International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

Did you know we have a European affiliate? Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung. More information can be found at http://www.fantastikforschung.de/.

EUROFAN: New Directions of the European Fantastic After the Cold War Second Annual Conference of the Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung (GFF) within the framework of the
Salzburg Annual Conferences in English Literature and Culture in Collaboration with the
Programme Arts & Aesthetics (Priority Programme “Wissenschaft und Kunst”) to be held at the University of Salzburg 29 September to 1 October 2011, organised by Sabine Coelsch-Foisner and Sarah Herbe.

Since the end of the Cold War a significant number of fantastic texts, films, artworks and new media practices across Europe have raised social and political questions. We understand the fantastic to mean a dynamic process rather than a finished product and a distinctive mode of engagement with the real. It typically works to disrupt the mimetic through supernatural, magical and visionary means. In this sense it breaks through boundaries of genre, space and identity. It fosters new kinds of dialogue across time, space and communities, informing contemporary technologies of cultural production and their use by increasing numbers of Europeans in their everyday lives. The rich European cultural context offers unique opportunities to look into how the contemporary fantastic as a truly global cultural phenomenon is being locally created and reinterpreted in active, trans-national dialogue. Through transformed networks of publishing, audiovisual industries, digital media, online communities, visitor attractions and cultural tourism, the fantastic has reached new dimensions. Pervading a wide range of literary genres, cultural practices and infrastructures, it plays a crucial role in the exchange of ideas and concerns across national and political boundaries. The fall of the Berlin Wall signalled the start of a period of profound changes and reconfigurations in Europe. These involved a rethinking not only of capitalism and communism, East and West, but also of the national and trans-national, the indigenous and migrant, borders and flows, histories and futures, identities and communities. Simultaneously, across high and popular culture new fantastic forms and practices have emerged.

This conference will explore how the fantastic has responded to and how it is shaping Europe’s dynamic cultural contexts, and how it contributes to cognitive and affective dimensions of European identity. The aim is to define the share of the fantastic in the cultural traffic between European societies and communities after the Cold War. We are particularly interested in transformations of the fantastic in literature, life-writing, film, folklore, gaming, cultural infrastructures such as museums and museum-like venues, multi-sensory events and social practices. For this purpose we invite papers dealing with:

• Genre Shifts: how have post-Cold War realities changed conceptions of fantastic genres and what new terminologies have emerged since 1989? What are the political implications of the genre shifts according to locale? How has the growing cultural acceptance impacted conceptions of high and low culture and how has it become a privileged site for negotiating cultural identities?
• Fantastic Film and New Media: what is the role of the fantastic in European cinema? How has the latter articulated and negotiated the relationships that have emerged since the end of the Cold War between nation, Europe and international capital? What impact have contemporary forms of media had on the fantastic and, conversely, how have the cultures of fantasy paved the way for contemporary media cultures to emerge (participatory media culture, ‘media convergence’ and ‘fan fiction’)?
• Cultural Infrastructures and Social Practices: What is the role of cultural infrastructures in constructing history and communicating cultural value through narrative and multi-sensory experience? How have sites of cultural memory, history and trauma, museums and visitor attractions been narrativised, emotionalised and theatricalised by fantastic tropes and strategies? What role does the fantastic play in the construction and reconfiguration of different identity categories in the new Europe (re-tellings of myth and folklore, festivals, events)?

If you are interested in this conference and wish to offer a paper, please send an abstract of 350 words describing your project and bearing your name and institutional affiliation by 15 January 2011 to:

Prof. Dr. Sabine Coelsch-Foisner
University of Salzburg
Department of English and American Studies
Akademiestraße 24
5020 Salzburg, Austria
Tel.: +43-662-8044-4422
Fax: +43-662-8044-167
E-Mail: sabine.coelsch-foisner@sbg.ac.at

and

Dr. Sarah Herbe
University of Salzburg
Department of English and American Studies
Akademiestraße 24
5020 Salzburg, Austria
Tel.: +43-662-8044-4402
Fax: +43-662-8044-167
E-Mail: sarah.herbe@sbg.ac.at

The 2010 Science Fiction Research Association (www.sfra.org) conference theme, “Far Stars and Tin Stars: Science Fiction and the Frontier,” reflects the conference’s venue in the high desert of Carefree, Arizona, north of Phoenix. The frontier, the borderland between what is known and what is unknown, the settled and the wild, the mapped and the unexplored, is as central to science fiction as it is to the mythology of the American West.

International Guest Scholar Pawel Frelik: “Gained in Translation: Dispersed Narratives in Contemporary Culture”

Guest Scholar Margaret Weitekamp: “Ray Guns, Play Sets, and Board Games: What Space Toys Say About the Frontier”

Guest Scholar/Author Joan Slonczewski: “Tree Networks and Transspecies Sex: Biology in Avatar”

Submissions are invited for individual papers (15-20 minutes), full paper panels (3 papers), roundtables (80 minute sessions), and other presentations that explore the study and teaching of science fiction in any medium. Proposals that engage the conference theme are appreciated, but all proposals will be considered.

Paper and other session proposals should be 150-250 words. Paper panel proposals should include the proposals of all three papers and a brief statement of their unifying principle. Include all text of the proposal in the body of the email (not as an attachment). Please be sure to include full contact information for all panel members and to make all AV requests within each proposal.

In addition to traditional paper panels, the conference will include several “Year in Review” sessions in which a small panel will present observations about the most significant texts in a given area before inviting audience discussion. Individual panels will cover SF Scholarship, SF in Print, SF Film, SF Television, SF Games. Anyone interested in serving on one of these panels should contact the Conference Coordinator.

For the first time, SFRA 2010 will offer three pre-conference “Short Courses” the morning of the conference’s first day. One will examine teaching science fiction in higher education, one will provide interested scholars a primer on studying digital science fiction, and the third will offer students (and anyone else interested) an orientation to science fiction scholarship.

The conference is open to other non-traditional programming suggestions that take advantage of an in-person gathering of science fiction scholars.

E-mail submissions as attached files by April 30, 2010 to Conference Coordinator Craig Jacobsen: jacobsen at mesacc dot edu

Ongoing submission acceptances will be issued to better allow presenters to plan.

The conference will run June 24-27, 2010. Visit the conference website at www.sfra2010.ning.com. Rather than a static site, this year’s conference web presence is a social network designed to allow attendees (and those considering) to join, network before during and after the conference, and collaborate in the construction of the conference. Sign up even if you are not sure whether you’ll attend.

Call for Proposals
Fantastic Voyages, Monstrous Dreams, Wondrous Visions: Cinematic Folklore and Fairy Tale Film

Submissions are invited for an edited collection of essays on fairy tale film. Suitable topics include but are not limited to:
• Intersections between folklore, fantasy, and film theory
• Postmodern and psychoanalytic perspectives on cinematic folklore
• Metamorphosis, enchantment, monstrosity, and abjection in fairy tale film
• Transgender or transbiology in fairy tale film
• The rise in popularity of adult fairy tale films
• The convergence of science fiction and fairy tale fantasy film
• Ethnographic studies of fairy tale film viewers and audiences
• Fairy tale film narratives of Happily-ever-after, the American Dream, utopia, and other cultural discourses
• Discourses of Otherness, (post)coloniality, and Orientalism in fairy tale film
• Fairy tale film as cultural pedagogy, encoding issues of socialization, sexuality, gender, race, and class difference
• Analyses of particular works by fairy tale filmmakers from Georges Méliès and Walt Disney to Tim Burton and Stephen Spielberg
• Global migration of cinematic folklore, cross-cultural translations and transformations
• Genre and generational shifts and remixes in fairy tale film from melodrama and romantic comedy, to science fiction, horror, noir, and action adventure
• Fairy tale motifs in the visual culture of film shorts, TV advertising and music video
• Historic and contemporary perspectives on innovative cinematography and special effects in animated and live-action fairy tale film, from puppetry to Pixar
• Political economy/capitalist relations of production and direction of cinematic folklore
• Relationship of “classic” 19thC fairy tale illustration (from Arthur Rackham, Kay Nielsen, Walter Crane, Edmund Dulac, et al.) and the Disney animation image repertoire to the iconography of contemporary cinematic folklore

Final essays should range in length from 5,000 – 9,000 words. Previously published work, appropriately revised and/or updated, will be considered. Send 500-word proposals (or completed essays) and a brief c.v. electronically as email attachments to Sidney Eve Matrix (matrixs@queensu.ca) and Pauline Greenhill (p.greenhill@uwinnipeg.ca) by 1 January 2008.

These Irish eyes aren’t smilin’ given the recent news from our SFRA compatriots that deserves mention on our IAFA blog (economically prudent and understandable, but disappointing nonetheless):

The SFRA Executive Committee has decided that, due to the uncertainties caused by recent currency fluctuations, the only financially prudent course is not to hold our 2008 annual meeting in Dublin, Ireland. We sincerely regret any problems this announcement will cause our members, wherever they reside. It was not a decision the Committee reached lightly, and it is a decision that has caused all of us bitter disappointment. But whether or not we could reach sufficient prepaid registrations by preset cancellation deadlines, which given the rapid decline of the U.S. dollar against foreign currencies seemed a major uncertainty, the amount of money SFRA would have to upfront for registration subsidies to attract a minimal attendance seemed almost to guarantee a significant deficit, one that could grow substantially under certain conditions. The SFRA Executive Committee agreed that we should not commit to this level of expenditure at this time.

We would like to thank the Dublin Conference Group for all the hard work they have put in over the past several years on this project. We stress that it is not the fault of any of them that these plans have not worked out, but rather the declining value of the U.S. dollar that is the major culprit here. And we stress that SFRA will continue to do all it can in the future to serve ALL of its membership, wherever they reside.

The SFRA Executive Committee will work to find a site in the United States for SFRA’s 2008 Conference that is affordable and will make for a quality academic gathering. We hope to announce this new venue in the next couple of weeks. In addition, SFRA will do what it can to offer graduate students willing to present a paper at that conference, particularly non-North American students who were looking forward to the Dublin locale, travel grants to lessen the cost of attending the U.S. venue.

We hope that out of this disappointment will somehow come a shared determination to make SFRA a more vital and more dynamic group of science fiction scholars.

Adam Frisch
SFRA President

Note: for those of you intent on going to Ireland this summer, there is a viable alternative that deserves a plug:

9th International Conference of the Utopian Studies Society
University of Limerick, Ireland, July 3-5, 2008.

The 9th. International conference will be hosted by the Ralahine Centre at the University of Limerick. A Call for Papers will be posted as soon as it is available.

Special themes identified by the Steering Group so far will be Architecture, Music, and Irish Utopias, but proposals on a wide range of Utopian topics will be welcome.

Venue: The Ralahine Centre, University of Limerick, Ireland
The nearest airport is Shannon.
For information, click here.

CFP: Special Issue of Science Fiction Studies on Gender and Sexuality. Past special issues of SFS have focused on women writers and on queer theory, but this issue proposes to take a broader approach to gender and sexuality, focusing on a full spectrum of related topics: femininity/masculinity in sf, sf and sex/gender change, sf pornography, techno-fetishism, alien sex, multiple genders/sexualities, sexual subcultures in sf, sf and censorship, sex work(ers) in sf, slash/flash writing, and more. We welcome submissions from a range of disciplinary perspectives. The deadline for 500-word abstracts is May 1, 2008; please send them to Rob Latham at rob-latham@uiowa.edu or to Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. at icronay@depauw.edu.