OCCT HT 2022 - Week 8 Updates
Good afternoon!
This week saw our final Discussion Group Session of the term. We welcomed Marta Arnaldi, who discussed how literary canons travel across space as well as through time, and how they are, therefore, supra-geographical, rather than simply trans-historical, entities. Arnaldi explored this idea by sharing the findings of her forthcoming monograph, titled The Diasporic Canon: American Anthologies of Contemporary Italian Poetry 1945-2015 (Legenda 2022). Thank you to everyone who attended!
Next term we will be hosting a range of exciting events, from Discussion Group Sessions and the Fiction and Other Minds Seminar, to this year's Oxford Translation Day, as well as a Festival of events, both online and in-person, on 'Transnational Africa: Print Culture, Adaptation, Translation'. For more information, please be sure to check the website's events page closer to the beginning of Trinity. If you have any questions about our events, please contact Dr Joseph Hankinson [comparative.criticism@st-annes.ox.ac.uk].
We look forward to seeing you next term!
Calls for Papers and Events:
[1] Event: ‘WHO CARES?’ In Contemporary Women’s Writing & Film
https://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/events/event/25687
Session 2: Care and the Non-Human
21 March 2022
4 - 5pm GMT (UK time)
Online seminar series
Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing Seminar Series
Organisers: Dr Jasmine D Cooper (Cambridge) & Dr Katie Pleming (Edinburgh)
‘Who cares?’ speaks to a paradox at the heart of ethical and political discourses of care in the contemporary. It is an interrogation of who performs care, an examination of the intersections of capital, care, and exploitation, a making visible of those upon whom the burden of care falls. Yet it also captures feelings of apathy - both individual and institutional - which seem to mark the contemporary. While the institutional refusal to care results in forms of systemic violence, the individual and collective turn away from care is more complex, bound up with questions of privilege, agency, and resistance. While a politics of care may align with progressive politics, narratives of care are easily appropriated or inverted: co-opted by reactionary, nationalist political groups. As such, care orbits a crucial negotiation between self and other, between self-centredness and other-centeredness. It is linked to vulnerability and forms of precarity. Ultimately, care speaks to relationality: how we relate to others, to ourselves, to the Earth, and to non-human lifeforms.
Seminar Programme
We approach the discussion of care and the issues it raises across three broad topics:
Session 1: Care, (Geo)politics, and the Social
Date: 7th March 2022
Time: 16:00 GMT
Speakers: Sophie Lewis (Brooklyn Institute for Social Research; Visiting Scholar, GSWS Penn) and Ally Day (University of Toledo)
Session 2: Care and the Non-Human
Date: 21st March 2022
Time: 16:00 GMT
Speakers: Jami Weinstein (Uppsala University) and Iggy Cortez (Vanderbilt University)
Session 3: Care and Neoliberalism
Date: 28th March 2022
Time: 16:00 GMT
Speakers: Lisa Downing (University of Birmingham), Alice Blackhurst (St John’s College, Cambridge) and Emma Dowling (University of Vienna)
All are welcome to attend these free online seminars. You will need to register in advance to receive the online joining link. To attend this second session starting at 16:00 GMT on Monday 21 March go to https://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/events/event/25687 to register.
[2] Event: Women’s Narratives of Ageing and Care
https://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/events/event/25056
Next Friday 18 March 2022
9.00am - 4.20pm GMT, UK time
Online Conference
Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing Online Conference
Care is fundamental to human survival, yet it is often overlooked, undermined, and undervalued. Care of the old, in particular, is low in status and too readily occluded. This event seeks to explore why and how, to examine some of the powerful responses to relationships of care in recent creative works by women, and to investigate ways in which care might be redefined and reconceptualized. Taking as its focus the representation or narrativization of care, in theory, literature and visual culture, it seeks to engage with contemporary female-authored texts from diverse cultural contexts, encouraging the development of comparative, cross-cultural perspectives. Narrative is key here; as Sarah Falcus claims: ‘Telling and reading stories of age … open[s] up debate and embrace [s] complexity, and may challenge our ways of thinking.’
Programme
9.00-9.15 Introduction and Welcome
Conference Organisers: Emily Jeremiah (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Shirley Jordan (Newcastle University)
9.15-10.45 Panel 1: Narratives and Counternarratives of Age
Chair: Emily Jeremiah (Royal Holloway University of London)
Avril Tynan (University of Turku), ‘Counternarrating Loss in Women’s Dementia Fiction in French: Collaboration, Continuity, Care’
Jordan McCullough (Queen’s University Belfast), ‘«Tu trouves pas quand même absolument fabuleux d’en connaître un peu moins?»’: Dementia and the “Second Childhood” as Shared Learning in Sophie Fontanel’s Grandir (2010)’
Martina Pala (Durham University), ‘«Non vorrei toccarla»: daughters repulsing ageing mothers.
Laudomia Bonanni, Donatella Di Pietrantonio, and Maria Grazia Calandrone in comparison’
10.45-11.00 Break
11.00-12.30 Panel 2: Care and Caring
Chair: Shirley Jordan (Newcastle University)
Kate Averis (Universidad de Antioquia), ‘Still the Carer Sex: Women Ageing and Caring in Contemporary Women’s Writing’
Alice Hall (University of York), ‘Women’s Work: Reading, Writing and Archiving as Forms of Care in The Carers UK Archive’
Siobhán McIlvanney (King’s College London), ‘The Cultures of Caring (for) Women in Contemporary French and Francophone Writing’
12.30-13.10 Lunch
13.10-15.00 Panel 3: Narrativizing Care
Chair: Emily Jeremiah (Royal Holloway University of London)
Julia Dobson (University of Sheffield), ‘Co-presence as Care: The Hyperreal Figures in Bérangere Vantusso’s Work’
Margarita Saono (University of Illinois Chicago), ‘The Old Woman Comes out of the Attic’
Kathleen Venema (University of Winnipeg), ‘“I guess there’s Nice Meddling and Meddler’s Meddling”: Women’s Graphic Narratives of Ageing and Care’
Susan Ireland (Grinnell College) and Patrice J. Proulx (University of Nebraska Omaha), ‘Textualizing the Maison de Retraite in Contemporary Narratives by Francophone Women Authors’
15.00-15.15 Break
15.15-16.00 Book Launch: Sarah Falcus and Katsura Sako, eds., Contemporary Narratives of Ageing, Illness, Care (Routledge, 2022).
16.00-16.20 Collective Conclusions
Chair: Shirley Jordan (Newcastle University)
Conference Organisers: Emily Jeremiah (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Shirley Jordan (Newcastle University)
All are welcome to attend this free online event, starting at 09:00 GMT, UK time. You will need to register in advance to receive the online joining link. To register please go to: https://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/events/event/25056
