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Call for Papers: SHAKESPEARE IN FRENCH

Wednesday, 8 June 2016

Venue: Senate House Library, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU

Marking 400 years since the death of William Shakespeare, the Institute of Modern Languages Research (IMLR), London and Senate House Library in association with the Institut français du Royaume-Uni and Culturethèque, are organising a one-day conference.

With Shakespeare’s works being regarded (and thrust down people’s throats) as ‘universal classics’, it is perhaps not surprising that they have so often been staged across the Channel. The Bard is, in fact, the writer whose works are most frequently performed in France. Indeed, despite a fraught history owing to neo-classical hang-ups, today at least, ‘la langue de Molière’ regularly plays host to ‘la langue de Shakespeare’.

We invite proposals for 20 minute papers that look at commentaries, translations, adaptations and productions of Shakespeare’s works in French contexts from the 17th century to the present day.

Topics may include but are not limited to Voltaire’s dubious attitude towards Shakespeare, Jean-François Ducis’s adaptations (including Macbeth minus the witches), Victor and François-Victor Hugo’s respective interests in the Bard, Peter and Irina Brook’s productions of his plays, Ariane Mnouchkine’s Les Shakespeare and very recent adaptations such as Vincent Macaigne’s Au moins j’aurai laisse un beau cadavre, in which Elsinore is turned into a blood-soaked bouncy castle.

Confirmed keynote speakers include: Florence March and Nathalie Vienne-Guérin (Université Paul Valéry).

Please send abstracts of no more than 200 words, together with a brief biography (50 words) by 5 April 2016 to the convenor Dominic Glynn (IMLR, London) dominic.glynn@sas.ac.uk. Decisions will be made by 12 April 2016.

CFP. TRANSNATIONAL MODERN LANGUAGES

The Italian Cultural Institute, 39 Belgrave Square, London, SW1X 8NX

Friday 2 and Saturday 3 December 2016

Teaching and research in Modern Languages are conventionally structured in ways which appear to insist on national or linguistic specificity. Work on the transnational inevitably poses questions on the nature of the underlying framework of Modern Languages: whether the discipline should be construed and practised as the inquiry into separate national traditions or as the study of cultures and their interactions. These structures seem inadequate at a time when the study of cultures delimited by the concept of the nation/national identities is becoming more difficult to justify in a world increasingly defined by the transnational and translingual, and by the material and non-material pressures of globalization. Challenging the assumption that cultures are self-contained units that correspond to sharply defined national boundaries must become an essential part of all disciplinary fields and sub-fields that make up Modern Languages, as they seek to avoid the risk of methodological nationalism and of participating in the very structures that it is their purpose to critique. At the same time, how might the transnational acknowledge the residual pull of the nation as a potent, albeit porous, container of cultural identity, and broker of citizenship?

A great deal of research within Modern Languages is already, albeit often implicitly, concerned with the transnational dimension of culture. In so doing, it poses questions about language, translation and multilingualism; about the set of practices that make up a sense of location and of belonging to a geographically determined site; about the notions of temporality that obtain within cultures; about modes of understanding subjectivity and alterity. All these questions are of fundamental importance for the study not only of the contemporary world, and its likely future, but for the study of the past.

The aim of the conference is to explore how the ‘cultural’ and the ‘transcultural’ cannot be studied in isolation but rather need to be seen as part of a complex system of circulation which goes beyond national boundaries, canons or linguistic discreteness. The conference aims to bring together researchers who are working on the transnational across Modern Languages and whose work poses questions both on how we study culture and how we produce a version of Modern Languages that is fully respondent to practices of human mobility and cultural exchange.

250 word abstracts should be submitted by 30 April 2016 to Georgia Wall at: G.Wall@warwick.ac.uk

Abstracts should follow this order:

author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) bibliography

Please specify in the subject of your email: ‘Transnational Modern Languages’.

We will acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in two weeks, you should assume we did not receive your proposal.