International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

Suvin Today?

A Roundtable Discussion

The Society for Utopian Studies (November 9-12, 2017 in Memphis, TN)

Proposal Deadline: July 8, 2017

Co-Organizers: Gerry Canavan and Hugh O’Connell

Nearly 45 years ago in December 1972, Darko Suvin published the signal sf studies text, “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre.” It was this article that (in)famously introduced “SF as the literature of cognitive estrangement,” and which was later expanded for the equally trailblazing Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (1979). Writing in the introduction to the recent Ralahine Classics edition of Metamorphoses, Gerry Canavan notes that although sf studies certainly predated this text, its publication was a watershed moment, delimiting a foundational discourse for science fiction studies. Indeed, whether in agreement or in strict opposition to Suvin’s work, it is still rare to find sf criticism that does not set out from Suvin. However, in recent years, the “Suvin Event,” as it has come to be known, seems increasingly to garner detractors with ever more calls to dislodge the Suvinian paradigm from the heart of sf studies. These works often proceed in the name of a more nuanced attention to the socio-historical function of genre studies, as a dismissal of the hierarchical ordering of speculative forms, or as an end to sf as a particular form with a particular vocation altogether. Yet Suvin did more than offer a formal definition of sf. While much has been written, particularly in relation to the notion of “cognition” and the formal gatekeeping rigidity of Suvin’s work, the utopian and radical historical materialist aspects of Suvin’s work are often lost or submerged by a long critical commentary that has fixated on its structural weaknesses (whether real or perceived). And this occlusion perhaps goes doubly so for his work in the historicization and internationalization of sf studies.

Therefore, with the 45th anniversary of “On the Poetics” upon us, not to mention the recent republication of the long out of print Metamorphoses in 2016, this informal roundtable discussion invites contributors to re-engage with the Suvin Event.

· In the words of Rhys Williams, how can we continue to break down the walls that Suvin’s “paradigm threw up” and that keep its still vital “living concepts petrified,” in order to free them for contemporary sf criticism?

· Or, following Patrick Parrinder, if the utility of the Suvin moment was already exhausted by 2000, not to mention the more recent withering critique by fellow marxist China Miéville, what is left to salvage from the Suvin Event?

· At the proposed end of the Suvin Event, what surprisingly new utopian anticipations await us?

· What aspects re-emerge – whether in new or altered form – after the updatings, alterations, and critiques?

· What parts of Suvin’s work have been under-attended?

· What has been left undiscovered – or is left to rediscover – at this late moment of zombie neoliberalism and the slow violence of its concomitant environmental apocalypse?

· How – or even, can – we conceive of sf’s utopian impulse in the post-Suvinian critical zeitgeist?

· Alternately, have the critics got it wrong?

We invite participants that take up these or any other aspects of Suvin’s work and the debates over the Suvin Event.

A note about the format: This session is being proposed as an informal roundtable discussion. Rather than the usual 20 minute, written presentations, contributors will be asked to keep their opening comments to a brief 5 minutes. Gerry Canavan, editor of the 2016 Ralahine Classics edition of Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, will then act as a respondent. Our intent is to provide more time for panelists to interact and discuss ideas with one another as well as with audience members than in the usual conference panel setting.

Please email Gerry Canavan (gerrycanavan@gmail.com) and Hugh O’Connell (hugh.oconnell@umb.edu) with a brief (250 words) synopsis or proposal for participation in the roundtable by July 8, 2017.

Essays for Collection on Supergirl Television Series–Under Contract

deadline for submissions:
June 1, 2017

full name / name of organization:
Tim Rayborn and Melissa Wehler

contact email:
trayborn@sbcglobal.net

McFarland Publishers, an independent book publisher devoted to a wide variety of topics, including history, sports, and pop culture, will be releasing a collection of essays on the CW television series Supergirl. Tim Rayborn and Melissa Wehler will take on the role of editors.

Tim has written three books for McFarland (The Violent Pilgrimage, Against the Friars, and A New English Music), and co-edited an anthology of studies of the series Jessica Jones, to be published by McFarland in 2017. He has a PhD from the University of Leeds (UK), and has written numerous articles for magazines and journals, as well as an ongoing book series for Skyhorse Publishing. Melissa is the Dean of Humanities and Sciences, Central Penn College, Summerdale, PA. Her publications include book chapters in various edited collections, including “‘Be wise. Be brave. Be tricky’: Neil Gaiman’s Extraordinarily Ordinary Coraline,’” in A Quest of Her Own: The Female Hero in Modern Fantasy (McFarland, 2014) and “The Haunted Transatlantic Libertine: Edmund Kean’s American Tour” in Transnational Gothic: Literary and Social Exchanges in the Long Nineteenth Century (Ashgate Publishing, 2013).

Supergirl is now in its second season. It began life on CBS, but was moved to the CW at the end of season 1 to bring it into the same continuity as Executive Producer Greg Berlanti’s other DC Comics television shows (Arrow, The Flash, and Legends of Tomorrow). It has generated many positive reviews, though some feel that season two has shifted its tone somewhat from the first, particularly in keeping its female characters as the main focus.

The show explores a variety of topics, including women’s lives and roles (as a government agent, as the CEO of a media empire, as a police detective, as president, and as one of the most powerful beings on earth), the sister relationship between Kara and Alex Danvers (often held to be the heart of the show), the importance of family (regardless of how that family is created), issues concerning immigration and refugees, and LGBTQ representation (Alex’s coming out story arc and her subsequent relationship with detective Maggie Sawyer).

There is a wealth of material from the show that can be thoroughly examined. In assembling a collection of essays, we would like to see a variety of topics, particularly centered on gender studies, LGBTQ studies, and related psychology and sociology. Possible subjects might include:

The positive portrayal of women in these various and important roles
The portrayal of women as many of the show’s best villains
Subverted gender roles
LGBTQ representation in Alex’s highly-praised coming-out story arc
The “Sanvers” romance and its positive impact on LGBTQ communities and fandom
The role of family in the show (Alex and Kara as sisters; their relationship to their mother, Eliza; J’onn as a surrogate father to them both)
Thematic similarities and differences between seasons one and two, related to any of these topics
Sociological studies, such as which themes resonate with modern viewers, especially women and the LGBTQ community.
Essays must be in American English and spellings, fully cited with end notes, and bibliography, all in accordance with the current Chicago Manual of Style (the preferred style manual for this collection). The length of each contribution should be between about 6,000 and 8,000 words, unless there is a good reason that a given essay should be shorter or longer. Please use clear, concise writing, not overly academic jargon or dense prose.

Peer review will be conducted after the collection is submitted, currently scheduled for October, 2017. Accordingly, the deadline for final chapter submission is July 15, 2017, to allow us time to edit properly. Submissions before that deadline are, of course, most welcome and helpful. Season 2 has not yet finished, but contributors are welcome to submit proposals now about their topics before the season finale airs in early May. All proposals must be submitted by mid-May (final date to be decided).

If contributors wish to include images not in public domain or text excerpts from copyrighted materials requiring written permission to reproduce, they will be expected to obtain such permissions on their own, and pay the required reproduction fees (if needed); McFarland cannot reimburse for this expense. We will need hard copies of each such permission. McFarland also prefers that contributors not use extended quotations of dialogue from episodes, as well as images/screen captures, as these require additional permission/fees from the television network and can delay publication, unless contributors can obtain said permissions and pay fees themselves.

Potential contributors should submit a one- to two-page proposal including a potential title, a short description of the topic(s) for your essay, a brief summary of your background and qualifications, and contact information.

Please email your proposals to Tim at: trayborn@sbcglobal.net

Organic Systems: Environments, Bodies and Culture in Science Fiction

deadline for submissions:
May 31, 2017

full name / name of organization:
London Science Fiction Research Community (Birkbeck + Royal Holloway)

contact email:
londonsfsymposium@gmail.com

Though often understood in ecological terms, the word ‘environment’ can also be viewed more widely as the surroundings and conditions of a specific system—whether they be mechanical, biological, social or chemical. Culture arises from and then informs these systems, becoming itself a further component of environments. Science fictional texts have explored the interactions between culture, environments and bodies on a wide spectrum of scale: from the level of a planetary biosphere or climate system (e.g. terraforming) to a single body or organ (e.g. genetic engineering). This conference will gather Science Fiction researchers, critics, authors and readers together to discuss intersections between cultural and organic systems in all forms of SF media. Potential topics for presentation include, but are not limited to:

Interactions between culture, ecosystems and organisms;
Rhetorics, stylistics and tropes common to ecological SF;
Ecological SF’s relationship to its context of production;
Living worlds (e.g. the Gaia hypothesis);
Analogical connections between smaller bodies (e.g. humans) and larger (e.g. cities, planets, universes);
Environmental utopian and dystopian themes;
The technological versus the natural in environmental systems;
The relationship between socio-political systems and the environment;
The impact of radically altered bodies and conceptions of the body on culture, and vice versa;
The aesthetic and conceptual significance of modes and subcategories such as Biopunk and Ribofunk;
Interrelations between posthuman theories and texts and different types of technological and environmental change;
Transhumanism, both as a movement and an ideology;
Connections between SF media and the geohumanities.
The conference will also feature a keynote session with environmental humanities researcher Chris Pak, as well as a panel discussion with award-winning SF authors Gwyneth Jones, Paul McAuley and Adam Roberts.

Conference organisers: Francis Gene-Rowe (PhD, Royal Holloway, University of London), Rhodri Davies (PhD, Birkbeck, University of London), Aren Roukema (PhD, Birkbeck, University of London).

This conference is supported by the Centre for Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck College (University of London) and the Department of English, Royal Holloway (University of London)

Submit abstracts of up to 300 words for 20 minute papers by 31 May 2017 to londonsfsymposium@gmail.com. Please include a brief biography of no more than 100 words. Applicants will receive a response by 1 July.

THE FINAL FRONTIER: OUTER SPACE AND POPULAR CULTURE

SAMLA 2017, November 3-5, Atlanta, Georgia

This CFP invites papers dealing with fictional representations of outer space, intergalactic travel, and other worlds. This panel is particularly interested in discussing why some texts about outer space remain central within scholarly and popular discourse while others fade into obscurity. Does the value of intergalactic fiction derive from its scientific and technological realism and its ability to, according to Hugo Gernsback, inspire “scientific fact and prophetic vision”? Or, does the staying power of these speculative fictions come from their complex worldmaking and engagement with empire and colonization (as in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series)? What determines whether we return to someone’s vision of life beyond the boundaries of Earth? We will consider space travel narratives from various decades and types of media including novels, short fiction, film, television, games, and music. By June 2, please submit a 250-word abstract, brief bio, and AV requirements to Andrea Krafft, Georgia Institute of Technology, at akrafft3@gatech.edu.

For additional CFPs and conference information, please visit https://samla.memberclicks.net/samla-89-cfps.

deadline for submissions:
May 21, 2017

full name / name of organization:
Justin Wyble, Chaminade University of Honolulu

contact email:
justin.wyble@chaminade.edu

This panel seeks any and all papers related to science fiction, especially in relation to this year’s theme of sight, visuality, and ways of seeing.

Individual paper presentations will be between 15 and 20 minutes long. Please submit proposals via the online system by May 21, 2017. The PAMLA 2017 Conference will be held at the lovely Chaminade University of Honolulu (with the official conference hotel being the Ala Moana) from Friday, November 10 to Sunday, November 12.

Paper proposals must be made via our online system found here:

http://pamla.org/2017/topic-areas

Any questions can be sent to the above email address.

deadline for submissions:
May 21, 2017

full name / name of organization:
Daniel Ante-Contreras, University of California, Riverside

contact email:
dante001@ucr.edu

This session is interested in both analysis of games and the gaming industry and the visibility and role of “video game studies” as an institutional entity. It seeks papers willing to engage with the intersections of visuality and play in games and game studies as they are and as they might be.

Individual paper presentations will be between 15 and 20 minutes long. Please submit proposals via the online system by May 21, 2017. The PAMLA 2017 Conference will be held at the lovely Chaminade University of Honolulu (with the official conference hotel being the Ala Moana) from Friday, November 10 to Sunday, November 12.

Paper proposals must be made via our online system found here:

http://pamla.org/2017/topic-areas

Any questions can be sent to the above email address.

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.