CALL FOR PAPERS
7th Annual University of Tulsa English Graduate Student Conference
October 4-6, 2012
Ephemerality, Mutability, and Marginality:
Print Alteration and Literary Culture
This conference aims to explore the relationships between literature and extra-literary culture. For the purpose of this conference, we are defining as “ephemeral” any transitory publication, including but not limited to broadside ballads, advertisements, pamphlets, magazines, periodicals, and comic books. We also welcome papers that discuss the ways in which ephemeral print has influenced the production and circulation of texts, thereby shaping conceptions of the literary canon. Additionally, we invite discussion of print culture in connection with alterations of printed texts (such as marginalia) as well as materials that extend the literary beyond print (for example, textual illustrations and digital humanities websites).
We particularly welcome proposals that address or are related to the following topics:
- Connections between ephemera from differing time periods (i.e. between Early Modern and Modernist periodicals)
- Extraneous material that accompanies a text, such as photography, illustrations, poetry, marginalia, doodles, etc.
- Relationships between literary texts and extra-textual materials
- Ways a given text mutates in different cheap print incarnations
- Connections between ephemera and research methods, ephemera and the canon, ephemera and archives, ephemera and digital humanities
- Textual adulterations (e.g. William Blake’s Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses and editorial attempts to alter manuscripts)
- Interdisciplinary approaches to adaptations and alterations of texts
- Interrogating differences between “high” and “low” art forms
- Alterations in medium that transform the reception of a text (i.e. transitions from print to digital formats)
We encourage papers from other disciplines including Art, Music, History, Communications, Journalism, Sociology, Political Science, and Women’s Studies. We welcome submissions from undergraduates as well.
Why “Ephemerality, Mutability, and Marginality”?
The University of Tulsa has a special relationship with ephemeral texts. From our extensive holdings in McFarlin Library’s Special Collections and University Archives to our joint endeavor with Brown University, The Modernist Journals Project, the university is actively involved in the preservation and digitization of ephemeral and extraneous material. It is our hope that this conference will both showcase the University of Tulsa’s many resources related to ephemera and provide an impetus for discussion between scholars specializing in a variety of fields and disciplines.
Keynote Speakers
Professor Mark L. Schoenfield, Chair of the English Department at Vanderbilt University, is the author of The Professional Wordsworth: Law, Labor & the Poet’s Contract and has contributed to A Concise Companion to the Romantic Age, edited by Jon Klancher (Blackwell, 2009). In 2005, he received the Jeffrey Nordhaus Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching in the Humanities. His latest book, British Periodicals and Romantic Identity: The Literary Lower Empire” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) won the Colby Prize for outstanding work on 19th-century periodicals. His research interests include British Romanticism, print culture, and the relationship between literature and the law, and his current project focuses on connections between 19th-century British periodicals and legal culture.
Professor John Richetti, A.M. Rosenthal Professor (Emeritus) of English, received his graduate degrees from Columbia University, where he specialized in eighteenth-century English literature, and wrote his dissertation at University College, London as a Fulbright and a Danforth Fellow. His books include: Popular Fiction Before Richardson: Narrative Patterns 1700-1739; The English Novel in History, 1700-1780; and Philosophical Writing: Locke, Berkeley, Hume (Harvard UP, 1983). He has edited The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, The Columbia History of the British Novel, and most recently The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780 (February 2012). He also co-edited the 2010 Broadview abridged edition of Richardson’s Clarissa with Toni Bowers.
Submission Information
Abstracts of 250-300 words for papers not exceeding 20 minutes should be submitted by July 31, 2012 to the organizers at tulsagradconf@gmail.com, or through regular post: EGSA Conference Committee, English Dept. Zink Hall, The University of Tulsa, 800 S. Tucker Drive, Tulsa, OK 74104. Please include the title of your paper, your name, your contact information, institutional affiliation, and any presentation requirements (laptops, projectors, etc.) you may have.
There is a registration fee of $20 for all presenters (excluding TU graduate students who can register for $15 and TU undergraduates who can register for $5).
Conference Dates and Locations
Thursday, October 4th 2012 through Saturday, October 6th 2012 on campus at the University of Tulsa.
Contacts
If you have any questions or require further information, please e-mail the conference co-directors Lindi Smith at lindi-smith@utulsa.edu or Ashley Schoppe at ashley-schoppe@utulsa.edu.
Further information can also be found on the conference webpage at http://tuegsa.wordpress.com/conference.
