Daily Archives: 20 September 2018

CFP Complaint and Grievance: Literary Traditions

Paper proposals are invited for a two-day symposium on Complaint and Grievance: Literary Traditions
14-15 February 2019
National Library of New Zealand / Victoria University of Wellington, NZ.

‘O woe is me / To have seen what I have seen, see what I see’. Shakespeare’s Ophelia, wooed and cast aside by her one-time lover, Hamlet, amplifies her woe in the open-ended expression of grief that characterises complaint, a rhetorical mode that proliferates from the poetry of Ovid to the Bible, from the Renaissance to the modern day.

This symposium explores the literature of complaint and grievance, centring on the texts of the Renaissance but welcoming contributions from related areas. Shakespeare (A Lover’s Complaint) and Spenser (Complaints) are central authors of Renaissance complaint, but who else wrote complaint literature, why, and to what effect? Female-voiced complaint was fashionable in the high poetic culture of the 1590s, but what happens to complaint when it is taken up by early modern women writers? What forms—and what purposes—does the literature of complaint and grievance take on in non-elite or manuscript spheres, in miscellanies, commonplace books, petitions, street satires, ballads and songs? What are the classical and biblical traditions on which Renaissance complaint is based? And what happens to complaint after the Renaissance, in Romantic poetry, in the reading and writing cultures of the British colonial world, in contemporary poetry, and in the #metoo movement?

Keynote speakers:

  • Professor Danielle Clarke, University College, Dublin
  • Professor Kate Lilley, University of Sydney
  • Professor Rosalind Smith, University of Newcastle, Australia

We invite anyone with an interest in the literature of complaint and the politics of grievance to submit a 250-word paper proposal by 31 October 2018 to the conference organiser, Sarah.Ross@vuw.ac.nz.

This conference is supported by the Royal Society of New Zealand’s Marsden Fund, as part of the three-year project ‘Woe is me: Women and Complaint in the English Renaissance’.

CFP Animal/Language: An Interdisciplinary Conference

Animal/Language: An Interdisciplinary Conference will be held in conjunction with the art exhibition “Assembling Animal Communication” at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX
21-23 March 2019.

Animals and language have a complicated relationship with one another in human understanding. Every period of history evinces a fascination with the diverse modes of communicative exchange and possibilities of linguistic community that exist both within and between species. Recent critics of anthropocentrism are far from the first to question the supposed muteness of the “dumb animal” and its ontological and ethical ramifications. Various cultures have historically attributed language to animals, and we have developed an increasingly sophisticated scientific understanding of the complex non-verbal communicative systems that animals use among themselves. New research complements millennia of human-animal communication in the contexts of work, play, and domestic life.

Some people have extensive experience with real, live animals. Some primarily encounter animals as products of the food industry. Some focus on animal representations in text or image, or deploy the abstract figure of “the animal” as limit or counterpart of the
human. These interactions condition different ways of “thinking with animals,” including: using them in and as language or in experimentation, recruiting them as symbols and metaphors, incorporating them into idiomatic expressions, projecting moral values onto them, and ventriloquizing them for purposes of cultural critique. A vast archive of literary, artistic, philosophical, historical, religious, and scientific explorations testifies that the boundaries and complementarities relating animals and language have always captured the human imagination.

Animal/Language aims to create an interdisciplinary dialogue on the relationship between “animals” and “language” that considers both what connects and what separates these two key terms. The conference hopes to generate new scientific inquires and creative synergies by initiating conversation and exchange among scholars in the arts, humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences. We therefore invite researchers from all fields, periods, and geographical areas to propose contributions engaging questions such as:

  • What are the real, imagined, or potential relationships between animals and language(s)?
  • What are animal languages?
  • What spaces or functions does the animal occupy within human language and cultural
  • representation?
  • What is the role of animals in aesthetic or artistic meaning-making processes?
  • How do our interactions with animals shape our conceptions of animals and language?
  • How and why do we communicate with animals?
  • How and why do animals communicate with us?
  • How and why do animals communicate with one another?
  • What philosophical, ethical, and political questions are raised by different ways of
  • affirming and denying connections between animals and language?
  • How does the question of animal language connect to issues of gender and class?
  • How should any of the above questions be historicized?

The conference will be held in conjunction with the art exhibition “Assembling Animal Communication”, featuring the work of artists Catherine Chalmers, Catherine Clover, Darcie DeAngelo, Lee Deigaard and Maria Lux. Scheduled events will also include live canine and equine communication demonstrations. The conference will have no registration fees; further details regarding accommodations will be provided on the conference website: https://www.depts.ttu.edu/classic_modern/AnimalLanguageConference.php

Proposal Submission Deadline: 30 September, 2018

Proposals for 20-minute papers should be no more than 300 words long and include 3-5 keywords identifying your discipline and topic(s). All abstracts will be reviewed anonymously; please provide author name(s) and affiliations in your submission email, but omit them from your abstract itself. Please submit all proposals (in .docx or .pdf form) and questions to animallanguage2019@gmail.com. Accepted participants will be notified in early November.