International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

In 2018 Cardiff University’s ScienceHumanities research group will host a
week-long International Summer School dedicated to the examination of the
relations between the humanities and the sciences.

The Summer School programme features workshops from leading scholars in
literature and science, the histories of science and medicine, and the
philosophy of science from across the UK and Europe. It is designed to give you
access to significant researchers in the field, and professional development
opportunities on publishing, public engagement, and archival research.

In addition, you will have the opportunity to share ideas, concepts and methods
with other doctoral students and begin to build a network of global contacts.
The Summer School also incorporates a cultural programme focussed on the rich
heritage of Cardiff as both a Welsh and British city.

The Summer School is open only to doctoral students located in universities and
research centres outside the UK. There are only 12 places available.

It is free to attend, but participants must be able to meet the cost of their
own transport, accommodation and part of their subsistence during their stay in
Cardiff. Advice will be given on accommodation and transport and some meals will
be included during the Summer School.

Two bursaries of £400 are available for students from nations with limited
resources.

To express initial interest and receive an application form please email
Professor Martin Willis on willism8@cardiff.ac.uk. Further information can be
found on the ScienceHumanities website at: https://cardiffsciencehumanities.org.

The closing date for expressions of interest is 29 September, 2017. Applications
must be submitted by 30 November, 2017 and decisions will be communicated by 31
December, 2017. Participating doctoral students must be able to commit to the
full 5 days of the Summer School.

Kurt Vonnegut: Ten Years Later—So It Goes

deadline for submissions:
May 31, 2017

full name / name of organization:
Josh Privett / SAMLA

contact email:
jprivett1@gsu.edu

It’s been ten years since American novelist Kurt Vonnegut passed away, and twenty since he published his final novel, Timequake. Author of fourteen novels and nearly one hundred published short stories (not to mention numerous plays and essay collections) over his fifty-year career, Vonnegut has been called everything from a hack to an innovator. Blurring fact and fiction, high and low styles of art, and conventions from genre and “literary” fiction, Vonnegut’s work remains popular with general readers, especially high school and college students, but is often maligned in serious academic circles, perhaps for that same reason. This panel seeks papers that focus on Vonnegut—his life or work—specifically in relation to this year’s conference theme, “High Art/Low Art: Borders and Boundaries in Popular Culture.” By May 31, please send a 250-word proposal, a brief CV, and any A/V requirements to Josh Privett, Georgia State University, jprivett1@gsu.edu, for SAMLA 89, Nov. 3-5, in Atlanta, GA.

Spaced Out. Spatiality in Comics

deadline for submissions:
May 31, 2017

full name / name of organization:
Comics Studies Research Clutster. Department of Humanities, University of Cagliari (Italy)

contact email:
spazi.nuvole@unica.it

Spaced Out. Spatiality in Comics

International Conference
Cagliari, Italy, 26-27 October 2017

How is space thematised and transformed, strengthened or weakened in the narrative comic? To what extent do comics rewrite and reinvent space by offering a place where spatial coordinates can be reconfigured in a utopian or fantastic manner? How does this reconfiguration affect perception devices? And again, how can the representation of spatiality in comics be modified within the network of the ongoing transmedia transformations?

Comics writers have long shown a preference for setting their works in the city and have implicitly tailored their works for readers, whose lifestyle and way of consuming comics as ‘products’ of the cultural industry single them out as a completely urbanised audience. Alongside this representation, interest has also been growing in internal or domestic space, from houses to artists’ studios, from apartment buildings to nursing homes, from hospitals to prisons. Such spaces are anything but neutral settings and, just like urban spaces, play a decisive role in shaping the narrative and the characters that move therein. Last but not least, space must be considered as asemiotic phenomenon: the language of comics manages to produce its own spatiality on the flat surface of the page, a spatiality that defines the coordinates of perception and the representation of space.

The Spaced Out. Spatiality in Comics Conference calls on scholars to tackle the issue of space in the narration of comics, against the background of the broader contemporary narrative and transmedia landscape, adopting various theoretical and critical approaches. There are two ways to participate:

– submitting a proposal for a paper to be presented at the general sessions coordinated by the respondent appointed by the Scientific Committee;

– submitting a workshop proposal for the two roundtable sessions that will focus on how the City and House are represented in the following works:

The city

Andrea Pazienza, Le straordinarie avventure di Pentothal (1982); Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers (2004)

The house

Richard McGuire, Here (2014); Paco Roca, La casa (2015)

Paper proposals should be around 500 words long. A short bio-bibliography of the author and an essential annotated bibliography must also be submitted. Two papers can be presented if one of these concerns the workshop sessions. Proposals must be submitted by May 31, 2017 to spazi.nuvole@unica.it. Authors will be notified of paper acceptance by June 30, 2017. Papers presented at the conference will be peer-reviewed and considered for publication. The deadline for sending the final version of the articles is December 30, 2017.

Participants:

Michael A. Chaney is Associate Professor of English at Dartmouth College, Chair of African and African American Studies. He specialises in nineteenth-century American literature and African American literature, visual culture studies and mixed race representation, comics and graphic novels. He has published Reading Lessons in Seeing: Mirrors, Masks, and Mazes in the Autobiographical Graphic Novel (University Press of Mississippi, 2017) and edited Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels (The University of Wisconsin Press, 2011).

Sara Colaone is a comics writer, illustrator and animator of short films. She teaches Illustration at Bologna’s Academy of Fine Arts. Her work has been published by Kappa, Dargaud, Coconino, Norma, Schreiber&Leser, Centrala, Stripburger, Giunti, Zanichelli, Pearson and in several journals: Internazionale, Le Monde Diplomatique DE, Rivista Il Mulino, Ventiquattro Magazine. Her latest graphic novel is Leda.Che solo amore e luce ha per confine (Coconino, 2016).

Manuele Fior is a comics writer and illustrator. His work has been published by Coconino, Atrabile, Futuropolis, Delcourt and in several newspapers and magazines: The New Yorker, Le Monde, Vanity Fair, La Repubblica, Sole 24 Ore, Internazionale, Il Manifesto, RollingStone Magazine. His latest book is entitled I giorni della merla (Coconino, 2016); his latest graphic novels are L’Intervista (Coconino, 2013) and Cinquemila Chilometri al Secondo (Coconino, 2010), which won the Fauve d’Or (Golden Wildcat) at the 2011 Angoulême Festival.

International Conference

19 AUGUST 2017 – LONDON, UK

ORGANISED BY INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH FOUNDATION AND LONDON CENTRE FOR INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH

http://uncanny.irf-network.org/

The twentieth-century literature and culture tended to explore and to celebrate subjectivity. But this tendency did not mean the turn to the self, but beyond the self, or as Charles Taylor puts it, “to a fragmentation of experience which calls our ordinary notions of identity into question”. 

In his attempts to define the uncanny Freud asserted that it is undoubtedly related to what is frightening – to what arouses dread and horror. It may be something domestic but at the same time unfriendly, dangerous, something that sets the sense of insecurity within the four walls of one’s house. “Persons, things, sense-impressions, experiences and situations which are known and long familiar arouse in us the feeling of danger, fear and even horror. Everyday objects may suddenly lose their familiar side, and become messengers”.

The uncanny suggests an unsettling of the feeling of comfort and reassurance in one’s home, but also in oneself. Architecture takes the place of psychology (Kreilkamp). The perturbed relationship between the characters and their familiar world, the troubled sense of home and self-certainty is a result of a traumatic experience of loss.

As Cathy Caruth claims, “to be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event”. It usually involves time disruption with the past surfacing in the present, especially the past which has not been worked through. The memory traces are revised and interweave with fresh experiences producing the uncanny effect.

In the new literary and artistic discourse authors tend to depict the new human being, “psychologically deep and multi-layered, fragmentary, floating on sensation and consciousness, fed by their random thoughts and their half-conscious dream worlds” (Bradbury). The new style relies on fragments, breaks, ellipses and disrupted linearity of the narration. It serves to convey the idea of the fractured character of modern time and fragmentariness and allusiveness of subconscious thought. As “an externalization of consciousness”, the uncanny becomes a meta-concept for modernity with its disintegration of time, space and self.

This conference seeks to explore the representations of the uncanny in language, literature and culture. Papers are invited on topics related, but not limited, to:

• uncanny geographies
• uncanny technologies
• the uncanny and visual tropes
• the uncanny and postcolonialism
• the uncanny and gender studies
• the uncanny and sexuality

We also welcome poster proposals that address the conference theme.

The conference aims to bring together scholars from different fields. We invite proposals from psychology, sociology, anthropology, literature, linguistics, etc.

Paper proposals up to 250 words and a brief biographical note should be sent by 31 May 2017 to: uncanny@irf-network.org.  Download paper proposal form.