Find here a link to an online interview between Luca Ricci and Bart Van den Bossche on the short story. The interview came out of the annual ENSFR spring conference in Leuven and ENSFR is mentioned (in Italian)
Find here a link to an online interview between Luca Ricci and Bart Van den Bossche on the short story. The interview came out of the annual ENSFR spring conference in Leuven and ENSFR is mentioned (in Italian)
The definitive programme for the third ENSFR conference: “Short Fiction: Co-Texts and Contexts” is now online on the website of the conference: https://ensfrleuven2017.wordpress.com/
Twentieth-Century British Periodicals: Words and Art on the Printed Page, 1900-1999
4 July 2017
Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading, Redlands Road, Reading, UK
Current scholarship on twentieth-century periodicals is moving beyond the study of the ‘little’ magazine and avant-garde publications. Many mainstream and specialist periodicals, including tabloids, broadsheets, illustrated newspapers, illustrated magazines, fashion magazines, ‘slick’ magazines, women’s magazines, art periodicals, trade and specialist periodicals, pulps, reviews, and political and campaigning magazines have yet to receive sustained critical attention.
This interdisciplinary one-day * conference, coordinated by Dr Kate Macdonald, University of Reading, and Emma West, Cardiff University, will bring together scholars and collectors to discuss the magazines, newspapers, journals, dailies, weeklies, fortnightlies, monthlies and quarterlies of British cultural life in the pre-Internet twentieth century. The focus of the discussion will be on the producers and consumers of these ephemeral products, to attempt to map out their networks. By focusing on both words and images, this conference aims to bring the specialist collector and the art historian to the table, to share knowledge of commercial and artistic figures and movements with publishing and book historians.
We invite abstracts relating to these topics:
Please send abstracts of 300 words or less, plus a brief account of your teaching, publications or research in these fields, by 31 January 2017, to k.macdonald@reading.ac.uk.
* If enough abstracts are received to warrant a second day, we will extend the conference to 5 July.
The Fifth Biennial John Updike Society Conference
Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade, Serbia – June 1 – 4, 2018
THE FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS
The Fifth Biennial John Updike Society Conference will be the first one outside the United States of America, and it will take place in Serbia. John Updike visited Belgrade in 1978—it was then the capital of Yugoslavia and now it is the capital of Serbia. Updike also visited Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, which was then one of the six constitutive republics of Yugoslavia. In both cities Updike gave important interviews for magazines and TV stations.
Papers on any aspect of John Updike’s work or life will be considered, but topics that are especially appropriate can be found on the society’s website: http://blogs.iwu.edu/johnupdikesociety. One-page proposals for 15- to 20-minute papers on all aspects of Updike’s life and work and especially suggested topics should be sent, along with a brief one- or two-paragraph bio, to conference director Biljana Dojčinović – jus5thconference@gmail.com – by the 31st of January 2018.
The American Short Story: New Horizons
Johannes Gutenberg-University, Mainz, Germany
October 5-7, 2017
Program coordinator: Oliver Scheiding
Organizing Committee: James Nagel, Olivia Edenfield, Elke D’hoker, Jochen Achilles, Dustin Anderson, Damien Schlarb
Throughout its history, the American short story has been praised either as a highly polished gem or condemned as literary fast food. Despite such rise-and-fall predictions, the short story has always been a demanding form. Its narrative economy in terms of time and space records decisive, intimate moments of life that give the American Short Story a broad social resonance. As such, the short story offers a vibrant field of research. There is a renaissance in progress not only in terms of the short story’s productivity but also in terms of innovative theoretical questions. The current state of research is, however, probably best described as “ripening.”
The conference “The American Short Story: New Horizons” invites both panels and papers that address fresh and original questions relevant to studying the American short story: how the genre works as performance in itself; how it conveys a theory of culture in which aesthetic structures and the presentation of cultural problematics interrelate; how the short story and the practices of text-making are related to the cultures of print in which textual circulation and economic exchange are homologues; how we can read the short story as an expressive form alongside its material dimensions, its vitality of forms (i.e., short-short fiction, flash fiction), and the multiple meanings of such concepts as authorship and genre; how we can reassess the short story as a field to map out exchanges not just among authors, but also among editors, publishers, reviewers, readers, and the physical text, with its advertisements, illustrations, and editorial changes. The conference thus seeks to explore the American short story as a coming together of the enduring narrative practice of compression and concision in American literature, presently culminating in a digital culture in which brevity rules.
Suggested Topics:
Short Fiction: Co-texts and Contexts
University of Leuven (KU Leuven), 4-5-6 May 2017
Since the emergence of the modern short story as a distinct literary form in the second half of the nineteenth century, many critics and writers have sought to decide what it is exactly that distinguishes the short story from longer fiction, such as the novella or the novel – Is it length? Conciseness? A specific thematic concern? Or a particular stylistic feature? The matter has not yet been settled. Perhaps we need to look to more circumstantial, material elements for a pragmatic answer to that question. Indeed, one could argue that one of the discerning features of the short story is that it is rarely if ever published separately. Instead, it appears as one text among others, whether in a newspaper or magazine, an anthology or collection, a short story cycle or sequence, on a website or in a twitter feed. Precisely these different formats and contexts of publication have also been instrumental in the birth and development of the modern short story as we know it today. As several critics have argued, the short story rose to fame as a new and fashionable literary form in the 19th century thanks to the boom in the periodical press. Similarly, its decline in popularity in the second half of the 20th century correlates with the decimation of magazines willing to publish short fiction. And one could argue that the renewed interest in short fiction today is related to the proliferation of new publishing opportunities through digital media.
This necessary co-textuality of the short story or the different contexts in which it is published and read are slowly receiving more critical attention. Dean Baldwin’s Art and Commerce in the British Short Story: 1880-1950 documents the rise and fall of British short fiction through a study of its modes of publication. Other studies address the processes of unification and collection that go into the making of short story cycles, anthologies or collections, while the interactions between short fiction and new (digital) media formed the topic of the previous ENSFR conference.
This third annual ENSFR conference wants to further explore the many different ways in which short fiction interacts with its co-texts and contexts in different literary traditions. Questions we would like to address are:
In other words, possible topics can include, but are not limited to, the following themes:
We welcome papers (in both English and French) that address these questions and topics either through individual case studies or more theoretical or historical explorations as well as in different literary traditions. Proposals for three-paper panels are also welcome. 300-word abstracts for 20-minute papers should be sent to Elke D’hoker (elke.dhoker@kuleuven.be) and Bart Van den Bossche (Bart.vandenbossche@kuleuven.be) by the 15th of January 2017. Contributors should also send a short biographical note indicating institutional affiliation. Further information about the conference will be posted on the conference website http://www.shortfiction.be. The conference will take place in the Leuven Irish college (http://www.leuveninstitute.eu/site/index.php).
‘The Child of the Century’: Reading and Writing Short Fiction Across Media
Edge Hill University, UK
Day 1, Friday 13th May 2016
| TIME | SESSION | VENUE |
| 8.30 – 9.00 | Registration & Refreshments | Business School Foyer |
| 9.00 – 9.30 | Welcome address | B001 |
| 9.30 – 11.00 | Parallel Sessions: Panels 1 & 2 | |
| Panel 1: Form, Format and Short Story Publishing | B002 | |
| Narrative Empathetic Writing Devices: A Study of Short Fiction Formatting.
Amanda Bigler (Loughborough University, UK) Embracing Modes: How the children of this century have employed the online publisher. Lisa Blower (independent scholar, UK) Does the Short Story exist? George Green (Lancaster University, UK)
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| Panel 2: The short story on film | B003 | |
| Altered States: Narrator and Audience Adaptations of Helen Simpson’s Short Stories.
Ingrid Cuypers (KU Leuven, Belgium) Narration and Commemoration in the Story and the Film A Rose for Emily. Esin Korkut (Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey) Updating the Past: Thomas Hardy’s Wessex Tales on Film. Lukas Lammers (Friedrich‐Alexander-Universität Erlangen‐Nürnberg, Germany)
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| 11.00 – 11.15 | Break & Refreshments | Business School Foyer & Atrium |
| 11.15 – 12.45 | Parallel Sessions: Panels 3 & 4 | |
| Panel 3: Innovation, Technology and Genre | B002 | |
| A new detective method: The Adventures of Richard Marsh’s Female Detective Judith Lee in the Strand Magazine, 1911-16.
Minna Vuohelainen (Edge Hill University, UK) Haunting a mean house in a dull street: Time and Technology in the ghost stories of Edith Wharton and Elizabeth Bowen. Emma Liggins (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK) Revealing as Concealing: The Flash of the Epiphany Moment in the Modernist Short Story. Sophia Kier-Byfield (University of Aarhus, Denmark) |
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| Panel 4: Reading, Writing, Teaching | B003 | |
| Seeing and Not-Seeing the Short Story.
Anna Metcalfe (University of East Anglia, UK) No time to be lost: Short stories as a compass in a changing world. Philippa Holloway (Edge Hill University, UK) With suspicious intent: Teaching the pleasures of Short Fiction. Kerry Myler (Newman University, UK)
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| 12.45 – 13.45 | Lunch | Business School Foyer & Atrium |
| 13.45 – 14.45 | ENSFR committee meeting | |
| 14.45 – 16.15 | Parallel Sessions: Panels 5 & 6 | |
| Panel 5: The Short Story and Cinematic Form | B002 | |
| Textual Portraits of Self and Other: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s ‘A Lovesong for India’.
Karen D’Souza (Edge Hill University, UK) Beyond Cinema: Daphne du Maurier’s Intermedial Experiments in her Short Stories. Christine Reynier (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier, France) The Spiritual Automaton: Cinematic Precursors in Steven Millhauser’s Short Fiction. Simon Stevenson (University Centre Doncaster, UK)
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| Panel 6: Twitter Fiction | B003 | |
| Tweeting Short Stories: Jennifer Egan’s ‘Black Box’ and David Mitchell’s ‘The Right Sort’.
Elke D’hoker (University of Leuven, Belgium) Curating Conclusions: Collaborative Twitter Fiction and the implied author. Emma Segar (Edge Hill University, UK) Short but not fleeting: Lydia Davis can teach us how to live (and tweet). Julie Tanner (Independent scholar, UK) |
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| 16.15 – 16.30 | Break & Refreshments | Business School Foyer & Atrium |
| 16.30 – 18.00 | Short Story Readings (programme to follow) | B001 |
| 18.00 | Day 1 Close |
‘The Child of the Century’:
Reading and Writing Short Fiction Across Media
Day 2, Saturday 14th May 2016
| TIME | SESSION | VENUE |
| 8.30 – 9.00 | Refreshments | Business School Foyer |
| 9.00 – 9.30 | Welcome | B001 |
| 9.30 – 11.00 | Parallel Sessions: Panels 7 & 8 | |
| Panel 7 : Flash, Hybridity, Cycles and Transformation | B002 | |
| From Blog to Book and Back: Éric Chevillard’s Migrating Microfictions.
Erika Fülöp (Lancaster University, UK) Transcultural and Transmedial Stories and Identities in Short Story Cycles: Tom Cho’s Look Who’s Morphing and Ali Alizadeh’s Transactions. Manuela Zehnter (University of Bonn, Germany) Hemingway, Twitterature and the Places of Indeterminacy – Discussion of Problems of Interpretation and the Position of the Reader in the World of Flash Fiction. Roksana Zgierska (University of Gdansk, Poland)
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| Panel 8: Art and Technology | B003 | |
| We are Cyborgs: Technology in Hari Kunzru’s Short Fiction.
Bettina Jansen (TU Dresden, Germany) Visionary Inner Spaces in J. G. Ballard’s Vermilion Sands. C. Bruna Mancini (Università della Calabria, Italy) Coherence and Counterpoint: Music in the Short Stories of James Joyce and Kazuo Ishiguro. Thomas Gurke (Heinrich-Heine-University, Düsseldorf, Germany)
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| 11.00 – 11.15 | Break | Business School Foyer & Atrium |
| 11.15 – 12.45 | Parallel Sessions: Panels 9 & 10 | |
| Panel 9: Hybrid Forms | B002 | |
| Adrian Tomine’s Visual Storytelling in Killing and Dying.
Mercedes Peñalba (University of Salamanca, Spain) Intermedial synergy in Angela Carter’s short fiction. Michelle Ryan-Sautour (Université d’Angers, France) Generic Hybridisation in Janice Galloway’s “Scenes” from Blood (1991). Jorge Sacido-Romero (University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain)
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| Panel 10: Publishing 1: Authorship and Adaptation | B003 | |
| Dis/honesty and risk in collaborative short fiction.
Micaela Maftei and Laura Tansley (University of Victoria, Canada and University of Glasgow, UK) Narrative Brevity Across the Media: Rhetoric and Form. Miłosz Wojtyna (University of Gdańsk, Poland)
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| 12.45 – 14.00 | Lunch | Business School Foyer & Atrium |
| 14.00 – 15.00 | Nicholas Royle Reading and Questions | B001 |
| 15.00 – 15.15 | Break & Refreshments | Business School Foyer & Atrium |
| 15.15 – 16.45 | Parallel Sessions: Panels 11 & 12 | |
| Panel 11: Publishing 2: Excerpts and Anthologies | B002 | |
| Cutting a Long Story Short or the Art of Excerpting the Right Passage: Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land in the New Yorker.
Gerald Preher (Lille Catholic University, France) Arriving, Settling, Moving on: Stories of Belonging and Displacement. Eleonora Rao (University of Salerno, Italy) The Construction of Gender in Hermione Lee’s Short Story Anthology The Secret Self. Aleix Tura Vecino (University of Stirling, UK)
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| Panel 12: Mysterious Visions | B003 | |
| Mystification by Landscape: Margaret Atwood and the Group of Seven.
Dr Susan Poznar (Arkansas Tech University, USA) Short Fiction and Theology: Foundational Myths and Marian Iconography in Michèle Roberts’s ‘Annunciation’. Laura Lojo-Rodríguez (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Spain)
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| 16.45 – 17.00 | Closing Remarks | B001 |
| 17.00 | Day 2 Close |
Please note, programme subject to change.
This event is supported by Edge Hill University’s Institute for Creative Enterprise:
www.edgehill.ac.uk/ice
http://blogs.chi.ac.uk/shortstoryforum/features-competition/
FREE ENTRY
750 to 2,000 words.
£500 first prize, plus 2x runner-up prizes £100 each
Deadline: 06 March 2016, 11:59pm (GMT).
Calling for feature essays on the short story form, either recommending a short story, collection or anthology, or profiling the life and writing of a short story writer. We look, above all, at the quality of prose, the insights offered, and your ability to really hook your readers. The focus must be on the short story form (short stories, though, are not eligible for entry).
Society for the Study of the American Short Story
Call for Papers
The American Short Story: An Expansion of the Genre
A Symposium of the American Literature Association
The Society for the Study of the American Short Story (SSASS) requests proposals for papers and presentations at an international symposium on the short story to be held in Savannah, October 20-22, 2016, at the Hyatt Hotel. More information regarding hotel reservations, keynote speakers, and registrations details will be available in the spring of 2016 and will be posted on the new Society website:
americanshortstory.org.
‘The Child of the Century’: Reading and Writing Short Fiction Across Media
Edge Hill University, UK, May 13-14, 2016: deadline for proposals extended to January 31st 2016.
Writing in 1936, Elizabeth Bowen said: ‘The short story is a young art; as we now know it, it is the child of this century. Poetic tautness and clarity are so essential to it that it may be said to stand at the edge of prose; in its use of action it is nearer to drama than to the novel. The cinema, itself busy with a technique, is of the same generation; in the last thirty years the two arts have been accelerating together.’
The child of the 20th century is still growing and developing in the 21st century, alongside an equally rapid acceleration in new media. Through discussions, presentations and performances, this conference will explore the generic affinities between short fiction and other art forms; intermedial transformations; and migrations of the form. This includes the impact of changing technologies on its writing and transmission, historically and at the present moment. Proposals are welcome from both critics and practitioners.
Topics include (but are not limited to) the following:
Short fiction as electronic literature; hypertext, twitter fiction and interactive short fiction
The short story, print and magazine culture
Short fiction and film
Short fiction and theatre
Short fiction and the visual arts, e.g. painting, photography, illustration
Short fiction and music
Short fiction and poetry
Graphic fiction
Short fiction in performance
Adaptation and hybridity
Short fiction authors working across media
Technology and form in short fiction
Short fiction, radio and podcast
New forms of transmission
Short fiction and social media
Digital research in short fiction
300-word abstracts for 20-minute papers should be sent to coxa@edgehill.ac.uk no later than midnight on the 31st of January 2016. Contributors should also send a short biographical note indicating institutional affiliation. It is envisaged that conference proceedings will be published as a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Short Fiction in Theory and Practice:
http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Journal,id=196/
Edge Hill University is located in North West England, within easy reach of Liverpool. http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/.
Haunting in Short Fiction and Its Adaptations
20-21 November 2015, University of Angers, France
Edge Hill University, University of Leuven,
University of Le Mans, University of Nantes, University of Angers and the European Network for Short Fiction Research
Friday 20 November 2015
9 a.m. registration
9.30 – 11 a.m. PANELS 1, 2
Panel 1: Maternal Ghosts ¡ Frida Kahlo room
Helen E. Mundler, Université Paris-Est Créteil
The maternal impulse as ghost: three hauntings in contemporary women’s fiction: A.S. Byatt, Fay Weldon, Alison Lurie
Pascale Tollance, Université de Lyon 2
A Writer’s Ghosts: The Spectre of Matricide in A.S Byatt’s “The Changeling”
Leslie de Bont, Université de Nantes
“Effy’s Passion for the Mother Who Had Not Loved her Was the Supernatural Thing”: Haunting as an expression of attachment in May Sinclair’s “The Intercessor”
Panel 2: Domestic Ghosts ¡ Germaine Tillion room Continue reading
Call for Papers
‘The Child of the Century’: Reading and Writing Short Fiction Across Media
A conference of the European Network for Short Fiction Research
Edge Hill University, UK, May 13-14, 2016
Writing in 1936, Elizabeth Bowen said: ‘The short story is a young art; as we now know it, it is the child of this century. Poetic tautness and clarity are so essential to it that it may be said to stand at the edge of prose; in its use of action it is nearer to drama than to the novel. The cinema, itself busy with a technique, is of the same generation; in the last thirty years the two arts have been accelerating together.’
The child of the 20th century is still growing and developing in the 21st century, alongside an equally rapid acceleration in new media. Through discussions, presentations and performances, this conference will explore the generic affinities between short fiction and other art forms; intermedial transformations; and migrations of the form. This includes the impact of changing technologies on its writing and transmission, historically and at the present moment. Proposals are welcome from both critics and practitioners.
Topics include (but are not limited to) the following:
Short fiction as electronic literature; hypertext, twitter fiction and interactive short fiction
The short story, print and magazine culture
Short fiction and film
Short fiction and theatre
Short fiction and the visual arts, e.g. painting, photography, illustration
Short fiction and music
Short fiction and poetry
Graphic fiction
Short fiction in performance
Adaptation and hybridity
Short fiction authors working across media
Technology and form in short fiction
Short fiction, radio and podcast
New forms of transmission
Short fiction and social media
Digital research in short fiction
300-word abstracts for 20-minute papers should be sent to coxa@edgehill.ac.uk no later than midnight on the 15th of January 2016. Contributors should also send a short biographical note indicating institutional affiliation. It is envisaged that conference proceedings will be published as a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Short Fiction in Theory and Practice:
http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Journal,id=196/
For further information about the European Network for Short Fiction Research see:
Edge Hill University is located in North West England, within easy reach of Liverpool. http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/.
Short Fiction Writers With a Theory: Re-Reading Short Fiction Theory Through the Lens of New Writing and New Media
11-12 June 2015, Université Catholique de Lille, France
Room RS 248 — 58 rue du Port — 59000 Lille
Collections by Madeleine D’Arcy, Carys Davies, Kirsty Gunn, Toby Litt, Anneliese Mackintosh and Rose Tremain shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize 2015.