OCCT MT 2020 Week 4 Updates

On Tuesday 10 November (5:15-7:15 pm), Felix Budelmann and Ben Morgan will host the Fiction and Other Minds seminar, focusing on the topic, “I & We: Literary Texts and the Constitution of Shared Identities at Four Moments of Historical Transition”. If you would like attend this online event please email Ben Morgan at Ben.Morgan@worc.ox.ac.uk.

OCCT invites submissions for a one-day virtual workshop, Fictions of Retranslations: Retranslating Language and Style in Prose Fiction. The workshop will be hosted online, on 12 March 2021. We encourage doctoral students and early careers researchers working on retranslations of prose to send an abstract (350 words) and a brief bio (150 words) by 14  December 2020 to rowan.anderson@ell.ox.ac.uk and anna.saroldi@ell.ox.ac.uk. For the full CFP see here: https://www.occt.ox.ac.uk/fictions-retranslations-retranslating-language-and-style-prose-fiction.

In Monday’s Discussion Group session, we held a joint event with OCCT Review in which we had the opportunity to meet the editors of the journal, Georgia Nasseh and Joseph Hankinson, and two reviewers, Rowan Anderson and Niamh Burns. After a general introduction to OCCT Review, Niamh and Rowan discussed two recent books they have reviewed, Ariane Mildenberg's Modernism and Phenomenology (2017) and Cross-Channel Modernisms (2020), on the overarching topic of Transdisciplinary Modernism.

EVENTS AND CFPs

1.International Book Club - 8pm Wednesday 25th November

The next International Book Club meeting will be on Wednesday 25th November at 8pm (GMT). We’ll be discussing Gine Cornelia Pedersen’s book, Zero (Nordisk Books), translated from Norwegian. The translator, Rosie Hedger, will be joining us live for our discussion, taking place on Zoom. 

The book can be purchased directly from the publisher, who have kindly offered us a discount. You can use the discount code IBCZERO15 to get 15% off at checkout until midnight on the day of the meeting. 

To register, go to our website: https://www.queens.ox.ac.uk/international-book-club

Gine Cornelia Pedersen debuted with this explosive novel, which won the prestigious Tarjei Vesaas First Book Award. Compared, in its home country of Norway, with a ‘punk rock single’, the unique lyrical style and frank description of life with mental health problems have come together to create one of the most exciting works of fiction from Scandinavia in recent years.   

Rosie Hedger’s translation of Zero was shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2019, and her translation of Agnes Ravatn’s The Bird Tribunal won an English PEN Translates Award in 2016. Ravatn’s novel was later selected for BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime, broadcast in January 2017, and was shortlisted for the 2017 Petrona Award for Best Scandinavian Crime Novel of the Year. Rosie was a candidate in the British Centre for Literary Translation’s mentoring scheme for emerging translators in 2012, mentored by Don Bartlett. Since then she has worked on a range of projects, more information about which can be found here. She is a member of the Translator’s Association. 

2. We are delighted to invite you to the online conference “Tra rito e mito: il carnevale nella cultura europea”/ “Du rite au mythe: le carnaval dans la culture européenne”. The conference will be held in Italian and French on the 16th and 17th of November (from 9AM to 6PM).

Access to the conference: https://meet.google.com/hgq-khns-kxv
The conference will be recorded, by connecting to the platform and participating in the conference you also agree to being recorded.

Please also visit the website: https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/bsfm-lea/carnevale
For further information: callcarnevale2020@gmail.com.

3. The Remains of the Body | Legacy and Cultural Memory of Bodies in World Culture 

Saturday 22nd May 2021 – University of Warwick

Keynote speakers:

Prof. Angela Wright (University of Sheffield) – Prof. Patricia Phillippy (Coventry University)

Call for papers

How did different cultures depict dead bodies at different times, and how were they understood as important and valuable? In which way is the body of a male hero represented? How does this representation differ from the body of a dead woman? How important is the body in issues of national identity and popular folklore?

From the representation of the dead body of Christ in the Pietà, sculpted by Michelangelo during the Italian Renaissance; passing through the angelic Disney depiction of the sleeping beauty; the pile of cadavers of the fallen in Eugène Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People; until reaching the theme of the ghost in the gripping charade in Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological thriller Vertigo, the remains of the body have crossed the world cultural imagery.

This conference, The Remains of the Body: Legacy and Cultural Memory of Bodies in World Culture, intends to tackle the current issue of how bodies are marked, organised and produced as cultural entities that leave traces into the world imagery after their total or partial material dissolution. Particularly, the conference’s goal is to gather an interdisciplinary network of scholars exploring the way in which the body, or parts of it, is preserved and remembered in time in different aspects of cultural representation, in order to evaluate its cultural impact. Key concepts will be: sacralization/desacralization; the body as a relic of a past age; immortality and techniques for enduring fame; posthumous life; remembrance, memory and commemoration; and any other topic exploring the relationship between body, death and memory.

The preservation and re-evocation of bodies/corpses, or parts of them, can be related to various and different cultural manifestations (in film, literature, visual art and others) and examined by following four different paths (which are not to be considered as limitations):

1. TheGothic.Macabrescenes,folklore,ghosts,monstersandallthegoryandgloomyrepresentationsdealingwith remains of bodies. Also relevant are: carnivalesque deathly rites; the dance macabre; dead, apparently dead and/or sleeping bodies; dismembered bodies; ruined, wrecked bodies; zombies and ‘abject’ bodies; gendered dead bodies; the posthuman.
2. Religious relics. Martyrs and saints, whose bodies have been injured and shielded in places of worship, or every relic religiously preserved and adored. This could also imply incorrupt bodies which manifest themselves through impalpable bright appearances after death, through visions.
3. Nationhoodandpatriotism.Themakingofthenationinvolvesalargeamountofbodies:thoseofheroeswhofight and sacrifice themselves, and those of ordinary people who support and raise statues and monuments not to forget them (also the tombs of unknown soldiers, which are scattered in many cities).
4. Heirloomsandpledgesoflove.Theycouldberepresentedbyromanticgifts,suchasalockofhairbeforethe separation of lovers; a mourning jewel to remember a dear one by; or a little tooth guarded by mothers as a memento of their kids’ lost childhood. Cemeteries, urns, statues and paintings are also meaningful legacies of bodies.

The conference aims at including papers from a broad chronological period and dealing with any geographical area with no restrictions. Applications are welcome from a large span of fields: literature, history, art history, classics, archaeology, theatre and performative arts, film studies, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, politics, medicine and the history of medicine, popular and folklore studies, material culture studies, architecture and urban studies, and others.

Abstracts (250 words) for twenty-minute papers together with a short bio (150 words) should be submitted by 30 December 2020 to the following email address: remainsofthebody@gmail.com specifying: 1)Title; 2)Presenter; 3)Institutional affiliation; 4)Email; 5)Abstract.

Follow the conference on Twitter: @Remains2021

4. Critical Concepts and Readings: English Literature GCSE.  

Editors: Dr Kate Watson and Dr Sally O’Gorman 

This original collection invites teachers and academics to contribute a book chapter on a GCSE text, applying a theory and considering a new and innovative aspect of the literary text. 

The study of GCSE literature enables students to develop their knowledge of a vast literary heritage that spans over two centuries of societal, psychological and philosophical reactions.  GCSE English Literature encourages students to read widely for pleasure, preparing for their engagement with literature at a higher level of interpretation. 

Students of this millennium continually engage with the metafiction of artificiality or literariness of texts with an expectation that they will understand and adhere to methodological conventions in their own interpretations.  This collection of indispensable interpretations on GCSE narratives is a departure from traditional readings offering under-researched, multifaceted concepts that relate to today’s multicultural reader ensuring students can make closer conceptual links between the past and the present. 

Contributors would also be expected to include a brief advisory section at the end of the chapter detailing ways to engage students through both online and classroom modes of teaching. 

We invite proposals for 6000-word book chapters.  Topics can include the following: 

An Inspector Calls 

Lord of the Flies 

Blood Brothers 

Never Let Me Go 

Animal Farm 

The History Boys 

A Taste of Honey 

Pigeon English 

DNA 

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time 

A Raisin in the Sun 

The Woman in Black 

The Empress 

Romeo and Juliet 

Macbeth 

Much Ado About Nothing 

The Tempest 

The Merchant of Venice 

Julius Caesar 

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 

A Christmas Carol 

The Sign of Four 

Great Expectations 

Jane Eyre 

Frankenstein 

Pride and Prejudice 

Concepts that can be applied to your reading: 

Intertextuality/ Metafiction and self or inter-referentiality 

Postcolonial criticism 

Psychology and Psychoanalysis (Freud/Jung/Lacan etc.) 

Eco criticism 

Feminist criticism 

Allegory
Allusion 

Archetype 

Binary opposition 

Canon 

Carnival (Bakhtin) 

Desire 

Conventions 

Semiotics 

Structuralism (e.g. Barthes) and Poststructuralism  

Ideology 

Irony 

Metaphor 

Metonymy 

Motif 

The Death of the Author 

Queer theory 

Marxist criticism 

Narratology 

New Criticism 

New Historicism and Cultural Materialism 

Reader-response criticism 

Narrative structure 

Realism 

Dramatic structure 

Ouspensky 

Brecht (epic theatre) 

Performative interpretations 

Dramatic irony 

Editors: Dr Kate Watson and Dr Sally O’Gorman 

We welcome proposals from secondary school English practitioners and university academics.  Please email your 200-word proposal, four key words and short biographical note including your school/university affiliation to watson2@outlook.com and sallyogorman@hotmail.com no later than 15th December 2020.  Comments and queries should be directed to the same email addresses.