CFP: Nationalism(s) and Cultural Memory in Texts of Childhood

One-day conference, University of Worcester (UK), 10 April 2010

Keynote speakers: Prof. Mavis Reimer, the Canada Research Chair in the Culture of Childhood at the University of Winnipeg; Dr. Benjamin Lefebvre, the Leverhulme Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Worcester.

Deadline for proposals for 20-minute papers: 10 March 2010.

This one-day conference, organised by the International Centre for Research in Children’s Literature, Literacy and Creativity, seeks to address the interplay between nationalism (or nationalisms) and cultural memory in texts for or about young people, including books, periodicals, films, television series, games, tourism sites, websites, and archives.

Possible topics include:

• Texts for children and/vs. texts for adults (as well as crossover texts);
• Transnational co-productions or co-publishing ventures;
• Textual transformations (adaptations, translations, abridgments, retellings, parodies, fan/slash fictions, authorized or unauthorized sequels and prequels);
• Depictions of the past and the future (including history/biography, revisionist histories, science fiction and futurism);
• The circulation of colonial and postcolonial discourses (from empire to colony, or from former colony back to empire);
• Depictions of war and conflict, particularly contentious historical and political conflicts;
• The role of food, dress, and festival in the transmission of cultural memory;
• The cultural production of texts, including branding, genre, and assumptions about gender, race, class, sexuality, religion, and nationality;
• Reception of texts, either by critics/scholars or by young people.

Cost: £70 including lunch, morning and afternoon coffee & tea. Contact for proposals (5o0 words maximum): Prof Jean Webb, Director of the International Centre for Research in Children’s Literature, Literacy and Creativity. Accommodation, if required, is available off campus in the locality. Further information with the booking form. Conference booking direct to: Jill Veale, 01905 542173, j.veale@worc.ac.uk

CFP: Canadian Women Writers Conference: Connecting Texts and Generations

An Interdisciplinary, International Conference, Canadian Literature Centre, University of Alberta, 30 September – 3 October 2010

The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC, pronounced “quirk”) will provide a digital platform for new collaborations in humanities research. Supporting team-based scholarship, digitization and editing, and embedding its material in political, commercial and cultural contexts, CWRC brings digital arts into dialogue with other artistic practices that are part of a contemporary landscape of imaginative and creative work and critical research. CWRC has been successful in securing, under the leadership of Dr. Susan Brown (University of Alberta / University of Guelph), substantial funding from both the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and provincial funding bodies.

CWRC’s centerpiece is a Canadian Women Writers project, a radically interdisciplinary, collaborative and bilingual research initiative that will be developed across three primary modules: 1) a virtual archive of textual, visual, and audiovisual materials relevant to research in women’s writing in Canada; 2) a searchable, expandable, user-producer textbase of historical, bio-critical data on women’s writing in Canada; 3) an interactive forum/salon for the circulation of discussion, new textual, audio and visual material, and readers’ and writers’ communities.

This gathering will be the first of up to three conferences planned around this flagship project of CWRC.

This venture with multilingual, multi-genre, and multi-media content is anchored in the premise that digital and electronic instruments are key to enabling and producing new meanings in embodied, experiential, participatory ways. In coordinated collaboration with related major projects partnered with CWRC (TransCanada Institute; Editing Modernism in Canada; canadiana.org, among others), this Canadian Women Writers initiative aims to bring into alignment established and emergent histories, to integrate divergent perspectives on history, and to engage users as producers in a variety of textual, visual, and audio formats.

The conference will bring together scholars, writers, booksellers, librarians, publishers, and software designers, along with invited keynote speakers, to catalyze discussion — particularly on women’s writing in Canada, literary history, historiography, collaborative methods, and digital and feminist scholarship — through papers, panels, readings, and online hook-ups and demonstrations.

Plenary Speakers:

• Nicole Brossard (Author, Montréal)
• Louise Dennys (Executive Publisher and Vice-President, Knopf Canada, Random House Canada, Vintage Canada)
• Lucie Hotte, (Research Chair on the Literatures and Cultures of Francophone Canada, University of Ottawa)
• Smaro Kamboureli (Canada Research Chair, TransCanada Institute, University of Guelph)
• Rosemary Sullivan (Author and Canada Research Chair, Department of English, University of Toronto)

We invite papers that illuminate the vast diversity of Canadian women’s writing, past and present, in all genres and formats (printed text, manuscripts, journalism, screenwriting,  graphic novels, songs, music, performance art, artists’ books), of all cultures, regions, and linguistic groups. Papers should be relevant to CWRC’s emphasis on collaboration and digital scholarship. They may:

• comment on the critical reception of Aboriginal, minority and/or multilingual writing;
• explore the potential for comparative study and analysis through an integrated online history and/or its implications for Canadian Comparative Literature;
• pursue both historical specificity and trans-historical connections;
• consider the plurality of Canadian women’s literary histories;
• examine these histories in relation to various versions of the nation or a transnational perspective;
• address the practicalities of the marketplace;
• interrogate distinctions between popular and elite, subversive and insider writing;
• investigate platforms necessary to make Wikipedia-like resources literary, creative, scholarly and extensible;
• address the limitations of current available sites (e.g.,. lone databases) and the potentials of interlinked or integrated knowledge systems;
• explore modes of circulating, disseminating and expanding an integrated history;
• offer frames for reading digital works as media systems, social practices, or cultural networks;
• offer examples of using digital tools to produce new kinds of cultural or historical analysis;
• illustrate the emergence of new forms of technological infrastructure and media.

Forward abstract (500 words), along with a one-page CV, in English or in French, to: clccollo@ualberta.ca

Deadline for submission: 15 March 2010

Members of the conference committee:

Dr. Susan Brown, University of Alberta/Guelph University
Dr. Marie Carrière, University of Alberta
Dr. Patricia Demers, University of Alberta
Dr. Cecily Devereux, University of Alberta
Dr. Carole Gerson, Simon Fraser University
Dr. Christl Verduyn, Mount Allison University

Address all mail inquiries to:
Canadian Women Writers Conference/Colloque écritures des femmes du Canada
Canadian Literature Centre/ Centre de littérature canadienne
Humanities Building 4-115
University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta
T6G 2E5

CFP: Children’s Literature and Media (ChLA)

CHLA 2010: Children’s Literature and Media
June 10-12—Eastern Michigan University—Ypsilanti/Ann Arbor MI

Many texts from various media now constitute children’s culture: novels, picture books, and poetry as well as video games, text messages, Facebook, television shows, and films. It is important that we expand our understanding of these child-oriented cultural forms and media platforms. Doing so expands the way we define and analyze children’s culture and, hopefully, provides new critical tools by which to understand children’s books. This conference, the 37th Annual Children’s Literature Association Conference, therefore seeks to illuminate the broader electronic children’s culture within which children’s literature exists and thus highlight the multivalent, dialectical relationship between literature and other media written for younger readers, viewers, and consumers.

Some suggested topics follow, but other ideas are welcomed:

• History of genres such as children’s film, television, video games, picture books
• Discussions of particular shows, child stars, games, films, web texts, or works of children’s or young adult literature
• Digital spaces: public spaces, virtual bodies, the on-line child/the child on-line
• Ratings and children’s media; funding for children’s television; censorship of children’s media
• Hypertexts: cell phone text messaging, Youtube, Myspace, Facebook, blogs, web sites
• Media as contemporary folklore; electronic orality; the urban myth on-line
• How has electronic media affected the form and content of children’s books? How have books been altered or adapted into other forms? How do author web sites or other ancillary materials affect the way we read a work of literature?  How have developments in print technology affected children’s texts?
• Children’s media and literature and gender and/or sexuality
• Images of race, ethnicity, nationality and/or social class in children’s media and literature
• Global media and literature; images of children around the world

Send 300-500 word paper proposals to Annette Wannamaker and Ian Wojcik-Andrews at chla2010@emuenglish.org by January 15, 2010.

For more information and conference updates go to http://chla2010.emuenglish.org

Publication of Jeunesse 1, no. 2

The Winter 2009 issue of Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, and Cultures has now been published! It includes an editorial by co-editor Mavis Reimer, reviews by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, Jenny Kendrick, and Jamie Paris, and a forum entitled “‘The Child,’ Childhood, and Children: Defining our Terms,” with contributions by Margaret Steffler, Mona Gleason, Patrizia Albanese, Shauna Pomerantz, and Julia Emberley. It also features the following articles:

• Toward a Zeroth Voice: Theorizing Voice in Children’s Literature with Deleuze / Jane Newland
• Little Red Riding Hood and the Pedophile in Film: Freeway, Hard Candy, and The Woodsman / Pauline Greenhill and Steven Kohm
• Retraduire un classique: Dépoussiérer Alice? / Isabelle Nières-Chevrel
• “Better Friends”: Marshall Saunders Writing Humane Education and Envisioning Animal Rights / Roxanne Harde

Subscriptions to Jeunesse include open access to all issues of Canadian Children’s Literature / Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse. Back issues of this journal are also available.

The Blythes Are Quoted on CBC’s “Year in Books”

The publication of The Blythes Are Quoted has been selected as one of the “10 biggest publishing stories of 2009″ on a CBC.ca news story:

Fans of the precocious, freckle-faced redhead from P.E.I. had reason to rejoice this year when an amended version of the final Anne Shirley stories was released under a new title, The Blythes Are Quoted. But the book’s additional 100 pages revealed a darker story – complete with references to adultery and suicide. Novelist Jane Urquhart ably provided a context for these bleak scenes in her comprehensive, unflinching biography of Anne’s author, Lucy Maud Montgomery. Anne’s banner year ended with a triumphant Sotheby’s auction – proof that great CanLit never goes out of fashion.

See “The Year in Books” for the full story.