ENCLS-Newslettermay2016
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N ewsletter No. 2, May 2016 Editor: Olga Springer 1 . C A L L S F O R P A P E R S A N D S E M I N A R P ARTICIPATION I N S I D E T H I S I SSUE ( BY DEADLINE ) 1 Calls for Papers and Romantic Legacies (National Chengchi University (NCCU), Taipei, Taiwan) Seminar Participation / 18-19 November 2016 Appels à Deadline: 15 May 2016 Communication et Keynote Speakers: Rachel Bowlby, FBA (Comparative Literature, Princeton Séminaires University/English, University College London): “Romantic Walking and Railway 2 Calls for Contributions / Realism”; Arthur Versluis (Religious Studies, Michigan State University): “Platonism, Its Appels à Contribution Heirs, and the Last Romantic”. In his seminal book The Roots of Romanticism (1999), Isaiah Berlin regards 3 Publications and Romanticism as “the largest recent movement to transform the lives and the thoughts Doctoral Theses of the Western world.” Indeed, Romantic ideas and attitudes—embraced by Goethe, Hegel, Sade, de Staël, Rousseau, Baudelaire, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Coleridge, 4 Funding Alerts / Shelley, Beethoven, Schubert, Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, Turner, and Annonces de Finance- Delacroix, to name but a few—not merely changed the course of history in the West in ment de Recherche the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but helped to fashion twentieth-century 5 Positions democracy, environmentalism, Surrealism, fascist nationalism, communist Announcements universalism, spiritualism, social liberalism, and so forth in the West as well as in the (Teaching, Research, East. This two-day interdisciplinary conference aims to bring together academics from etc.) / Annonces de across the humanities and social sciences to explore the full spectrum of possible Postes (Enseignement, Romanticisms, the germination, maturation, and development of this heritage on both Recherche, etc.) sides of the Atlantic and its afterlife in our global capitalist culture today. We invite proposals for individual papers or collaborative panels from academics in the 6 Reports on Recent humanities and social sciences to reassess Romanticism and its legacies in different Events / Rapports sur nations and disciplines. Possible topics may include, but are not limited to: des Evénements · Esotericism and Spiritualism Récents · Emotion and Neuroesthetics · Gothic, Romantic, and Uncanny · Imagination, Memory, and Childhood · Revolution and Anarchy · Romantic Geographies and the Tourist Gaze · Romantic Victorians · Romanticism as Proto-modernism · Romanticism and Abstract Expressionism · Romanticism and Empire · Romanticism and Its Afterlife in the Far East · Romanticism and Realism · Romanticism and the Environmental Humanities · Romanticism and the Inhuman · Romanticism and the Apocalypse · Romanticism and the Everyday · Romanticism and World Literature · Romanticism and the Technological Sublime · (Post)Romantic Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis · (Post)Romanticism and Book History/Print Culture · (Post)Romanticism and Celebrity Culture · (Post)Romanticism and Gender Performance · Sensibility and Social Reform · Solitude and Sociability Proposals of no more than 300 words should be sent by 15 May 2016 via EasyChair (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=rl2016). Should you have any questions or enquiries, please contact us at [email protected]. An edited volume from the conference with a major academic publisher and a special issue for The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture (www.wreview.org) are being considered. This conference is organised by the EARN (Enlightenment and Romanticism Network) in partnership with The Wenshan Review in the Department of English at NCCU. REPLACEMENT (Birkbeck, University of London) 9-10 Dec 2016 Deadline: May 30, 2016 In a recent film, 45 Years (dir. Andrew Haigh, 2015), a couple about to celebrate forty-five years of marriage hear of the recovery of the body of the husband’s erstwhile girlfriend – whose name resembles that of the wife – found perfectly preserved in Alpine ice. This discovery implicitly affects the two differently: it appears that the husband is shocked at reminders of lost youth, while the wife is affected by the vivid idea (supplemented by slides she views) of a rival who pre- existed her and thus has a permanent kind of precedence. The same effect is experienced by the unnamed narrator- protagonist of Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier, 1938), who enters a house and a marriage dominated by her predecessor and the violent enigma surrounding her. Yet at one point she writes: ‘Perhaps I haunted her as she haunted me; […] Jasper had been her dog, and he ran at my heels now. The roses were hers and I cut them. Did she resent me and fear me as I resented her?’ In the face of changing family relations in the west, we have moved rather suddenly from one replacement series to another: one or two centuries ago, replacement children were commonplace as child mortality led to families naming a baby after an earlier sibling that had just died, or – as in Wordsworth’s ‘We are seven’ (1798) – children lived with the dead as well as living among a large group of siblings. Nowadays serial monogamy has created a structure more akin to Rebecca, in which children or adults must contend with others both absent and present, whether living or dead. Thus the structure of replacement, which is always both diachronic and synchronic, has effects both across and within generations and signifies both unruly passion and the attrition of passions lost, exchanged or conserved. This conference is about modes of personal haunting, looking both forward and back, and may focus on any of the three main positions in the drama of replacement: the ‘replacement’ child or partner; the never-entirely-dead predecessor; or the effect on the empowered or disempowered person whose desires move between these two others. KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: Juliet Mitchell, Laura Mulvey, Naomi Segal, Naomi Tadmor Please send proposals for a 20-minute paper (or for a panel of three 20-minute papers) to the two organisers, Jean Owen and Naomi Segal. Deadline: 30 May 2016. A proposal should comprise your name, email address & academic affiliation if any; the title, a 300-word abstract and a 100-word mini-bio. Please see the conference website for more information. See Birkbeck Research in Aesthetics of Kinship and Community. Summer School 2016: “Risk Communication and Narratives of Risk” (TU Dresden, Germany) October 3-7, 2016 Deadline: May 31, 2016 The perception of risks has increased strikingly in recent years. Not least, that holds true for the assessment of environmental risks, food and nourishment risks, financial risks, and safety risks. Increasingly, these risks have been condensing into threatening scenarios in a confusing world full of uncertainties. It is also common in this world for risks to be perceived decreasingly as chances, but rather as threats. On one hand, the consolidation of risk perception leads to an intensified demand for academic expertise. On the other hand, the reliability of such expertise is increasingly being called into question, because, in a world perceived as dangerous, mistrusting all types of expert statements becomes ubiquitous. Experts are regarded as a privileged elite and frequently met with suspicion. The media revolution in the last few years strengthened this impression to an even greater degree, with its explosive growth of information and communication, in which an expert’s knowledge and a newcomer’s opinion are hardly differentiable. As a result, risk communication has become a central challenge and even a fundamental problem in the world of science. Furthermore, risk communication strengthens risk perception. The more often risks are discussed, the more real and threatening they appear. If nothing else, this phenomenon is connected to the fact that transformations of the semantics of risk and risk narratives play a considerable role in the communication of risks. If risk appears semantically as simply danger and no longer as chance, that narrows the perception of risk considerably. With that being said, however, it is in no way clear whether actual or previously unfelt risks are captured by such risk perceptions. Risk narratives, which include narratives of catastrophe as well as those of salvation, represent risks commonly in the vein of end-times scenarios, conspiracy stories, or heroic rescues. That is why the questions “How can expert knowledge and risk communication be better negotiated?” and “How does one analyze and communicatively consider the semantics of risk and risk narratives?” are central to the Summer School “Risk Communication and Risk Narratives”. For that purpose, the TU Dresden, as the site for risk research in various subject areas, is also calling for an intensive exchange by means of field-specific perspectives and methods used in grappling with the topic of risk. The specific problems of risk communication are particularly suited for academic cooperation across the boundaries of the so-called “two cultures” of the sciences and the humanities. Participating Disciplines: Literary Studies, Media and Film Studies, Environmental Sciences, Food Chemistry, Business and Economics, Political Science, Linguistics. Time and Location: The TU Dresden Summer School “Risk Communication and Risk Narratives” will take place from October 3–7, 2016 at the TU Dresden and the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum Dresden. Participants: The invitation is aimed toward up-and-coming academics (primarily doctoral candidates and post-docs) from all participating disciplines. PhD candidates