CFP Medieval Uncanny: Pearl Kibre Medieval Study 18th Annual Conference (expired 1/31/2024)

Sorry to have missed this:

The Medieval Uncanny: Pearl Kibre Medieval Study 18th Annual Conference

deadline for submissions: January 31, 2024

full name / name of organization: Pearl Kibre Medieval Study

contact email: medieval.study@gmail.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2023/11/10/the-medieval-uncanny-pearl-kibre-medieval-study-18th-annual-conference

What: Pearl Kibre Medieval Study 18th Annual Conference

Where: Hybrid, hosted through The Graduate Center, CUNY

When: Friday 3 May 2024

There’s a great deal of attention and sensitivity paid to continuities between the medieval period and the present day, continuities that animate projects as diverse as Geraldine Heng’s The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages to fan-studies readings of works like The Book of Margery Kempe, The Matter of Britain, and Roman de la Rose. This work (often correctly) insists that the medieval world never really went away; it was only dissolved into modernity. But despite the best efforts of scholars to make the vestiges of the Middle Ages intelligible, so many aspects of the period remain obscure, unruly, and decidedly weird. It is this weirdness that we are terming the medieval uncanny, the residue of the Middle Ages that resists simple functionalism. Following Stephanie Trigg and Carolyn Dinshaw, if we give up thinking of the medieval past as a static and knowable place, what can we do?

This conference will explore the uncanny and related terms– the weird, the abject, the spectral–  that describe the moment of rupture which can’t be assimilated by modern perspectives or previous experience, an experience common to contemporary readers and medieval ones. These are moments when a modern reader becomes very aware of the temporal and cultural distance of the Middle Ages, or when a character experiences a sudden shift from the normal to the fantastic. We also notice shifts within medievalist representations of the period, moving from technicolor epics to more somber, weirder stories. These modern adaptations use medieval culture as intertext, marshaling the medieval setting to produce a product that is truly uncanny. We welcome projects that explore these moments of distance, and what they tell us about the potential for uncanniness to be generative in the face of disconnection, unfamiliarity, or surprise.

Submissions might address the following topics:

• The weird and the eerie in lais, fabliaux, memento mori, etc.
• Mystics and unconventional relationships to devotion
• Psychoanalytic theory and medieval texts
• Human and non-human relationships
• Cousins of the uncanny (the Gothic)
• Uncanny medievalisms in film, video games, contemporary literature, etc.

Nonmedievalists, nonacademics and scholars outside the field of English are encouraged to apply. To submit your application, please fiill out the google form here.

Questions may be directed to medieval.study@gmail.com. Abstract Deadline: January 31 2024

Registration Deadline: April 1 2024

Last updated November 15, 2023

This CFP has been viewed 330 times.

CFP Gothic and Uncanny Explorations Conference (6/9/14; Sweden 9/10-17/14)

[UPDATE] Gothic and Uncanny Explorations, 10-12 Sept. 2014 (Proposal deadline 9 June)
full name / name of organization:
Karlstad University, Sweden
contact email:
maria.holmgren.troy@kau.se, sofia.wijkmark@kau.se

Gothic and Uncanny Explorations

An interdisciplinary international conference
Wednesday 10 September – Friday 12 September 2014
Karlstad University, Sweden

Extended Second Call for Papers

The gothic, as a mode or genre, has become an increasingly widespread and noticeable cultural phenomenon during the last few decades. There is also a great interest in the closely related concept of the uncanny in a number of different contexts. In addition to playing a larger role in academia, the gothic and the uncanny have been integrated in our everyday vocabulary and thinking in recent years.

This conference will explore and analyze new developments of and cultural, academic, and historical trends related to the gothic and the uncanny; we want to scrutinize transformations and meanings in different contexts. We welcome paper or presentation proposals that deal with either the gothic or the uncanny, as well as those that examine the two together.

Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

Popular culture
Art
Genre
Media
Technology
Intermediality
Postcolonial perspectives
Transnational gothic
Fiction for children and young adults
The body
Environment
Fictional violence
The monstrous
Cultural anxieties
Theoretical considerations

Please send proposals for 20-minute papers or presentations to sofia.wijkmark@kau.se and maria.holmgren.troy@kau.se by 9 June 2014. Proposals should be max. 250 words. We look forward to receiving your proposal.

conference homepage: http://www.kau.se/litteraturvetenskap/gothic-and-uncanny-explorations


By web submission at 05/02/2014 - 12:45

CFP Madness in the Woods (5/15/14)

Sorry for the slow posting:

Edited Volume: Madness in the Woods

Since the beginning of storytelling the narrative of being lost in the woods or of choosing to live in the woods as a heterotopian space has remained popular. While literary naturalists praise the woods‘ natural and sublime beauty, universal and national myths of the forest from the early settlement until today also include the dark, gothic and uncanny side of nature. Puritan thought associated the “hideous and desolate wilderness” (William Bradford) with the danger of getting lost in the woods where a pure soul might lose its sanity. Native American legends as well as European folktales draw a picture of haunted woods where spirits and ghosts dwell, but also as places where challenges are mastered and where the person who enters returns as somebody else.

We invite articles that focus on this dark side of forests in literature and film, that address the ambivalence of the forest’s offer for shelter and protection from the dangers of civilisation and the social sphere, but for the price of confrontation with the uncanny.

Submissions could include (but are not limited to):

How certain genres approach the topic
How the uncanny woods are represented in TV series
How ecological disasters, or environmental problems such as climate change or deforestation interfer with the narrator’s, protagonist’s or spectator‘s psyche.
How the dark and uncanny woods in colonizer and settler writings represent a liminal, irregulated space.
How the representation of the uncanny woods has changed over time.
How the woods are gendered, especially when they are uncanny.
How ecopsychology and disorders connect with the uncanny woods.

If you are interested in being included in this volume, please send an abstract of no more than 500 words and a short CV to heike.schwarz@phil.uni-augsburg.de and tina-karen.pusse@nuigalway.ie by the 15th of May, 2014.