Call for papers
2012 Annual International Conference of the Institute of English Cultures and Literatures
Reconfiguring Authorship
Date: November 15-18, 2012
Location: Ghent University, Belgium
The Research on Authorship as Performance project at Ghent University
invites proposals for 20-minute papers as well as for complete panels,
for a conference on the theme of "Reconfiguring Authorship". This
three-day conference will explore facets of authorship in the
Anglophone world from the Middle Ages to the present; confirmed
keynote speakers include Richard Wilson (Cardiff), Margaret Ezell
(Texas A&M), Dame Gillian Beer (Cambridge), and Paul St Amour
(Pennsylvania).
The conference program will include keynote talks and concurrent
sessions as well as a conference dinner and an optional museum
excursion on the final day of the conference.
PROPOSALS
The Romantic concept of the solitary genius (if indeed such an entity
ever existed) has for decades now been the subject of intense critical
scrutiny and revision. Recent work in the burgeoning field of
authorship studies has turned to the analysis of cultural formations
of "authoriality" as they developed historically in a variety of
geographical locations, in relation to cultural networks and social
change, to transformations of the media, as well as to changing
perceptions of gender and personhood. The notion of authorial agency
is therefore now submerged within an elaborate tissue of critical
feedback, textual instability, editorial intervention, and accidents
of publishing, branding, and spin. And yet the Author persists, as a
nomenclature, as a catalogue entry, as a biographical entity, as a
popular icon, and as an assumed agent of creativity and innovation. As
a result, current studies of authors and authorship have to contend
with the complex issues of authorial authority, independence or
interdependence, and self-fashioning in a large variety of historical
and discursive settings.
Reconfiguring Authorship aims to showcase the latest, most exciting
developments in authorship studies by providing a venue in which to
debate theoretical and historical understanding of the complex
ideological, technological and social processes that transform a
writer into an author. For that purpose, we take a wide view of the
notion of "authorship" and the figure of the "author" to include a
broad range of approaches and topics. Possible topics that
participants might discuss include (but are by no means limited to):
- Connections and differences between historical author concepts in
various fields and empirical situations of writing;
- When does a writer become an author, and why is not every writer
considered an author?
- Varieties of authors: dramatists, novelists, poets, journalists,
sages, critics, humorists; authors as entertainers, public
intellectuals, moralists;
- Authenticity, authority, agency, attribution;
- Authorship and the canon;
- Gender and authorship: interrogating putative "feminine" and
"masculine" models of writing, self-fashioning, and getting published;
- Fame, infame, disfame, lack of fame; the self-creation, branding
and reception of authors;
- Anonymity, pseudonymity, and authorial personae;
- Authors and collaboration; single and multiple authors; authors
and cultural networks;
- The quotidian activities of writers as they relate to the public
image of authors;
Translation, editing, redacting, and reviewing considered as kinds
of authorial performances;
- Authorship and the marketplace; authors and patrons; authorship
and intellectual property;
- The textual re-creation of authors by editors, publishers, and printers;
- Authorship and/in the material book; authorship & new technologies
(film, digital media, the internet).
Proposals for 20-minute papers are due via email
(authorship.conference@gmail.com) by March 31, 2012, and should take
the form of a 1-page abstract accompanied by a short CV; in the case
of complete panels, proposals should consist of an abstract and short
CV for every panelist together with a short CV for the chair (if
different). We aim to inform participants in late April.
