[Reader-list] ***SPAM*** CFP: RETHINKING THE NOVEL: University of Delhi (March 4-6, 2013)

[Aswathy Senan]

Dear all,



Call for Paper*: RETHINKING THE NOVEL*

Date of Conference: *March 4-6, 2013*

Venue: Department of English, University of Delhi, India

Last date to send in abstracts*: January 31, 2013*


How has the novel managed, over all these years, to redeem the promise of
renewal that is encoded in its very name ? Has the novel’s inexhaustibility
to do with the capacity, first identified by Mikhail Bakhtin , to draw into
its repertoire, expressive resources from forms as diverse as a government
document and the contemporary video game? Or is it that the novel is in
consonance with modern habits of thought, specifically, as Catherine
Gallagher has suggested, with the movement away from faith to the
conditional investment of belief? Are these qualities of the novel
responsible for its becoming the basis of some key conceptual categories in
the social sciences such as Jurgen Habermas’s “public sphere” or Benedict
Anderson’s “imagined communities”? Beyond this, is it possible to think of
the novel as a valuable resource in the growing interdisciplinary research
on visual culture or the body and its histories?
The novel has also been, in a fundamental sense, a travelling text. It has
moved freely not only between social spheres within a single geographical
terrain but also across national and indeed continental barriers. To what
extent has it intersected with popular sub-literary and even oral forms? Of
special interest to us in India, are the specific histories of interactions
that have driven the varying developments of the novel in our different
regions. We believe that the proliferation of the novel across languages
and literary cultures can no longer be explained in terms of “influence”,
“mimicry”, or “indigeneity”. Rather, we hope that papers will situate the
form within mobile norms of literary tradition, emerging print cultures,
various forms of public articulation, codes of visuality, political
positions and so on. We hope, indeed, that this conference will provide the
platform for new, even if tentative, formulations on the novel in India.
This conference invites papers that help to reconceptualize what novels can
or cannot do, or that track a specific history of interactions between a
novel and the discursive universe that produced it. The conference has a
strong interest in the novel in India, but it will by no means be confined
to work on the Indian novel. Rather, it treats novel studies as a house
with many windows which opens onto many parts of the world. It is our
belief that the conference will be the richer if conversations on these
topics can draw on a diversity of locations and histories.
Possible topics may include, but are not restricted to:
Novel theories now
The novel and visuality
The novel and the body
The significance of the novel in disciplines outside of literary criticism
Novel criticism in India
Realism in the virtual age
Europe and the development of the novel in India
The novel and orality
The novel and popular print culture
Please send your abstract (300 words) and a brief bionote (150words) to the
following email or postal address by 31 January 2013:
Professor Sambudha Sen
Department of English
Delhi University
Delhi – 110007
India
Email: dunovel2013 at gmail.com
Please note that train fare will be provided for selected junior scholars
within India.
Conference Committee
Prof Sambudha Sen, Dr. Rupendra Guha Majumdar, Dr Baidik Bhattacharya

Regards

Aswathy Senan

PhD English
University of Delhi