‘Ford and the Other’
Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier
September 7–9, 2017
Proposals are invited for an international conference on Ford Madox Ford and ‘the other’.
The principle underlying Max Saunders’s magisterial biography on Ford is that of duality; of a man forever oscillating between differing versions of himself; between public and inner life; tradition and modernity; reality and authenticity. As Saunders reminds us, a writer’s life, according to Ford, is ‘a dual affair’; and this tenet seems relevant both as regards Ford’s life as a writer and his theoretical and literary writing. At the core of duality lies the idea that one is also always another.
The concepts of alterity and otherness could include the following approaches to Ford and his contemporaries:
- Ford and empathy;
- Ford and altruism;
- the autobiographic dimension of his fictional and critical work – reinventing oneself as other, and conversely, discovering oneself in others;
- questions of race, nationality, and gender.
- Another fruitful topic is the question of alterity in terms of other times – for instance with reference to Ford’s historical novels – and other modes of being.
- Questions of otherness could also involve the Doppelganger motif, which is central to such novels as Henry for Hugh or The Rash Act, but also prevalent in much of Ford’s fictional work.
We welcome papers from established and new scholars which investigate connections with other writers, such as Richard Aldington, Vera Brittain, Elizabeth Bowen, Joseph Conrad, H.D., T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Oliver Madox Hueffer, Violet Hunt, Henry James, David Jones, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Rose Macaulay, Marcel Proust, Siegfried Sassoon, May Sinclair, Edward Thomas, Rebecca West, Edith Wharton, and Virginia Woolf.
Suggested theoretical frameworks may involve, but should not be limited to, Sigmund Freud; Emmanuel Lévinas; Alain Badiou; Paul Ricœur; Derek Attridge.
We welcome proposals of around 300 words for 20-minutes papers. These should be sent to the conference organiser, Isabelle Brasme (isabellebrasme@gmail.com), by 1 May 2017.