Conference, Seminar Organiser and CFP
Conference organisation
Under the auspices of the project 'Orientation': A Dynamic Perspective of Contemporary Fiction an... more Under the auspices of the project 'Orientation': A Dynamic Perspective of Contemporary Fiction and Culture (1990-onwards) (Ref. FFI2017-86417-P), this Conference explores how the concept of 'orientation' can offer a renewed perspective on literary texts and cultural products alike. By positioning 'orientation' in close relation to (multiple) temporalities (or "polytemporality", following Victoria Browne), space, and recognition of the 'other', this Conference (and the project) addresses the dynamic and fluid nature of today's fiction and culture in English. As Sara Ahmed points out, "[o]rientations are about the direction we take that puts some things and not others in our reach" (56). In this sense, we pose the following: what directions do contemporary texts tend towards? How are these directions configured? How do we make sense of the "things" that are within our reach?
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Prose Studies
Deadline for abstract submissions: 15 September 2020
(acceptance will be communicated before Nove... more Deadline for abstract submissions: 15 September 2020
(acceptance will be communicated before November 2020)
Deadline for full-manuscript submissions: 1 March 2021
Expected date of publication: September 2021
Editors of Special Issue: Rosalía Baena (University of Navarra, Spain), Marta Cerezo (UNED University, Spain) and Rosario Arias (University of Malaga, Spain).
https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issues/contemporary-illness-narratives/?utm_source=TFO&utm_medium=cms&utm_campaign=JPD14372
This special issue of Prose Studies aims to explore the critical possibilities of Phenomenology for illness narratives. Phenomenology, as a critical perspective, provides an especially adequate framework for illness narratives, as it deals particularly with one’s embodied situatedness. The phenomenological concepts of ‘recognition’ and ‘orientation’ function as useful critical lenses to reveal the cultural mediation of illness narratives on the issues of illness, pain, death, but also survival and resilience.
The phenomenological notion of ‘orientation’ derives from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945), and is later taken up by Sara Ahmed in her Queer Phenomenology (2006), where she aims to develop the relevance of the concept of ‘orientation’ for queer studies and within phenomenology itself.
The dynamic nature of ‘orientation’, as the notion refers to the space in between bodies and objects, involves one’s position in time and space, and its double-sidedness lends to useful approaches to interpret contemporary narratives of illness where bodily engagement with the world acquires multiple forms that deal with orientation, dis-orientation and re-orientation. Then, ‘orientation’ is pivotal for illness narratives where bodily intentionality, that is, the physical directedness towards objects and bodies in space and time is essential (Ahmed 2006).
In turn, ‘recognition’, as defined by Rita Felski (2008) is associated with “affective orientation” (18; emphasis added), that takes place in the act of reading, a dynamic interplay between texts and readers. Felski develops four modes of engagement in contemporary reading practices (recognition, knowledge, enchantment and shock), calling for “a phenomenology of reading” (18), her own contribution to “neo-phenomenology”. Felski highlights phenomenological “attentiveness to the first person perspective” (17) in embedded and embodied narratives. In this sense, the concept of recognition lays bare the dialogical mode of contemporary illness memoirs, as well as help us elucidate the social and cultural mediation of illness narratives.
In this critical context, contemporary illness memoirs such as Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air (2016), Hilary Mantel’s Giving up the Ghost (2003) and Ink in the Blood: A Hospital Diary (2010), Jenny Diski's In Gratitude (2016), or Olive Sacks’ Gratitude (2016), to name but a few, artfully bring the reader into the reading/writing dynamics of the author's self-reflexive embodied experience of illness. Also, these writers negotiate and re-orient themselves between embodiment and disembodiment, life/survival and death, showing a heightened interest in the materiality of the world through the persistent presence of relevant objects in their narratives. Thus, we need to further investigate the need for recognition on the part of the readers, or, in other words, what it is that authors demand from readers in terms of acknowledging their new embedded and embodied realities of illness.
We would welcome submissions that will open up questions about the problematics of textual engagement in the dialogical mode of contemporary illness memoirs from the perspective of ‘orientation’ and ‘recognition’.
Some of the questions that might be addressed (but not limited to):
-What are the main phenomenological concepts, following Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, among others, used in contemporary critical theory?
-How does Sarah Ahmed’s concept of ‘orientation’ apply to the experience of illness? How does ‘orientation’ relate to Felski’s concept of ‘recognition’?
-How can we approach contemporary illness memoirs through the critical lens of the concepts of ‘orientation’ and ‘recognition’?
-How are illness memoirs received and interpreted by contemporary readers? What impact do they have on contemporary perceptions of illness and disability?
-What are the strategies of re-positioning, re-orientation and/or dis-orientation in the textual engagement with an illness narrative?
-What is the role of materiality and objects in illness narratives in relation to the concepts of ‘orientation’ and ‘recognition’?
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S33: Reorientations: Reading Neo-Victorianism in Contemporary Culture
This panel explores the aff... more S33: Reorientations: Reading Neo-Victorianism in Contemporary Culture
This panel explores the affective and cognitive responses of readers/viewers of neo-Victorian texts. It considers how the polytemporal dynamics between writers, readers and critics of neoVictorianism reorientate and/or disorientate textual reception eliciting or short-circuiting empathy. In addition, it examines the tension between “unknowing” and “knowing” readers who negotiate immersion versus critical distance, and the strategies of adaptation, interpretation and interpolation that such (re)positionings involve. Seminar participants are invited to reflect on the comparative effectiveness (or failure) of such (re)orientations in relation to temporal contexts of production and reception. How do such strategies impact engagements with the nineteenth-century past? What manner of cultural memory work is thus enabled?
Convenors:
* Patricia Pulham (University of Surrey, UK), p.pulham@surrey.ac.uk
* Marie-Luise Kohlke (Swansea University, UK), m.l.kohlke@swansea.ac.uk
S62: Bodily (Re)Orientations in Neo-Victorianism
This seminar addresses the relevance of the materiality of the body in neo-Victorian literature and culture. It considers how the material turn is deployed in neo-Victorianism, and the ways in which critical perspectives such as phenomenology, Thing theory, and object-relations ontology (re)position and (re)orientate the dichotomy between subject and object, materiality and immateriality in neo-Victorian literature and culture by means of (re)embodiment and sensorial apprehension. In addition, this seminar explores the neo-Victorian text as a dynamic inter-space of bodily re-inhabitance, an in-between space of flows and movements, where the contemporary present brings the Victorian past into close proximity, enacting contact through affective interactions with various text(s) and bodies.
Convenors:
* Rosario Arias (University of Málaga, Spain), rarias@uma.es
* Ann Heilmann (Cardiff University, UK), HeilmannA@Cardiff.ac.uk
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This conference examines (neo-)Victorian diversifications into the twenty-first century exploring... more This conference examines (neo-)Victorian diversifications into the twenty-first century exploring the notion of ‘orientation’, a dialogical concept itself because it indicates one’s position in relation to something or someone. We aim to conceptualise the current interest in dynamic processes, notions of becoming, fluidity and multilayering in the neo-Victorian mode through the lens of ‘orientation’.
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Books
Universitat de València, 2023
La omnipresencia del hogar victoriano en la producción cultural del siglo XIX es indiscutible. As... more La omnipresencia del hogar victoriano en la producción cultural del siglo XIX es indiscutible. Así lo demuestra la monografía escrita en 2003 por Judith Flanders, Inside the Victorian Home, en la que la autora realiza un estudio pormenorizado de la presencia del hogar en el imaginario de la segunda mitad del siglo desde la consideración de la domesticidad como microcosmos de la sociedad decimonónica ideal. Tomando como base las teorías de Flanders, el objetivo de esta monografía es indagar en la representación sociocultural de lo doméstico desde la ruptura de la tradicional concepción de la sociedad como un espacio binario a partir de la teoría de las esferas. Para ello, se toma como punto de partida el hogar de la clase media decimonónica como espacio de confluencias, intersecciones y conexiones entre lo público y lo privado. Con estas consideraciones, la función pública de lo doméstico será estudiada desde varios prismas relacionados con la condición femenina y las posibilidades de las diferentes industrias del entretenimiento en el siglo XIX en Gran Bretaña.
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This volume consists of three sections, which aim to cover the different applications of the 'tra... more This volume consists of three sections, which aim to cover the different applications of the 'trace' to various authors and texts, crossing temporal and cultural boundaries, as it ranges from turn-of-the century ghost stories to twenty-first century fictional texts. Then, it illustrates the usefulness of the notion of the 'trace' in multiple contexts and time periods.
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Palgrave Macmillan
... Haunting and spectrality in neo-Victorian fiction: possessing the past. ... Arias, R. and Pul... more ... Haunting and spectrality in neo-Victorian fiction: possessing the past. ... Arias, R. and Pulham, Patricia, eds. (2009) Haunting and spectrality in neo-Victorian fiction: possessing the past. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. ISBN 0230205577. Full text not available from this repository. ...
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Journal Articles
Anuari De Filologia Seccio a Filologia Anglesa I Alemana, 2002
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Atlantis Revista De La Asociacion Espanola De Estudios Anglo Norteamericanos, 1998
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Clepsydra Revista De Estudios De Genero Y Teoria Feminista, 2004
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Sederi Yearbook of the Spanish and Portuguese Society For English Renaissance Studies, 1996
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Revista Canaria De Estudios Ingleses, 2005
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Victoriographies
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Uploads
(acceptance will be communicated before November 2020)
Deadline for full-manuscript submissions: 1 March 2021
Expected date of publication: September 2021
Editors of Special Issue: Rosalía Baena (University of Navarra, Spain), Marta Cerezo (UNED University, Spain) and Rosario Arias (University of Malaga, Spain).
https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issues/contemporary-illness-narratives/?utm_source=TFO&utm_medium=cms&utm_campaign=JPD14372
This special issue of Prose Studies aims to explore the critical possibilities of Phenomenology for illness narratives. Phenomenology, as a critical perspective, provides an especially adequate framework for illness narratives, as it deals particularly with one’s embodied situatedness. The phenomenological concepts of ‘recognition’ and ‘orientation’ function as useful critical lenses to reveal the cultural mediation of illness narratives on the issues of illness, pain, death, but also survival and resilience.
The phenomenological notion of ‘orientation’ derives from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945), and is later taken up by Sara Ahmed in her Queer Phenomenology (2006), where she aims to develop the relevance of the concept of ‘orientation’ for queer studies and within phenomenology itself.
The dynamic nature of ‘orientation’, as the notion refers to the space in between bodies and objects, involves one’s position in time and space, and its double-sidedness lends to useful approaches to interpret contemporary narratives of illness where bodily engagement with the world acquires multiple forms that deal with orientation, dis-orientation and re-orientation. Then, ‘orientation’ is pivotal for illness narratives where bodily intentionality, that is, the physical directedness towards objects and bodies in space and time is essential (Ahmed 2006).
In turn, ‘recognition’, as defined by Rita Felski (2008) is associated with “affective orientation” (18; emphasis added), that takes place in the act of reading, a dynamic interplay between texts and readers. Felski develops four modes of engagement in contemporary reading practices (recognition, knowledge, enchantment and shock), calling for “a phenomenology of reading” (18), her own contribution to “neo-phenomenology”. Felski highlights phenomenological “attentiveness to the first person perspective” (17) in embedded and embodied narratives. In this sense, the concept of recognition lays bare the dialogical mode of contemporary illness memoirs, as well as help us elucidate the social and cultural mediation of illness narratives.
In this critical context, contemporary illness memoirs such as Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air (2016), Hilary Mantel’s Giving up the Ghost (2003) and Ink in the Blood: A Hospital Diary (2010), Jenny Diski's In Gratitude (2016), or Olive Sacks’ Gratitude (2016), to name but a few, artfully bring the reader into the reading/writing dynamics of the author's self-reflexive embodied experience of illness. Also, these writers negotiate and re-orient themselves between embodiment and disembodiment, life/survival and death, showing a heightened interest in the materiality of the world through the persistent presence of relevant objects in their narratives. Thus, we need to further investigate the need for recognition on the part of the readers, or, in other words, what it is that authors demand from readers in terms of acknowledging their new embedded and embodied realities of illness.
We would welcome submissions that will open up questions about the problematics of textual engagement in the dialogical mode of contemporary illness memoirs from the perspective of ‘orientation’ and ‘recognition’.
Some of the questions that might be addressed (but not limited to):
-What are the main phenomenological concepts, following Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, among others, used in contemporary critical theory?
-How does Sarah Ahmed’s concept of ‘orientation’ apply to the experience of illness? How does ‘orientation’ relate to Felski’s concept of ‘recognition’?
-How can we approach contemporary illness memoirs through the critical lens of the concepts of ‘orientation’ and ‘recognition’?
-How are illness memoirs received and interpreted by contemporary readers? What impact do they have on contemporary perceptions of illness and disability?
-What are the strategies of re-positioning, re-orientation and/or dis-orientation in the textual engagement with an illness narrative?
-What is the role of materiality and objects in illness narratives in relation to the concepts of ‘orientation’ and ‘recognition’?
This panel explores the affective and cognitive responses of readers/viewers of neo-Victorian texts. It considers how the polytemporal dynamics between writers, readers and critics of neoVictorianism reorientate and/or disorientate textual reception eliciting or short-circuiting empathy. In addition, it examines the tension between “unknowing” and “knowing” readers who negotiate immersion versus critical distance, and the strategies of adaptation, interpretation and interpolation that such (re)positionings involve. Seminar participants are invited to reflect on the comparative effectiveness (or failure) of such (re)orientations in relation to temporal contexts of production and reception. How do such strategies impact engagements with the nineteenth-century past? What manner of cultural memory work is thus enabled?
Convenors:
* Patricia Pulham (University of Surrey, UK), p.pulham@surrey.ac.uk
* Marie-Luise Kohlke (Swansea University, UK), m.l.kohlke@swansea.ac.uk
S62: Bodily (Re)Orientations in Neo-Victorianism
This seminar addresses the relevance of the materiality of the body in neo-Victorian literature and culture. It considers how the material turn is deployed in neo-Victorianism, and the ways in which critical perspectives such as phenomenology, Thing theory, and object-relations ontology (re)position and (re)orientate the dichotomy between subject and object, materiality and immateriality in neo-Victorian literature and culture by means of (re)embodiment and sensorial apprehension. In addition, this seminar explores the neo-Victorian text as a dynamic inter-space of bodily re-inhabitance, an in-between space of flows and movements, where the contemporary present brings the Victorian past into close proximity, enacting contact through affective interactions with various text(s) and bodies.
Convenors:
* Rosario Arias (University of Málaga, Spain), rarias@uma.es
* Ann Heilmann (Cardiff University, UK), HeilmannA@Cardiff.ac.uk
(acceptance will be communicated before November 2020)
Deadline for full-manuscript submissions: 1 March 2021
Expected date of publication: September 2021
Editors of Special Issue: Rosalía Baena (University of Navarra, Spain), Marta Cerezo (UNED University, Spain) and Rosario Arias (University of Malaga, Spain).
https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issues/contemporary-illness-narratives/?utm_source=TFO&utm_medium=cms&utm_campaign=JPD14372
This special issue of Prose Studies aims to explore the critical possibilities of Phenomenology for illness narratives. Phenomenology, as a critical perspective, provides an especially adequate framework for illness narratives, as it deals particularly with one’s embodied situatedness. The phenomenological concepts of ‘recognition’ and ‘orientation’ function as useful critical lenses to reveal the cultural mediation of illness narratives on the issues of illness, pain, death, but also survival and resilience.
The phenomenological notion of ‘orientation’ derives from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945), and is later taken up by Sara Ahmed in her Queer Phenomenology (2006), where she aims to develop the relevance of the concept of ‘orientation’ for queer studies and within phenomenology itself.
The dynamic nature of ‘orientation’, as the notion refers to the space in between bodies and objects, involves one’s position in time and space, and its double-sidedness lends to useful approaches to interpret contemporary narratives of illness where bodily engagement with the world acquires multiple forms that deal with orientation, dis-orientation and re-orientation. Then, ‘orientation’ is pivotal for illness narratives where bodily intentionality, that is, the physical directedness towards objects and bodies in space and time is essential (Ahmed 2006).
In turn, ‘recognition’, as defined by Rita Felski (2008) is associated with “affective orientation” (18; emphasis added), that takes place in the act of reading, a dynamic interplay between texts and readers. Felski develops four modes of engagement in contemporary reading practices (recognition, knowledge, enchantment and shock), calling for “a phenomenology of reading” (18), her own contribution to “neo-phenomenology”. Felski highlights phenomenological “attentiveness to the first person perspective” (17) in embedded and embodied narratives. In this sense, the concept of recognition lays bare the dialogical mode of contemporary illness memoirs, as well as help us elucidate the social and cultural mediation of illness narratives.
In this critical context, contemporary illness memoirs such as Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air (2016), Hilary Mantel’s Giving up the Ghost (2003) and Ink in the Blood: A Hospital Diary (2010), Jenny Diski's In Gratitude (2016), or Olive Sacks’ Gratitude (2016), to name but a few, artfully bring the reader into the reading/writing dynamics of the author's self-reflexive embodied experience of illness. Also, these writers negotiate and re-orient themselves between embodiment and disembodiment, life/survival and death, showing a heightened interest in the materiality of the world through the persistent presence of relevant objects in their narratives. Thus, we need to further investigate the need for recognition on the part of the readers, or, in other words, what it is that authors demand from readers in terms of acknowledging their new embedded and embodied realities of illness.
We would welcome submissions that will open up questions about the problematics of textual engagement in the dialogical mode of contemporary illness memoirs from the perspective of ‘orientation’ and ‘recognition’.
Some of the questions that might be addressed (but not limited to):
-What are the main phenomenological concepts, following Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, among others, used in contemporary critical theory?
-How does Sarah Ahmed’s concept of ‘orientation’ apply to the experience of illness? How does ‘orientation’ relate to Felski’s concept of ‘recognition’?
-How can we approach contemporary illness memoirs through the critical lens of the concepts of ‘orientation’ and ‘recognition’?
-How are illness memoirs received and interpreted by contemporary readers? What impact do they have on contemporary perceptions of illness and disability?
-What are the strategies of re-positioning, re-orientation and/or dis-orientation in the textual engagement with an illness narrative?
-What is the role of materiality and objects in illness narratives in relation to the concepts of ‘orientation’ and ‘recognition’?
This panel explores the affective and cognitive responses of readers/viewers of neo-Victorian texts. It considers how the polytemporal dynamics between writers, readers and critics of neoVictorianism reorientate and/or disorientate textual reception eliciting or short-circuiting empathy. In addition, it examines the tension between “unknowing” and “knowing” readers who negotiate immersion versus critical distance, and the strategies of adaptation, interpretation and interpolation that such (re)positionings involve. Seminar participants are invited to reflect on the comparative effectiveness (or failure) of such (re)orientations in relation to temporal contexts of production and reception. How do such strategies impact engagements with the nineteenth-century past? What manner of cultural memory work is thus enabled?
Convenors:
* Patricia Pulham (University of Surrey, UK), p.pulham@surrey.ac.uk
* Marie-Luise Kohlke (Swansea University, UK), m.l.kohlke@swansea.ac.uk
S62: Bodily (Re)Orientations in Neo-Victorianism
This seminar addresses the relevance of the materiality of the body in neo-Victorian literature and culture. It considers how the material turn is deployed in neo-Victorianism, and the ways in which critical perspectives such as phenomenology, Thing theory, and object-relations ontology (re)position and (re)orientate the dichotomy between subject and object, materiality and immateriality in neo-Victorian literature and culture by means of (re)embodiment and sensorial apprehension. In addition, this seminar explores the neo-Victorian text as a dynamic inter-space of bodily re-inhabitance, an in-between space of flows and movements, where the contemporary present brings the Victorian past into close proximity, enacting contact through affective interactions with various text(s) and bodies.
Convenors:
* Rosario Arias (University of Málaga, Spain), rarias@uma.es
* Ann Heilmann (Cardiff University, UK), HeilmannA@Cardiff.ac.uk
To this end, we will employ the notion of ‘orientation’. We propose to conceptualise ‘orientation’ in a double sense: on the one hand, we would like to develop the idea of ‘orientation’ in close relation to the “polytemporality” of the trace (following Victoria Browne), which privileges process, dynamism and fluidity in its multiple temporalities, a timely concern in today’s fiction and culture in English. On the other hand, we intend to engage with ‘orientation’ by casting new light on ethics, affect studies and the I-you relationship that emerges in the encounter with the ‘other’ in fields such as illness and ageing studies. In this sense, several critical perspectives will constitute the theoretical framework of this project as we will draw on Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Judith Butler, Brian Massumi and Sara Ahmed, whose take on ‘orientation’ leads us to re-consider this notion in the light of the above-mentioned ideas.
https://orionfiction.org/
The results of the research carried out in the previous project have led us to delve further into the theoretical study of the trace with the purpose of progressing in the study of this concept, and of its application to recent literature written in English, focusing on the quality of the trace as a physical and tangible object under the title [FFI2013-44154-P] “Nuevos parámetros críticos en torno al concepto de la huella y su aplicación a la literatura reciente en lengua inglesa”.
Now we aim at delving into the theoretical study of the trace that we began in our previous research, with the purpose of progressing in the study of this concept, and of its application to recent literature written in English, focusing on the quality of the trace as a physical and tangible object. This research into the materiality of the trace will be carried out along three main lines: on the one hand, the trace as an impression, as a material object crucial for the reactivation of memories, which connects with “Thing theory”, and with museum studies and phenomenology. On the other hand, we will analyse the intersection of the trace with food as a mnemonic object, and with illness and ageing in their relationship with the processes of memory. Finally, in the context of the recovery of the subject and the ethical turn in artistic production, as a visible trace, we will deepen into the implications of the conceptualisations of the trace by Paul Ricoeur and Emmanuel Levinas, suggested in the previous project. All this will allow us to deal with a key issue in the current literary and critical context, for which the trace, so our contention goes, plays a crucial role: the questioning of the validity of the postmodern paradigm, especially in terms of the changing conception of nostalgia in relation with the past and memory as tangible presences.