[ecrea] CFP: The Short Story Cycle: Circling Around a Genre?

*The Short Story Cycle: Circling Around a Genre?*

CALL FOR PAPERS

University of Warwick, Saturday 6 February 2016
Deadline for submission: 30 September, 2015

Confirmed Key-note speakers:

Professor Bill Gray (University of Chichester)

Professor Max Louwerse (Universiteit van Tilburg)

The success of recent Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro, the movie Wild
Tales, the podcast This American Life and the event the Moth shows the
wide-ranging popularity of the short story cycle in modern media.

To reflect the ‘open’ nature of the form, our conference will start from
a working hypothesis (rather than a strict definition): a short story
cycle in whatever form or medium, seems to be constru(ct)ed as a
collection of stories, presented as a whole but without an explicit
narrative frame.

Traditionally, the short story cycle finds its raison d’être in oral
culture. Undoubtedly, the legacy of oral culture proved to be a
foundation for other areas of cultural expression, such as cinema,
performance art, and modern media.

Since the eighteenth century, the novel has occupied the role of
dominant genre in western literary culture. The short story cycle seems
to find itself in a grey area, less well defined, but at the same time
possibly less constrained. The anthology film is an example of how the
same mechanism that is at the basis of the short story cycle can be
productive in other media as well. This is also true in the case of
radio programs or podcasts. Due to modern technology, new forms of media
have made new forms of cultural expression possible, such as Twitter,
Facebook, Internet forums and YouTube, all of which can be said to have
brought to the surface shorter, more dialogical, more ‘spoken’ forms of
(written as well as visual) communication. This begs the question
whether the short story cycle, which seems to have gained in popularity
in recent years, thrives in a specific social or historical context.

The structural issues inherent in short story cycles also raise
questions of a mathematical, hermeneutic and neurological nature. Could
we, for instance, come up with mathematical patterns that can help us
gain insight into narratological structures and social functions of the
genre? Can we find neurological explanations for its appeal to both
readers and writers? The short story cycle seems to productively use the
tensions between continuity and discontinuity, the structuring impulse
and inevitable digression.

We envisage the conference itself as a short story cycle with the open
ended circularity of hermeneutics: different disciplines, backgrounds
and approaches revolve around one theme, providing a meaningful yet not
rigid, premeditated structure.

Please submit by 30th September 2015 a paper title, 300-word abstract
and a 300-word curriculum vitae to Elio Baldi (e.a.baldi /at/ warwick.ac.uk)
<mailto:(e.a.baldi /at/ warwick.ac.uk)> and Linde Luijnenburg
(l.m.e.luijnenburg /at/ warwick.ac.uk) <mailto:(l.m.e.luijnenburg /at/ warwick.ac.uk)>

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/hrc/confs/ssc/cfp/

--
Linde Luijnenburg
UK: +44 (0)7405 205694
Netherlands: +31 614527520
Italy: +39 389 0440543


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