[ecrea] CFP: Graphic Reading Conference

*/Graphic Reading: A One-Day Conference University of Birmingham, 19 May 
2017 /*

“The surface of the page is a problem to solve.”   – /Art Spiegelman /

Perhaps no other word in our critical vocabularies is changing as 
quickly as “reading”. As critics such as Franco Moretti, Stephen Best, 
Sharon Marcus, and Heather Love offer highly visible ways of approaching 
the digital through distant reading and surface reading, they have 
limited their focus to the textual. The purpose of this conference is to 
take reading out of its literary comfort zone and to move away from the 
traditional parameters of fiction, poetry, and prose. Comics, film, the 
book, book art, maps, sculpture, the digital, and, often, the archive, 
comprise of words and images that require us to learn new or unfamiliar 
reading practices. We invite participants in /Graphic Reading /to 
interrogate and explore these practices, cutting across visual, 
material, cultural, and literary contexts to follow their global 
intricacies and interdisciplinary implications.

Critical attention is increasingly turning to the graphic but the 
graphic itself has long been treated as a peripheral, “low” or crude 
form of art. Less and less of a guilty pleasure, critics are finding 
that the unconventional, controversial, and popular aesthetics that 
comics, pulp genres, films, and games often entertain make for nothing 
like easy reading. The presence of pleasure in this work – whether overt 
or insidious – gives trouble to its readers. We therefore want to 
consider how the naïve, the confessional, the indecent, the violent, the 
gratuitous, and the explicit function in both familiar and less 
established mediums. In short, what happens when we read the graphic?

We invite papers that consider graphic reading across comic, critical, 
literary, and theoretical texts as well as less established mediums such 
as videogames and other digital media. Possible topics may include but 
are not limited to:

*Past, present, and future methods and theories of reading and 
critique.
*Representations of reading, representations of violence, 
representations of desire
*Reading and graphic novels, reading and 
comics, reading and cinema
*The pleasures/erotics of reading
* Reading 
as labour, the ethics of reading, reading and critique
*The history of 
reading, history of the book, the book as object, libraries
*Childhood & 
Reading, Children’s Literature
*Approaches to reading in queer theory, 
narrative theory, theories of affect, translation studies *Reading in 
digital humanities
*Reading theatre, reading drama

**

*Keynote speakers *

Dr. Sarah Dillon (U. Cambridge), “The Ungrammatical Knife”
Author of 
/The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory /(2007) and /Queer 
Intimacies: Deconstruction, Feminism, Film /(2018)

Prof. Jason Dittmer (UCL), /TBC//
/Author of /Popular Culture, 
Geopolitics, and Identity /(2010) and /Captain America and the 
Nationalist Superhero: Metaphors, Narratives, and Geopolitics /(2013)

Abstracts of no more than 250 words, accompanied by a short bio, should 
be sent to (graphic.reading /at/ gmail.com) by March 31st. *Deadline extended 
to April 12th. *

Organisers: Dr. Charlotta Salmi (U. Birmingham), Dr. Angus Brown (U. 
Birmingham)

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