June 14-15, 2018 Writing and imaging 21st-century Scotland: dialogues across spaces and forms An international conference organized jointly by The University of Aix-Marseille, the University of Western Brittany and the University of Stirling AMU, Aix-en-Provence,

Writing and imaging 21st-century Scotland:

dialogues across spaces and forms

An international conference organized jointly by The University of Aix-Marseille, the University of Western Brittany and the University of Stirling

AMU, Aix-en-Provence, June 14-15, 2018

Keynote Speakers:

Dr Eleanor Bell (University of Strathclyde), “The Quest for Truth in Fiction”

Kevin MacNeil (University of Stirling), “Misty Islands and Hidden Bridges: Scottish Literature (Un)Revealed”

Dr Carla Sassi (University of Verona), “Settling and unsettling memories: the changing boundaries of Scottish literature”

 

Organisers:

Pr. Marie-Odile Pittin-Hédon (Aix-Marseille Université)

Dr. Scott Hames (University of Stirling)

Dr. Camille Manfredi (Université de Bretagne Occidentale)

 

Call for Papers

 

This international conference aims to examine cultural diversity and prolixity in twenty-first century Scotland, as well as its changed relations to the UK and Europe in the wake of the Brexit referendum. If writers in the 1990s placed Scotland on the map, the new millennium ushered in a variety of works of fiction that contributed to the expansion of that map and to an integration of notions that shift the focus from the national to that of an examination of Scotland in a context that foregrounds the post-national and the cosmopolitan. In Scotland in Theory, Gavin Miller and Eleanor Bell describe the contemporary period as a ‘post-national age’. Bell, starting from the theoretical thinking of Richard Kearney, contends that a European identity is developing because of the way power is restructured at a European level, with the emergence of countries as super-nation-states, which are gradually prevailing over nation states. ‘This focus on the postnational’, she argues, ‘encourages a re-thinking of the traditional concept of ‘Scotland’’ (2005: 84). In Literature as Intervention, Jürgen Neubauer, opposing those he calls ‘the nationalist critics’, argues that the concept of national identity itself is problematic, as is the link established by critics between literature and national identity. He borrows instead Habermas’ concept of the ‘postnational constellation’ to show that with the collapse of national boundaries, there has been in European countries a move which he describes as transnational as well as local. This analysis, Neubauer insists, applies to both macro-economic issues and to culture and the arts: ‘Scottish writers are beginning to imagine life in postnational constellations in which interactions and relationships are both more local and more global than the nation’ (1999: 12). Berthold Schoene resorts to the concept of cosmopolitanism to describe this shift in recent Scottish literature:

Cosmopolitanism repudiates reductions of ‘society’ and ‘the public’ to what inhabits or evolves within a neatly staked-out homogeneous realm. […] In fact, cosmopolitanism’s greatest strength lies in defusing the undesirable side-effects of globalisation by working to deconstruct neo-imperial hegemonies, champion transnational partnership, and project the world as a network of interdependencies. (Schoene 2008: 75-6)

 

This concept of a post-national identity, and therefore of a – possibly problematic – post-national literature raises the issue of the interconnections of art, ideology and politics, which are precisely the crossroads the Scottish novel is standing at. Ian Brown and Colin Nicholson phrase this peculiar situation in terms of Scottish literature’s ability precisely to cross borders, rather than reinforce or retrace them:

As the ‘United’ Kingdom’s nature is questioned, so writers who cross genre, language and art-form boundaries reflect that enquiry. Interrogating artistic borders, they interrogate the national idea. (Brown, 2007: 263)

The conference will therefore welcome papers that focus on the interrogation of borders and of the national sentiment in twenty-first-century Scottish literature both before and after Brexit, and on the various ways that writers “reconfigure the possible” (Brown, 2007, 261) in a key period of their political and cultural history. Questions might be raised as to the dynamic of contemporary Scottish cultural politics and the way literary nationalism is being overtaken by the mass-movement politics of independence; both ‘taking it over’ in the sense of determining the political/social frames in which literary criticism operates, thus rendering key paradigms redundant, and ‘overtaking’ in the sense of surpassing and leaving behind. We will also seek to assess the extent to which the new media and new art forms that are currently occupying Scotland’s creative space contribute to the remapping of Scotland’s artistic as well as political borders.

Participants will for instance address the following issues:

–       Globalization vs regionalism in post-Brexit, pre-Indyref2 Scotland

–       Scottish literature in times of change: Scottish-British-European relations and their impact on the literary production

–       Scottish cultural / “poetic” politics: literature and the 2014 referendum experience

–       Post-nationalism and the global imaginary

–       Scottish literature, border-crossers and cosmopolitanism

–       Multiculturalism, plurilingualism (English, Scots, Gaelic…), multimediality and literary polyphony in 21st-century Scottish literature

–       Change, permanence and transmission in 21st-century Scottish literature

–       intermedial approaches to C21 Scotland in literature and other media: graphic novels, photo-textual apparatuses, literature and the Internet, etc

Deadline for submission: January 31 2017

Please send a 300-word abstract (for a 20-minute presentation) with a short biography to the three convenors Marie-Odile Pittin-Hedon (marie-odile.hedon@univ-amu.fr), Camille Manfredi (camille.manfredi@univ-brest.fr) and Scott Hames (scott.hames@stir.ac.uk) by January 31.

Notification of acceptance: February 28.

 

 

Bibliography

Bell, Eleanor, and Gavin Miller (eds.). 2005. Scotland in Theory: Reflections on Culture and Literature (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi)

Gifford, Douglas. 2007. ‘Breaking Boundaries: From Modern to Contemporary in Scottish Fiction’, The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, Vol III: Modern Transformations, New Identities (from 1918), ed. by Ian Brown (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), pp. 237-52

Neubauer, Jürgen. 1999.  Literature as Intervention: Struggles over Cultural Identity in Contemporary Scottish Fiction (Marburg: Textum Verlag)

Schoene, Berthold. 2008. ‘Cosmopolitan Scots’, The Scottish Studies Review, 9, 2, Autumn, pp. 71−92

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L’Ecosse du XXIe siècle en textes et en images: Dialoguistes spatiaux et formels

Colloque international organisé conjointement par les Universités d’Aix-Marseille, de Bretagne Occidentale (Brest) et de Stirling (Ecosse).

AMU, Aix-en-Provence, 14-15 Juin 2018

Conférenciers invités :

Dr Eleanor Bell (University of Strathclyde), “The Quest for Truth in Fiction”

Kevin MacNeil (University of Stirling), “Misty Islands and Hidden Bridges: Scottish Literature (Un)Revealed”

Dr Carla Sassi (University of Verona), “Settling and unsettling memories: the changing boundaries of Scottish literature”

 

Organisateurs

Pr. Marie-Odile Pittin-Hédon (Aix-Marseille Université)

Dr. Scott Hames (University of Stirling)

Dr. Camille Manfredi (Université de Bretagne Occidentale)

 

 

Appel à communications

Ce colloque international se donne comme objet la diversité et la prolixité de la production artistique écossaise au XXIe siècle, ainsi que la nouvelle relation qu’elle noue avec l’Europe et le Royaume-Uni au lendemain du référendum sur le Brexit. En effet, les écrivains, poètes, poètes-marcheurs, dramaturges et plasticiens proposent au XXIe siècle une vision de l’Ecosse dite « post-nationale » ou « consmopolitaine ». Ainsi que l’indique le philosophe Richard Kearney, se développe actuellement une identité européenne qui va de pair avec la restructuration du pouvoir à l’échelle de l’Europe, laquelle identité se détache du strict contexte national. Cette évolution nous encourage à nous interroger sur ce que signifie « l’Ecosse », au sens traditionnel voire nationaliste du terme. Le concept de post-national, d’une identité post-nationale, et donc d’une littérature, d’un art post-national (concept qui se peut se révéler problématique) renvoie en effet aux interférences et interconnections entre l’art, l’idéologie et le politique, qui est précisément le point de convergence sur lequel se situe l’Ecosse contemporaine.

Les organisateurs sollicitent donc des communications qui se concentrent sur la manière dont les frontières du sentiment national se redéfinissent dans la littérature et les arts, avant et après le référendum sur le Brexit, aux diverses façons dont les artistes « reconfigurent les possibles » (Brown, 2007, 261) dans cette période clé de leur histoire nationale, supra-nationale et culturelle. On pourra interroger la manière dont la dynamique politique et le nationalisme littéraire sont dépassés par les mouvements indépendantistes et leur assise très large ; on entendra « dépasser » dans son double sens de dépasser les structures politiques et sociales dans lesquelles elles naissent traditionnellement, rendant ainsi caduques l’ancien paradigme, et de surpasser, en laissant derrière soi les anciennes structures de pensée. Nous examinerons également la manière dont les nouvelles formes artistiques, les nouveaux media qui occupent désormais l’espace créatif et culturel du pays contribuent à la reconfiguration des frontières à la fois artistiques et politiques du pays.

Les intervenants pourront s’ils le souhaitent traiter des thématiques suivantes (liste non exhaustive):

– représentations identitaires entre mondialisation et régionalisme; le Brexit et le référendum sur l’indépendance de l’Ecosse (2014, 2018?) en littérature

– littérature écossaise à l’heure du changement: relations entre Ecosse, Royaume-Uni et Europe, quels impacts sur la production littéraire?

– politiques et poïétiques culturelles: le référendum de 2014 sur l’indépendance en textes et en images

– post-nationalisme et imaginaire mondialisé

– littérature écossaise: esthétiques du transfert et du cosmopolitanisme

– multiculturalisme, multilinguisme (littératures en anglais, en Scots, en gaélique, etc), multimédialité et polyphonie en littérature écossaise du XXIè siècle

– permanence, impermanence et problématiques de la transmission en littérature écossaise ultra-contemporaine

– approches intermédiales des formes littéraires: romans graphiques, dispositifs photo-textuels, littérature et Internet, etc.

 

Date limite de soumission des propositions : 31 janvier 2018

Merci d’expédier un résumé de la proposition de 300 mots ainsi qu’une courte notice bio-bibliographique aux trois organisateurs : Marie-Odile Pittin-Hedon (marie-odile.hedon@univ-amu.fr ), Camille Manfredi (camille.manfredi@univ-brest.fr ) et Scott Hames (scott.hames@stir.ac.uk ). Les communications sont de 20 minutes.

Notification d’acceptation prévue pour le 28 février 2018.

 

Bibliographie

Bell, Eleanor, and Gavin Miller (eds.). 2005. Scotland in Theory: Reflections on Culture and Literature (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi)

Gifford, Douglas. 2007. ‘Breaking Boundaries: From Modern to Contemporary in Scottish Fiction’, The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, Vol III: Modern Transformations, New Identities (from 1918), ed. by Ian Brown (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), pp. 237-52

Neubauer, Jürgen. 1999. Literature as Intervention: Struggles over Cultural Identity in Contemporary Scottish Fiction (Marburg: Textum Verlag)

Schoene, Berthold. 2008. ‘Cosmopolitan Scots’, The Scottish Studies Review, 9, 2, Autumn, pp. 71−92


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