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Saturday, February 3, 2024
Call For Chapters: EditedThe #Palgrave Handbook of #Monsters and #Monstrous #Bodies
Call for Papers #CONRAD IN THE FAR EAST, Editor: Pei-Wen Clio Kao (National Ilan University) Vol. 36 of #CONRAD: #EASTERN AND #WESTERN PERSPECTIVES, Editor: Wiesław Krajka
The Maria Curie-Skłodowska University – Columbia University Press Conrad Project
Lublin: Maria Curie-Skłodowska University Press; New York: Columbia University Press, to be published in 2027.
This Call for Papers invites contributions from Conrad scholars, whether based in the Far East or outside the Far East, to address issues of Conrad’s relation to the Far East. We encourage the Conradians to reread and rethink Conrad’s works from the perspective of the Global South, and reconsider how Conrad’s modernist works have inspired and motivated our critical mentality as well as positionality. We welcome academic articles based on the perspective of the Third World as inspired by the decolonizing waves of the 1960s. We also suggest analysis of Conrad’s Eastern or Malay tales in relation to his maritime life. A comparison of Conrad and his Asian counterparts or followers is also particularly in alignment with our volume profile.
In “Decolonizing University” (2024), Paul Giles proposes three agendas regarding teaching and studying literature in the university: decolonizing the iconography in the university; decolonizing the curriculum; and decolonizing the racial representation in the university. The thrust of the decolonizing university project is not to discard the Western cultural as well as literary tradition, but to incorporate Africa, Latin America, Asia and Oceania into the epistemological frame. As Asian Anglo-American literary scholars based in the Far East, the curriculum and pedagogies of decolonizing university have incited us to rethink our epistemic and political positionality, and reevaluate our given philosophical framework or even biases. Besides, as the literary scholars from the Global South who are situated in the heyday of postcolonialism, how to make relevance of Conrad’s works to our time has become a pressing issue awaiting the Asian Conradians to address.
During 1883 to 1888, Conrad sailed to Singapore, and the impression of this seaport city has become the materials for his later writing career. Conrad’s influences have gone beyond the confines of Europe and America to reach the Third World, including Asia. Numerous Asian scholars and critics are claimed or self-proclaimed protégé of Conrad. We could see the legacy or traces of Conrad in the works of Asian academic moguls like Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha, etc. In the 2014 film adaptation of Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer,” Peter Fudakowski transformed both the setting and the characters from the European to the Far Eastern. We can see familiar faces of the Chinese and the Taiwanese stars in the film, which demonstrates the importance of Conrad’s influence in Asian literary as well as cinematic circles.
Terry Collits maintains that there are two methodologies for the contemporary readers to read Conrad’s works. One is “objective reading,” which is to see literature as the vehicle of disseminating moral truth. Another is “subjective reading” that centers on the reader’s subjective historical-spatial position. The 19th-century literary critic Matthew Arnold served as the representative of the former approach. In “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1864) Arnold emphasized the way to treat literary works as an object, and the responsibility of the literary critics “to see the object as in itself it really is.” The latter approach is embodied in the works of the contemporary American leftist critic Fredric Jameson. He highlighted the importance of historical context in The Political Unconscious (1981), and argued that the reader’s subjective positionality has affected the interpretation of literature. We encourage both “close reading” and “political reading” to approach Conrad’s works and tease out the embedded meanings for the Far Eastern readers and beyond.
Topics included in this volume are listed as follows, and other related topics are also welcome:
˙Conrad and postcolonialism
˙Conrad and the Global South Studies
˙Conrad and decolonization
˙Conrad and the Third World Perspectives
˙Comparative studies of Conrad and Asian writers
˙Conrad and Asian studies
˙Conrad’s biography and the Far East
Please send 300–500-word abstracts, along with brief 100–150-word biographies, to Pei-Wen Clio Kao at peiwen.clio.kao@gmail.com before August, 2024. The full manuscripts are due in September of 2025. All manuscripts will undergo double blind peer-review for consideration. As of now, the book volume is set for publication in 2027.
Monday, January 29, 2024
CALL FOR ABSTRACTS on Title Social-Emotional Undercurrents in #ELT Advocacy: Insights and Implications-Edited Volume being prepared for Routledge:
CFA: XVII Biennial International Conference on Comparative Literature as Alternative Humanities Ethics, Affect and the Everyday Social organized by Comparative Literature Association of India and University of Delhi-10th-12th September, 2024
- Interrogating categorial binaries (tradition/modernity, nature/culture, regional/national,
- east/west etc.)/ Literature after theory/ Shifting paradigms between Literary Studies and Social Sciences/ The Post-human as a paradigm in literary studies.
- Worlding literature / Historicising canons/ Global and local as contexts of reading. The idea of the classic in modernity: circulation or creativity ?
- Translation and the encounter with difference. Translating “dialects”/ The oral texts/ Archaic texts.
- The plural nation: stratification and resistance/ Literary historiography and geopolitics/ Intertextuality and chronotopes.
- Polyphony/ Polysemy in literature/ Poetry and cosmopolitanism.
- Interrogating “Minor” literature as category/ Identity theories as critiques of the Humanities / Life-writing from the margins.
- The performativity of literature/ Screenplay as literature/ Intermediality in literature. South Asian literatures and cultures: relations, reciprocity and ruptures/ Population movements and literature.
Sunday, January 28, 2024
CFP: Travel and Accommodation Sponsored #International #Conference on #Historiography and #Hagiography in #Buddhism and Beyond -#University of #Cambridge, United Kingdom, on 8-10 July 2024
This international conference aims to bring together scholars working on practices of record-keeping, historiography, and hagiography in the Buddhist tradition and in related cultural fields. Recent years saw a steadily-growing interest in the impact of Buddhism on historiography and hagiography, in tandem with an unprecedented increase in the availability of textual and visual primary sources. Ambitious digitization projects (especially of premodern sources) and the changing landscape of the digital realm offer new opportunities to study premodern and contemporary practices of writing and narration. In this three-days conference, we seek to foster an interdisciplinary discussion on practices of textual and visual recording, storytelling, and memory in Chinese Buddhism and beyond – past, present, and future.
This conference is generously sponsored by the Tzu Chi Foundation (慈濟) and hosted by the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge.
The conference will take place at the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, United Kingdom, on 8-10 July 2024 (08/07/2024-10/07/2024). Accommodation and meals will be provided for the duration of the conference. Travel expenses to Cambridge will be covered for conference presenters (please contact organizers for further details).
We welcome proposals for papers on topics relating to historiography, hagiography, and narration, including but not limited to:
- Buddhist historiography and record-keeping
- Historiography and record-keeping in other Chinese religious traditions
- Narrating lives of extraordinary individuals (e.g. biographies, autobiographies, hagiographies) in textual, oral, visual, and material forms
- The intersection of Buddhism and literature
- Book culture and production of texts in the Buddhist tradition (e.g. in print culture, manuscript culture, publishing practices, patronage of textual production, production of temple gazetteers and mountain gazetteers etc.)
- Uses of visual arts and the performance arts in creating or supporting Buddhist historiography and hagiography
Proposals for papers should include the following information:
- Name, affiliation, and title of position at the affiliated institution (independent scholars are also welcome to apply; please note “independent scholar” in your proposal if relevant)
- Title
- 250 word abstract
- Contact information: email, address, and phone number(s)
The deadline for all proposals is Friday, February 23rd, 2024 (23/02/2024). Proposals should be sent as either Word or PDF to the following email address: hist.hagio@gmail.com
For general information and logistical questions, please email the organizing committee at: hist.hagio@gmail.com
Regarding the conference, please contact the primary organizer, Dr Noga Ganany at ng462@cam.ac.uk.
*Proposals must be submitted in English.