Pleasure and Pain

To be held at the University of Edinburgh
30th March-1st April 2006

Call For Papers

We invite proposals for papers treating aspects of the conference theme, to be interpreted as widely as possible, in relation to the study of France and Francophone countries in the nineteenth century.

The following list of topics may serve as inspiration:

• Institutionalizing pleasure and pain: the medical & legal gazes
• The influence of Sade on the nineteenth century
• Les affres du style
• Ambiguous pleasures in the fin de siècle
• The pleasure of pain in the mal du siècle
• Pain and the Orient / pleasures of the Exotic
• The pleasures of the table
• The sadomasochistic imaginary
• Texts of pleasure and texts of jouissance
• The pains of writing / the pleasures of reading
• Desire, dreaming and melancholy
• Lovesickness
• Guilty pleasures
• Painful silences, painful memories
• Confessions and memoirs
• The iconography of pain
• Poeticizing pain; punctuating pleasure (or vice versa)
• Terror, torture and tyranny
• The social construction of leisure
• The pleasures of music

Proposals for individual papers or for panels should be addressed, by 30th September 2005, to the Conference Officer, Dr Lisa Downing (contact information provided below).

For general information about the Society, please visit our website at the following web address.