[ecrea] CFP Fantastic Material(s) Things and the Workings of the Non-Real

please find below a CfP for a conference organized by the Institute of
English Cultures and Literatures,
University of Silesia, Poland.

*Fantastic Material(s) *

*Things and the Workings of the Non-Real *

7-8 July 2016, Sosnowiec, Poland

Institute of English Cultures and Literatures (IECL)

The conference aims to address the use of materiality by the fantastic
in its aesthetic, narrative and world building strategies.
In the broadest sense then, the conference wishes to investigate the
contribution of things to the achievement of the non-real
and the production of its estranging appeal, which is often at the same
time responsible for its immersive qualities.

Positioned as the other of realistic expression with its normative
sanction, the fantastic strives to generate worlds
and stories which would be imaginatively persuasive, be it either in the
creation of ruptures and discontinuities or
in the establishment of representative coherence and internal logic.
Through the use of defamiliarization and (en)wonderment
as well as through the evocation of fear or longing, the non-real
engages with the real in both dialogic and subversive manners,
often achieving a powerful critique of the domestic, social, political
and geographical environments.
Or, conversely, despite its representational otherness, the fantastic
may reinforce the ideological conditions of those environments,
embracing their values and bestowing them with mythologizing meaningfulness.

The purpose of the conference, therefore, is to explore the role of the
things in fantastic representations on the level of artistic expression
as well as on the level of its affective and ideological effects.

We invite scholars working on the various modes and theories of the
non-realin culture (literature, art, film, TV, video games),
and also in transmedial environments, to engage in readings of the
entanglement of /the material/ and /the fantastic/ through perspectives
focusing on the readings of the material, for example, by the poetics of
matter, material culture studies,
the material engagement theory, affect theory, or object-oriented ontology.

Topics may address, but are not limited to:

·objects and the question of genres and sub-genres (fairy tales,
fantasy, science-fiction, new weird, cyberpunk, steampunk, etc.);

·the role of objects and the structure of the fantastic narratives,
transfictionality and transmedial storytelling;

·the fantastic materials and the question of seriality and adaptation
and rebooting;

·the system of things and the mechanisms of world-building and
world-reception;

·things and immersion;

·affective engagement (wonder, fear, longing, belief etc.) and the
employment of the material;

·things and the self-referentiallity of the fantastic;

·uniqueness and rarity in the context of, on the one hand, fantastic
exceptionality, on the other, fantastic formulas;

·fantastic aesthetics and the material (for instance, the grotesque, the
uncanny, the sublime, the weird, the monstrous etc.);

·material culture and the strategies of subversion, estrangement, rupture;

·the fantastic political and objects (utopias and dystopias);

·the fantastic “recovery� of objects (after J.R.R. Tolkien);

·the mutiny of objects in fantastic settings: reinventions of the everyday;

·material culture and social distinction;

·the fantastic and the question of work and cultural production
(fantastic labour/ fantastic capital)

·the economy of the fantastic (surplus/ excess, deficiency/lack)

·the fantastic and the semiotic currency of objects

·objects and the rhetorics (Farah Mendlesohn) of the non-real,

·temporal and spatial trajectories (biographies) of objects/ artifacts
in fantastic contexts,

·objects and the question of agency and effect in fantastic settings
(magic, technology, laws of non-real nature);

·the body as subject vs. the body as object

·the fetish and the fantastic.

The conference will take place at the *Institute of English Cultures and
Literatures*, University of Silesia (Poland, Katowice/ Sosnowiec)

on 7-8 July 2016, and is intended as a one panel event to ensure the
highest quality of the debate. Proposals for presentations,

papers and full panels (of approx. 500 words) followed by a short bio
note should be submitted to *(fantastic.materials /at/ gmail.com)
<http://gmail.com>*

by 31 March 2016. The cost of the conference is £90, 100€; 120$.

Conference fee includes lunch, coffee and snacks, conference dinner and
conference materials.

For further queries, please contact the conference organizers:

*Karolina Lebek*, PhD, (karolina.lebek /at/ us.edu.pl)
<mailto:(karolina.lebek /at/ us.edu.pl)>,

*Ania Malinowska*, PhD, (anna.malinowska /at/ us.edu.pl)
<mailto:(anna.malinowska /at/ us.edu.pl)>,

*Agnieszka Podruczna*, MA, (podruczna /at/ gmail.com)
<mailto:(podruczna /at/ gmail.com)>.

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