CFP: European Literary and Cultural Perspectives – Deadline 28 April 2019

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Pathological Body From the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present: European Literary and Cultural Perspectives

A one-day symposium at the Institute of Modern Languages (IMLR), Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU, UK

Friday 20 September 2019

Keynote Speaker: Dr Steven Wilson (Queen’s University Belfast)

* With support from the Cassal Endowment Fund *

What is sickness, and how is it represented in literature? In his twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart novel cycle (1871–93), Émile Zola creates pathological bodies living within Napoleon III’s Second Empire (1852–70), a period which is represented as being engulfed by political and social sickness. It is in the last volume, Le Docteur Pascal, that there is hope embodied within Pascal’s newborn son, the potential ‘messiah’ of the French nation. In the aftermath of the disastrous Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), Zola’s cycle may be a literary reaction to the state of a weakened France in exalting the mythicised image of the mother and child, at once a symbol of purity and new beginnings. Reflecting on the multi-dimensional aspect of Zola’s Naturalism, Henri Mitterand writes that these novels are not merely a form of social and historical documentation, but, instead, offer a knowledge that is more intuitive, modern and poetic, and which might be termed an ‘anthropomythic naturalism’ (preface, Émile Zola, Le Docteur Pascal, p. 48). This symposium aims to explore the nexus of fears, anxieties and desires that society projects onto the body within European literature and culture, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, tracing the birth and development of modern medicine. It will examine the widest meaning of sickness and the power dynamic between the body and society. Is sickness ever ‘just’ sickness, or is there often a covert ideological agenda that drives and constructs it? How can literature help us understand the relationship between the body and society? The symposium will take a transhistorical and transnational approach in order to see whether, and how, cultural anxieties which appropriate the body change and differ across European national boundaries during a time when medicine is establishing and asserting its increasing authority. The symposium will be an opportunity for colleagues to forge connections and to compare different approaches within the growing field of Medical Humanities within the Modern Languages.

Suggested themes include, but are not limited to:

Fin de siècle

Gender

Race

Class

Degeneration

Blood

Hysteria

Social order

Myth

Sacred and the religious

Suffering

Contagion

Evil

Medicine

Illness and cure

Life and death

The other

Purification

Nationhood

Utopia

Politics

Deviancy

Contamination

Infection

Ideology

Rebirth

Healing

Morality

Necropolitics

Biopolitics

Power

Ritual

Abject body

Heredity

Identity

Proposals of c. 250 words for 20-minute papers in English and a 100-word biography should be emailed to the conference organiser, Dr Kit Yee Wong, by Sunday 28 April 2019. Notifications to potential speakers will be sent out by Saturday 25 May 2019.

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Call for Abstracts: The Centre for the Study of Women and Gender at the University of Warwick. Deadline – Friday 1 September 2017

Call for Abstracts

The Centre for the Study of Women and Gender at the University of Warwick will host an interdisciplinary Graduate Seminar Series in the academic year 2017/2018. We would like to invite papers from postgraduate students working in, but not limited to the following areas:

  • Media, Culture and Gender Representations
  • Work, Employment and the Family
  • Gender and Education
  • Politics and Power
  • (Trans) national Gender
  • Intersections of Gender, ‘Race’, Class, Disability and Age
  • Transgender and Sexualities
  • Feminism and Women’s Rights
  • Masculinities and Femininities
  • Feminist Theories and Methodologies
  • New Media and Digital Technologies
  • Histories of Feminist Movements, Gender and Sexuality
  • Gender, the Body and Embodiment
  • Postcolonial debates and Gender

We welcome submissions, both conventional and innovative, from any disciplines on gender related topics. Seminars will take place on three or four afternoons across the Autumn and Spring terms (dates and timings TBC). Attendance is open to everyone.

The seminar series aims to:

  • Foster discussions on questions of/around gender
  •  Provide a safe and comfortable space for students to present their research
  • Create an opportunity to fine-tune presentation skills

Abstracts should be:

  • Maximum 200 words
  • Submitted along with a brief biography of the author (max 100 words); including their institution, department, andresearch interests. If undertaking empirical research please also provide a brief summary of methodology.
  • Submitted by Friday 1 September 2017

Please email abstracts to cswgseminarseries@gmail.com. Abstracts will be peer reviewed. If successful, you will hear from us in the week commencing Monday 18th September 2017 and will be allocated a seminar between October 2017 and March 2018. Funds may also be available to help contribute to travel expenses.

If you have any further questions, please do email us at cswgseminarseries@gmail.com

Or get in touch via Facebook

For more information about the CSWG at University of Warwick, please visit: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/sociology/research/centres/gender

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