DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS: 1ST DECEMBER 2009

International Conference, 8-11 July 2010, University of Lincoln, UK

CALL FOR PAPERS
Please email 200-300 word proposals for papers and brief biographical note to conferences@lincoln.ac.uk For further information please email the conference organisers Dr Siân Adiseshiah sadiseshiah@lincoln.ac.uk and Dr Rupert Hildyard rhildyard@lincoln.ac.uk
Conference website: http://www.lincoln.ac.uk/home/conferences/index.htm

Confirmed speakers: Will Self, Iain Sinclair, John Burnside, Professor Rachel Falconer, Dr Lynette Goddard, Tim Crouch (performing My Arm)

This international conference will provide a forum in which to discuss, reflect on, and review creative literary and dramatic work in English, published since the year 2000.

The principal aim of the conference is to contribute to the process by which the significant and innovative writers and dramatists of the new millennium are discovered and discussed, and to begin to identify new patterns, clusters, trends and paradigms in contemporary prose, poetry and drama as well as the continuation or re-emergence of older modes and characteristics.

A major focus is likely to be on writing produced in Britain and Ireland, but the global/national/local context of writing is expected to be a key theme and papers on writing in English beyond Britain and Ireland are warmly invited. The conference will also discuss contemporary theory and criticism, as well as the teaching of 21st century writing.

Another distinctive feature of the conference will be the participation of contemporary writers and dramatists as guest speakers and readers of their own work, and one of its main events will be a round table discussion of 21st century writing in Britain by writers, publishers, critics, academics and theorists.

We welcome papers discussing the full range of literary and dramatic expression produced from the mainstream to the margins, including:

utopian and dystopian writing, life writing, children’s literature, historical fiction, science fiction and fantasy, travel writing, graphic novels, romantic fiction, crime writing, verbatim drama, musical theatre, post-dramatic theatre, technologically mediated performance, electronically mediated text, performance poetry, and poetic dialogue.

We invite contributions identifying and exploring
• distinctive and innovative texts and writers published since 2000;
• key themes, trends and issues of the new millennium;
• and any other issue of relevance to 21st century writing in English, including but not limited by the following:



∙ What happens now
- Post-millennialism
- Terror and catastrophe
- Environmental endgame
- Globalization and consumerization
- Bankrupt capitalism
- The end of Western hegemony

∙ Genre and Form
- Mainstream and postmodernism, popular and avant-garde
- New genres/forms
- Mixing genres/forms
- Re-emergence of older forms
- New technologies and form
- Adaptation

∙ Contexts of Literature
- Individuals, communities, and institutions in a consumerized world
- Planetary diasporas
- Questions of Place: global/national/local
- Post-millennial conceptions of time
- Sky-gods of masculinity: Football, Sky Sports and the Champions League
- It’s good to text: screen culture and the digitisation of social life
- Relating to nature
- Post-human identities

∙ Politics and identity
- Political impotence, political agency
- Scapegoating again: racism and nationalism
- Magic tricks: the disappearance of class, the return of religion
- Global injustice and postmillennial subalternity
- Bioscience, Butlerism and the politics of reproduction
- Misogyny and the pornography of consumer culture
- Nature’s politics

∙ Literary and Cultural Theory
- Recent theorists (Georgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, Jacques Rancičre, Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, David Abram)
- Recent theories (Hybrid/Diaspora/Gender/transgender/Trauma and testimonial criticisms/Ecocriticism/Cybercriticism)
- Contemporary applications of older theoretical frameworks (Marxist, feminist, postmodernist, humanist, historicist, Lacanian, phenomenological)

∙ Teaching 21st Century Writing
- Pedagogical problems and opportunities
- Professionalization of creative writing
- Sources and resources
- Students as consumers