiction reflects her deep interest in the intersecting zones of individual perception, identity and memory. She is particularly interested in the philosopher Martin Buber’s idea of ‘the Between’ – what Sigmund Freud terms the Tummelplatz [playground] and DW Winnicott calls the ‘potential or transitional space’: a zone of transference bisecting consciousness and unconsciousness which sees a dialogic interplay of individual identities, perspectives and ideas. This conference will give delegates the opportunity to examine Hustvedt’s unique contribution to contemporary literature, in particular her commitment to developing deeper dialogue and understanding between literature and the life sciences. Hustvedt’s interdisciplinary approach to fiction, with particular reference to hermeneutics, intertextuality and the dialogic imagination, will also form a major component part of the conference. We are particularly delighted that Siri Hustvedt will be in attendance throughout the day, and has been invited to give a reading and answer questions at the close of the event. The conference will welcome proposals for individual papers or panels, with submissions invited from both research students and academics. Papers should focus principally on the writing of Siri Hustvedt. Topics might include, but are not limited to: Literature and the life sciences Hermeneutics and intersubjectivity Narrative, memory and the imagination Perception and phenomenology Ekphrasis and visual art in literature Trauma narratives Contemporary American literature and culture Living, Thinking, Looking will take place on 23 October 2015 (9.30-7pm) in the Keynes Library at 43 Gordon Square, Birkbeck, London. Confirmed keynote speakers Hubert Zapf, Professor and Chair of American Literature, University of Augsburg, Germany Christine Marks, Assistant Professor of English, LaGuardia Community College (City University of New York). Siri Hustvedt, author Please send proposals of no more than 300 words detailing your topic, along with a brief biography, to hustvedtconference@gmail.comby 23 April 2015. You can also follow the conference on twitter: @HustvedtConf / #HustvedtConf. Tweet Image by Matthew Rutledge, used under a CC BY 2.0...
London Science Fiction Research Community
Birkbeck's science fiction PhD students have organised the London Science Fiction Research Community to bring together postgraduates and academics in the London area interested in science fiction. The group has its own Facebook page and has started meeting regularly for a reading group – the title for 2015's list of texts is "Transcending the Flesh: SF and Cognitive Technologies." Reading List for 2015: 12 January 2015 | Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race, 1871 2 February 2015 | A. E. van Vogt, The World of Null-A, 1948 2 March 2015 | William Gibson, Neuromancer, 1984 13 April 2015 | Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven, 1971 4 May 2015 | Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End, 1953 1 June 2015 | Stanislaw Lem, Golem XIV, 1981 6 July 2015 | Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts, 2007 3 August 2015 | Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker, 1937 7 September 2015 | Charles Stross, Accelerando, 2005 The group is open to all, so please do get in touch via the Facebook page if you would like to join the research community and attend future reading group meetings. Tweet Banner image by Torley under a CC BY-SA...
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