Lives & Letters Mailing: August 2015
Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to another Lives & Letters Mailing. This mailing contains information about:
1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project news
Forthcoming WWW website update
The traces that remain
And two items on letterness and its challenges:
Forms and letterness
Orders and the letter
2. ‘After-Image: Life-Writing and Celebrity’ conference on 19 September 2015 in Oxford.
3. Proposed Edited Collection on American Women Writers and Liminality 10 Dec 2015
4. Call for Papers: INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS “AUTHORSHIP. THEORETICAL REFLECTIONS AND PRACTICAL ANALYSIS”
5. Legacies and Lifespans: Contemporary Women’s Writing in the 21st Century
6. Panel: Women Authors from the Great War
7. ‘Silence in the Archives: Censorship and Suppression in Women’s Life Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century’
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1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project news
There are four items of project news we would like to share:
Forthcoming WWW website update
We are pleased to announce that OVER the next two weeks we will be redesigning some of the Whites Writing Whiteness website and adding some interesting new areas. The ‘new look’ WWW will be fully launched by 1 September, so please keep an eye on the website to see what we’ve concocted! Go to http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/
The traces that remain
What are traces in terms of letters? Are letters a difference kind of trace from others? The trace, what remains, is an afterlife of a kind for the part of ‘the past’ concerned. But this is not as a residue of the past, for using this word makes it sound like it is a rendered down part of ‘then’. Nor is it a ‘clue’, for this would situate it in terms of ‘now’ and its investigations. ‘Trace’ is in fact exactly right. It has aspects of both then and now; there is a trace of what once was back then, although this is only faintly seen now. To read more on the traces that remain, please visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/the-trace/
Forms and letterness
Some documents are not letters, but not entirely lacking aspects of ‘letterness’. These include ‘forms,’ which are 90% not-letter but with a 10% hint of epistolarity hanging about them. The particular printed form – for registering employment and issuing passes to black people under an 1857 ‘Kaffir Pass’ Act – which is discussed involved key information being written by one person, about another, and communicated to a third party, an administrator within the legal framework that administered the 1857 Act. To read more about this, please visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/the-form-and-the-letter/
Orders and letters
Some archival documents appear to be letters – almost. Asking the question ‘What is it?’ raises some pertinent questions about letterness. The example this is discussed in connection with is an 1847 letter to an Eastern Cape woman, Mrs. Townsend, written by a Cape Town merchant and importer, Mr Smith. To find out more about Mrs Townsend and Mr Smith, please visit the blog at: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/the-order-and-the-letter/
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2. ‘After-Image: Life-Writing and Celebrity’ conference on 19 September 2015 in Oxford.
We are happy to announce that registration is open and the conference programme is available for the ‘After-Image: Life-Writing and Celebrity’ conference on 19 September 2015 in Oxford.
Keynote speakers are Sarah Churchwell and Man Booker Prize nominee Andrew O’Hagan. Through this conference we will be considering the interplay between the fields of celebrity studies and life-writing. The conference will explore ideas of image, persona and self-fashioning in an historical as well as a contemporary context and the role these concepts play in the writing of lives.
Our website and links to registration can be found here: https://afterimage2015.wordpress.com
With funding from the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, and the Centre for Life-Writing Research at King’s College London (CLWR)
With best wishes,
Nanette O’Brien, Wolfson College, Oxford
Oline Eaton, King’s College London
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3. Proposed Edited Collection on American Women Writers and Liminality 10 Dec 2015
full name / name of organization:
Society for the Study of American Women Writers
contact email:
ssawwcollection@gmail.com
CALL FOR PAPERS FOR A PROPOSED SSAWW EDITED COLLECTION
CALL FOR SENIOR SCHOLAR TO WRITE PREFACE
The Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW) is seeking abstracts (250 words) for essays (7500-8500 words, excluding notes) on American women writers and liminality for a proposed edited collection. We also seek a senior scholar in the field of American women writers to write the preface to the collection and, if interested, join the team as a co-editor.
The proposed collection builds on the popular CFP on liminality and hybridity for both SSAWW’s panels at the 2015 American Literature Association Conference and for SSAWW’s 2015 triennial conference. The timeline for the selection of essays and submission of the edited collection proposal appears below. Direct questions about this new publication initiative to: ssawwcollection@gmail.com.
Essay Abstracts: DUE December 10, 2015
Submit your 250-word abstract and 1 page CV to: ssawwcollection@gmail.com. In the subject line of the email and on your abstract, please note whether your proposed essay primarily focuses on (1) American women writers from the early period, (2) the 19 century, or (3) the 20th/21st century. All are welcome to submit abstracts; accepted authors should be members of SSAWW.
Senior Scholar: DUE December 10, 2015
Submit a letter of interest (250 words) that highlights your qualifications, interest, and preferred level of involvement (serve as co-editor and/or write preface) and a current CV to: ssawwcollection@gmail.com. In the subject line of the email please include the words “Senior Scholar.” The selected senior scholar should be a member of SSAWW.
American Women Writers and Liminality
The term liminality is arguably most familiar in postcolonial contexts; however, this critical concept draws on multiple disciplines and privileges inclusion. Often informed by notions of crossing, intersectionality, transition, and transformation, the term contests exclusionary practices involving class, ethnicity, gender, race, religion, and sex, among other variables. The word “limen,” from which liminality derives, designates threshold. The threshold functions simultaneously as both an obstructive barrier and an enticing opening for the entry into unknown, perhaps unknowable states that invite exploration. Both spatial and temporal, the liminal is a site of in-betweenness enabling non-normative perspectives. It is a site where difference becomes encounter as well as a location that resists assimilation while simultaneously allowing for the dynamic possibilities of fusion that hybridity embraces and articulates.
With the theme of liminality, the proposed edited collection aims to celebrate the multiplicity of American women’s writing across a longstanding literary tradition that continues to be dynamic in contemporary times. The theme of liminality, and the wide range of implications and meanings that this expansive concept implies, will facilitate a process of encounters, engagements, and conversations within, between, among, and across the rich polyphony that constitutes the creative acts of American women. Thus, through a focus on liminality, the proposed collection hopes to present the varied ways in which women, as critics, dramatists, educators, essayists, journalists, oral storytellers, poets, novelists, short story writers, and practitioners of both older and emerging forms, invent and reinvent the American literary and cultural landscape.
Possible topics involving the theme may include but are not limited to such keywords and ideas as:
· Alienation and/or disillusionment as states of in-betweenness
· Borders and peripheries
· Boundaries between/within the built environment and/or the natural environment
· Child, adult and blurring boundaries
· Collaboration
· Crossings
· Cross-species encounters: human and animal relationships
· Horizontal and/or vertical paradigms of social constructs
· The hyphen
· In between public and private or the semi-private, the semi-public
· In between resilience and vulnerability
· Liminal spaces in the home
· Immigration and/or citizenship
· Inside and outside‹the academy, the canon, etc.
· Leadership from, on, within the margins
· The mainstream and/or the subversive
· The margin and/or the center
· Mutations
· Obscurity and celebrity
· Outliers
· Porosity
· Pressures of normalization
· Technology and the human
· Transatlantic
· Transcontinental
· Transgender
· Transgressions
SSAWW Editorial Team
· Co-Editors: Miranda A. Green-Barteet and Kristin J. Jacobson
· Introduction authors: Miranda A. Green-Barteet and Rita Bode
· Preface author: senior scholar (TBA)
· Section Editors: Kristin Allukian, Rickie-Ann Legleitner and Leslie Allison
Proposed Content Distribution
· Early American (Pre- and Colonial America) Women Writers (3-4 essays)
· 19th-Century American Women Writers (3-4 essays)
· 20th/21-Century American Women Writers (3-4 essays)
Timeline
· Abstracts and Senior Scholar application due Dec. 10, 2015
· Review abstracts and send out notifications by Jan. 15, 2016
· Complete essays due June 1, 2016
· Proposal submission to publisher August 2016
Follow SSAWW on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/SSAmWW) and Twitter (@SSAWWrs)
Details about SSAWW¹s 2015 Conference: https://ssawwnew.wordpress.com/ssaww-2015-updates/
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IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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4. Call for Papers: INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS “AUTHORSHIP.
THEORETICAL REFLECTIONS AND PRACTICAL ANALYSIS”
October 22-23 2015
https://laautoria.wordpress.com/
In the last third part of the 20th Century, historical, philosophical and social scientific different trends converged in a common interest: to problematize author and authorship’s concepts. This issue has already emerged in the late 60’s, but it was the Internet appearance and the uprising of technology in academic activities that made it went in depth and, at the same time, became more complex in theoretical terms. In History and Historiography’s fields, the idea of authorship becomes a relational concept, losing in this way its autonomy and relatively isolation as approach, which was typical in the traditional perspectives. The concept of author refers to one or several biographies at the same time, depending on the particular work and on the context or historical moment. Authorship is comprehensive of a biography and a series of works that closely related with multiple collective contexts and perceptions. The author is then part of a historical world that defines the way he choses the subjects and the structure of his work, he publishes his texts and also the way he reaches some kind of public projection. Most frequently, the author belongs to an authorship community, with which he negotiates, collaborates or starts different arguments. These three actions are usually reflected in certain texts, and sometimes they produce jointly made narratives; the already mentioned uprising of technology in academic and cultural activities emphasizes this relation.
In a historiographical field, authorship, co-authorship, collective authorship, author groups direction, independent authors coordination or published works compilation are a particularly complex exercise of interaction, conciliation and responsibility. From the moment the author decides to publish his work, he must face the requirements of the publishing market, as well as the universities commercial and corporative orientations and the industrial trends. Such kind of conditioning, especially in the academic world, may affect the choice for certain authorship forms or communicative strategies. The author – and particularly the historian – writes for different publics that show interest in using his texts and that, directly or indirectly, influence the way the author presents his works and himself. Therefore, nowadays, authorship is not only a published book; it is a work that is a commercial object, a historiographic narration, a historiographical construction.
The author can be studied from different perspectives: his own biographical “name”, the works that he makes in his own name, all the symbolic references ttached to it and all the marketing strategies placed but publishers companies.. Some authors like Roland Barthes even consider that the author has disappeared and has been replaced by the advent of the reader as well as for a culture that is value-orientated.
The texts produced by the authors are not exclusively the result of their personal experience or their capacity for analysis. In other words, the analysis of an author’s theory, text or work cannot be interpreted only by a point of view based on biographical and conceptual structure. Since the Middle Ages, each historiographical production work has been always connected with other texts: the ones that influence author’s interpretative models, the ones that offer similar studies and the ones that provide evidentiary documents that prove author’s theory and explications. Thus, textual documents citations and previous researches’ bibliographical references are crucial for those that study the past. Intertextuality acquires in this way not only the meaning given to it by Gérard Genette, but also a wider epistemological significance, for example in a grammatical way just like conceived Jacques Derrida. In a information society context, with technology’s industrialization, telematics webs hipertextuality stimulate intertextuality, throwing it into a whole new context which consequences in the author’s concept broadening deserve a detailed consideration.
The aim of this call and this Congress is then to analyse and to reflect on these subjects from a widespread and varied point of view without limits of domain, considering all variations of authorship forms, from the Middle Ages to today’s world. The main purpose is to delve into the critical reflection of author terms, biographical name, work and writing’s concepts, their different backgrounds, relations, production and reception’s contexts. Contributions are welcome to consider these and other related subjects, from a particular topic disciplinary analyses point of view, or from specific study cases that may reveal significant issues.
Dates:
• – Until September 7 2015: Papers or posters submission must be sent to israel.sanmartin@usc.es.
• – September 14 2015: Acceptance notification
• – October 22 and 23 2015: Congress
Places:
• The Congress will take place at University of Santiago de Compostela’s Faculty of Geography and History and Faculty of Philosophy.
Publication:
• Papers will be published in a collective volume with double-blind peer review evaluation system.
Fees:
• – General: 30 euros
• – Predoctoral Fellowship Holders: 20 euros
• – Students and Unwaged: 10 euros
• Papers or posters submission must be sent to israel.sanmartin@usc.eswith:
• – Abstract (1 folio)
• – CV
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IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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5. Legacies and Lifespans: Contemporary Women’s Writing in the 21st Century
Contemporary Women’s Writing Association
g.wisker@brighton.ac.uk
The 10th Anniversary Conference of the Contemporary Women’s Writing Association in association with C21 the centre for contemporary writing at the University of Brighton.
University of Brighton Grand Parade site
Saturday 9-5, 17 October 2015
Keynote Speakers
Professor Lucie Armitt (University of Lincoln)
Professor Patricia Duncker (University of Manchester)
The very existence of the term contemporary women’s writing suggests a relationship as well as a difference, a continuity, and a radical creative break between women’s writing from the 1960’s and 70’s onwards, and those works of women writers which came before. Simultaneously it suggests writing which captures the evolving spirit and concerns of the twenty first century with experimentation, innovation and speculation. Contemporary women writers have long explored their present through both the past and the future, through historical explorations of women¹s lives and worlds, and through imaginary times ahead. This conference seeks to ask what has been the big news of the last ten years in contemporary women’s writing, and what may define it in future decades. We hope to explore contemporary women writers’ relationships to the past and the future, their continuities, legacies, radical breaks and innovations, including – but by no means limited to – the following topics: historical fiction; utopias / dystopias; feminist genealogies and generations; gendered temporalities; the politics of (re)writing the past and of imagining the future; women’s science fiction and fantasy; new genres/ new forms; the future of feminist literary criticism; writing in an age of crisis; defining the contemporary; women’s writing and the new technologies; women’s writing and the literary market place.
To submit an abstract of no more than 250 words by September 1st 2015, go to: http://www.the-cwwa.org/conferences/legacies-and-lifespans-contemporary-…
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IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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6. Panel: Women Authors from the Great War
NeMLA
Sareene.Proodian@Marquette.edu
Scholarship on women’s writing on the First World War has helped recover important texts that give us insight on the important roles women played as nurses and ambulance drivers. This panel seeks papers that examine the ways in which women depicted their new jobs. How did these new jobs affect their views on their gender? What about their responsibilities as citizens? And, how do these texts help change our views on the First World War?
Please submit an abstract via the NeMLA site: http://www.cfplist.com//nemla/Home/S/15804
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IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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7. Registration is now open for ‘Silence in the Archives: Censorship and Suppression in Women’s Life Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century’
at Wolfson College on November 7th to which all are warmly invited.
The full programme is available here.
Registration is through Oxford University Stores.
Booking before 5th September entitles you to the early bird rates of £20 for the unwaged and £30 for the waged, which includes pastries during registration, tea and coffee breaks, lunch, two keynote lectures and a wine reception. There are two optional dinners associated with the conference: please see the website for more details.
There is also the option to attend only the evening keynote lecture and wine reception for £5. Professor Janet Todd will be speaking on ‘Male memory, female subject: the case of Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft’. This can also be booked through the University Stores.
This conference is generous by OCLW, The Oxford Centre for Research in the Humanities and The Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth Century Studies.
Please email silenceinthearchives2015@gmail.com with any questions.
All best wishes, Lyndsey Jenkins and Alexis Wolf
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Last updated: 14 August 2015
