Upcoming Conference, Sessions, and CFPs
CFPs for next year’s panels at the 2024 MLA in Philadelphia:
Splendid Difficulty: Teaching Conrad:
Conrad's works feature linguistic sophistication, narrative complexity, psychological nuance, subtle irony, political contestation, and historical challenge. While some might seek to avoid difficulty, this panel instead embraces difficulty and considers how precisely the most challenging aspects of Conrad's art can empower students and cultivate subtlety, humanistic and historical breadth, and even humility. This panel invites papers that consider how the multivalent difficulty of Conrad’s works — syntactic, psychological, political, or aesthetic — offers pedagogical opportunity. Comparative approaches are welcome.
Send 250-word proposals to Debra Romanick Baldwin dbaldwin@udallas.edu by March 15, 2023.
Melville, Conrad, and Life:
Both Melville and Conrad appeal to the concept of life allied with their artistic activities. Moby Dick is pervaded by appeals to the appeal to life, as in the description of a whale skeleton become a chapel: "Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories." Conrad, too describes the action of art in fruitful tension with the kinetics of life, as when in his 1897 preface, he connects art with seizing a fragment "from the remorseless rush of time, a passing phase of life." But how exactly do these writers understand and see their relation to "life" -- vegetative, human, physical, spiritual, ethical? This panel invites papers that consider metaphysical, aesthetic, ethical, linguistic, biological, or cultural approaches to the concept of life, including its potential tragi-comic polarities, in Melville and/or Conrad. How do these authors use the concept to challenge ethical or cultural assumptions, or to innovate and animate their own art?
Send 250 word proposals to Mark Deggan mark_deggan@sfu.ca & Meredith Farmer farmerma@wfu.ed by March 15, 2023.
Conrad’s Legacy A.D. 2024 (Jagiellonian University Krakow, Poland, 10th-12th October 2024)
The Joseph Conrad Society (Poland) and The Jagiellonian University Joseph Conrad Research Centre invite proposals for papers for the International Conference, to be held at the Jagiellonian University from 10th to 12th October 2024.
Proposals for 20-minute papers and for panels on all topics related to Conrad’s life, work and legacy are welcome.
Each panel will be one and a half hours, comprising three papers and leaving time for questions and discussion at the end. The conference will start at 9.30 a.m. on Thursday 10th October and end on Saturday 12th.
The deadline for submission of abstracts in English (200-300 words) is 30th January 2024. These should be sent in MS Word format to Profesor Jolanta Dudek, the President of the Joseph Conrad Society, Poland, at: jmdplacmariacki@krakow.home.pl and conradslegacy@uj.edu.pl)
languages of the conference are English and Polish. There will be a separate panel in Polish.
Conference details and the programme of speakers and eventswill be posted on the Society’s website: http://www.octotext.com/ptc/ and the Joseph Conrad Research Centre: https://conradianum.polonistyka.uj.edu.pl when they become available.
Conference Registration, booking and costs will be posted in April 2024
The organizing committee: Prof. Jolanta Dudek (President of the Joseph Conrad Society, Poland), Prof. Agnieszka Adamaowicz-Pospiech (Vice President of the JCS, Pland), Prof. Andrzej Juszczyk (Director of the Jagiellonian University Joseph Conrad Research Center)
CFP: Conrad Today: Remediation and Adaptation.
The works of Joseph Conrad have long inspired artistic adaptation and remediation. The editors invite proposals for a critical engagement with transmedial expressions of Conrad’s work for a special volume proposed for Edinburgh University Press. We are interested in the unexplored spaces of Conrad’s posthumous inspiration in new adaptations of his works. We are particularly interested in adaptations and appropriations by new media--graphic novels, video games, digital media and so on. We encourage proposals that cross cultural and national boundaries and reframe Conrad’s ideas in defamiliarizing contexts. Please send 200 word proposals (and illustrations or examples of the art you wish to discuss) to r.hamspon@rhul.ac.uk and yael.levin@mail.huji.ac.il by October 1st 2022.
Transnational-Transcultural Conrad--Conrad Panel at the MLA, Washington, DC, 2022
The organizers invite papers on all aspects of Conrad’s engagement with transnational or transcultural themes. Conrad’s works confront the challenges of transnationality on land or sea, not only through explorations of language, race, and ethnicity, but his characters’ attempts to forge transcultural unity in the face of alterity. Please send abstracts of up to 150 words on this or any other aspect of Conrad’s engagement with the theme to Dr. Mark Deggan at mark_deggan@sfu.ca before 12th March 2021.
