Relational Forms: Medial and Textual Transits in Ireland and Britain
Description
This research group is defined by a commitment to forms of textual transit, cultural transfer, and intermediality. Temporally, it focuses on modern and contemporary literatures and cultures, with occasional extensions to other periods.
Its goals largely coincide with the following areas of academic inquiry:
1. the cultures of Ireland and Britain, relations and representations: the priority given to Ireland in the group’s name is a foundational trait in which Relational Forms takes pride. Indeed, our focus on Irish texts and cultural forms makes us the only structured research venture in Portugal with a sustained and continuous Irish dimension since 2004. However, our inquiry extends to the textual dynamics that mark other cultures in the British Isles, considered from a doubly exogenous perspective – our Portuguese vantage point, and the critical perspective gained through the Irish bias;
2. texts in transit 1, translations, appropriations, rewritings: the group understands translation as referring to more processes than interlingual transit. It also explores homologies between the culturally exogenous approach described under 1 above, and the relations between literature and other practices, verbal and non-verbal media;
3. texts in transit 2, intermedial transfer; literature and the visual arts;
4. texts in transit 3, time, space, experience: literature encounters biography, historiography, geography.
Relational Forms VIII
Love and Sex in Literature and the Arts since the 1960s
12-14 October 2023
an international conference hosted by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Porto, Portugal and organised by CETAPS
Confirmed keynote speakers:
- Carol Chillington Rutter (University of Warwick)
- Glenn Patterson (Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s Univ. Belfast)
- Linda Troost (Washington & Jefferson College) and
- Sayre Greenfield (Univ. Pittsburgh-Greensburg)
This conference will focus on how perceptions and representations of intimacy have impacted imaginative production, especially literature and the visual / performative arts, since the 1960s. It derives its pretext from the sixty years that have passed since the date (dubiously) celebrated in Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Annus Mirabilis’, with its sardonic opening: ‘Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three’.
Taking its cue from these memorable lines, our programme will privilege the non-linear and often perplexing ways in which love and sex have been addressed, troped and narrated by writers and artists over the past six decades, and the aesthetic, ethical and political challenges posed by their representations.
As indicated by the number in its title, this conference is the eighth in a series of academic events that reflect the ongoing concerns of the eponymous research group (Relational Forms), based at CETAPS (the Centre for English, Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies). The group’s rationale and remit entail that our conferences centrally address the cultures of Ireland and Britain – but we warmly welcome contributions bearing on other literary and artistic cultures.
The organisers will welcome proposals for 20-minute papers in English responding to the above.
Suggested (merely indicative) topics include:
- love and sex in literature and/or the arts – release and celebration;
- love and sex in literature and/or the arts – oppression and pathos;
- intimacy, creativity and repression: censorship;
- the ethics and politics of intimacy: private and public in literature and/or the arts;
- intimacy and the theatre: stage business;
- intimacy on screen: evolving ethics and aesthetics;
- intimacy and the politics of translation;
- intimacy and the politics of adaptation;
- intimacy and life writing;
- love, sex and museum cultures: the ethics and politics of exposure;
- love, sex and the evolving media: from print to digital platforms;
Submissions should be sent by email to relational@letras.up.pt
Please include RF8 in the subject line of your email and organise your proposal into two separate files:
- a file containing the full title and a 250-300 word description of your paper;
- a file containing the author’s data: name, affiliation, contact address, paper title and author’s bio-note (150 words).
Please name these two documents as follows:
- Surname_Name_Abstract_RF8
- Surname_Name_AuthorInfo_RF8
Deadline for proposals: 4 June 2023
Notification of acceptance: 15 June 2023
Deadline for registration: 20 September 2023
Registration Fee: 90 Euros
Student fee: 70 Euros
Registration details will be posted online in July 2023
All delegates are responsible for their own travel arrangements and accommodation.
More information available later at https://cetaps.wixsite.com/relationalforms8
Organised by the Relational Forms research area
Executive Committee:
Rui Carvalho Homem (coord.) | Jorge Bastos da Silva | Miguel Ramalhete Gomes | Jorge Almeida e Pinho | Márcia Lemos | Katarzyna Pisarska | Mark Wakefield
For further queries please contact:
CETAPS – Centre for English, Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies – Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto – Via Panorâmica, s/n
4150-564 PORTO – PORTUGAL
relational@letras.up.pt
Supported by FCT through national funds on UIDB/04097/2020 project.
Close Relations – The CETAPS Lectures on Literature, Culture, Theatre and Translation
Recorded November 10th 2022
Professor Frances Dickey (University of Missouri)
Close Relations – The CETAPS Lectures on Literature, Culture, Theatre and Translation
11 November 2022 14:30 / 2:30 pm WEST
Professor Declan Kiberd (Université de Notre Dame)
Close Relations – The CETAPS Lectures on Literature, Culture, Theatre and Translation
14 October 2022 14:30 / 2:30 pm WEST
Professor Michael Cronin (Trinity College, Dublin)
Close Relations – The CETAPS Lectures on Literature, Culture, Theatre and Translation
29 September 2022 18:00 / 6:00 pm WEST
Professor Claire Connolly (University College Cork)
Live streaming at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHJMRQ8y9b_sXn7yh6mLYAw
Relational Forms VII
Modernity and its Wake:
Remembering and Reimagining 1922
10-12 November 2022
an international conference hosted by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Porto, Portugal
and organised by CETAPS
in collaboration with the Institute of Philosophy
Confirmed keynote speakers:
Gualter Cunha (Univ. Porto) | Frances Dickey (Univ. Missouri) | Declan Kiberd (Univ. Notre Dame) | Fran O’Rourke (Univ. College Dublin)
This conference will ponder the legacies of 1922, an annus mirabilis for the literatures of modernity – within the English language, but also, more broadly, in global cultures. It will discuss literary aesthetics, but also the complex social and political contours of such legacies.
1922 witnessed the publication of two of the greatest literary monuments of the past century. In Ulysses, James Joyce decanted a formidably wide scope of human experience in the narrative of a single day in the life of a small group of fairly undistinguished characters. T. S. Eliot’s broadly evocative The Waste Land may be held as the epitome of the modern/ist (anti-)epic. Both works acknowledged and challenged the impacts of myth, religion and literature on cultural memory, and did so with a vividness that combined with boldly experimental techniques to depict a world that no longer offered security and solace. Joyce and Eliot may therefore be taken as representative of an engagement with the past that fuels modernism’s approach to modernity just as it strives to define itself as a break, and often a violent break, with the intellectual legacies of former ages. Works like Ulysses and The Waste Land contributed to the constitution of a watershed moment in contemporary cultural history, as borne in the fortunes of the term “postmodernism” for the period that followed.
Relational Forms VII commemorates the centenary of Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Waste Land by addressing their artistic, philosophical, and sociopolitical wake. It will encourage a focus on articulations of modernity as manifested in the imaginative production of the intervening century. The focus of the conference is accordingly broad and international, as well as intermedial, in keeping with the rationale that has been guiding the Relational Forms research group. The organisers will welcome proposals for 20-minute papers in English responding to the above. Suggested (merely indicative) topics include:
• modernism across boundaries: nations, styles, generations, disciplines
• modernism, modernity and philosophical traditions
• the modern as reverberation / reinvention / rejection of the past
• echoes of modernism: modernity and late/post-modernity
• domesticating the revolutionary: modernism canonized
• the politics of modern(ist) art
• modernism and spirituality
• modernism and the World Wars
• modernism and the city
• the many -isms of modernism: theory and creativity
• modernism and its others: Classicism, Romanticism, Victorianism, Naturalism…
• modernism in / and translation
• remediations of modernism: from literature to audiovisual to digital media
As indicated by the number in its title, this conference is the seventh in a series of academic events that reflect the ongoing concerns of the eponymous research group (Relational Forms), based at CETAPS (the Centre for English, Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies). Submissions should be sent by email to relational@letras.up.pt Please include RF7 in the subject line of your email and organise your proposal into two separate files:
• a file containing the full title and a 250-300 word description of your paper;
• a file containing the author’s data: name, affiliation, contact address, paper title and author’s
bio-note (150 words).
Please name these two documents as follows:
Surname_Name_Abstract_RF7
Surname_Name_AuthorInfo_RF7
Deadline for proposals: 30 June 2022
Notification of acceptance: 15 July 2022
Deadline for registration: 15 October 2022
Registration Fee: 80 Euros
Student fee: 60 Euros
Registration details will be posted online in September 2022
All delegates are responsible for their own travel arrangements and accommodation.
More information available later at https://cetaps.wixsite.com/relationalforms7
Organised by the Relational Forms research area https://www.cetaps.com/research-areas/relational-forms-medial-and-textual-transits-in-ireland-and-britain/
Executive Committee:
Rui Carvalho Homem (coord.) | José Meirinhos | Jorge Bastos da Silva | Miguel Ramalhete Gomes | Jorge Almeida e Pinho | Márcia Lemos | Katarzyna Pisarska | Mark Wakefield
For further queries please contact:
CETAPS – Centre for English, Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies
Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto
Via Panorâmica, s/n
4150-564 PORTO
PORTUGAL
relational@letras.up.pt
Relational Forms VI
Imag(in)ing the Nation:
Literature, the Arts and Processes of National Construction
2 – 4 December 2021
an international conference hosted by the
Faculty of Arts and Humanities
University of Porto, Portugal
Confirmed keynote speakers:
(to watch lectures on Youtube, follow the links after each keynote’s name)
According to scholars, criteria for nationhood have typically involved a commonality of ethnicity, language or religion, historically prolonged occupation of a stretch of land, frequently linked to the existence of a state apparatus, collective experience, and shared memories. Literature and the other arts have often been mobilized to support (if not altogether participate in the construction of) this sense of belonging and identity, which they can also challenge and complicate. Nationalism may simply be described as the most extreme form of such engagements and allegiances. In his 1945 essay “Notes on Nationalism”, George Orwell denounces the characteristic aggressiveness and single-mindedness of the nationalist, as well as the peculiar indifference to reality such attitudes entail. Orwell’s essay betrays a sense of urgency derived both from the hazards of the Second World War and from the perceived political and ideological threats of the approaching Cold War – a term he would himself coin. More recently, adopting the more poised stance of the historian, Jeremy Black has observed that nationalism “is a feeling as much as a principle. It manifests powerful emotional elements as well as the interaction of the ‘deep histories’ of particular national, or would-be national, groups with the contexts and expressions of these ‘deep histories’ in specific circumstances” (2018). And a pervasive tension between accounts of the past and versions of an envisaged future often energises the historiographic process; as noted by Roy Foster, “The most illuminating history is often written to show how people acted in the expectation of a future that never happened” (2002).
The organisers will welcome proposals for 20-minute papers in English responding to the above. Suggested (merely indicative) topics include:
• literature, the arts, and the ideology/ies of nation
Organised by the Relational Forms research area
Executive Committee:
- Rui Carvalho Homem (coord.)
- Jorge Bastos da Silva
- Miguel Ramalhete Gomes
- Jorge Almeida e Pinho
- Márcia Lemos
- Katarzyna Pisarska
- Mark Wakefield
For further queries please contact:
CETAPS – Centre for English, Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies | Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto | Via Panorâmica, s/n | 4150-564 PORTO | PORTUGAL
Close Relations – The CETAPS Lectures on Literature, Culture, Theatre and Translation
1 July 2021, 18.00 / 6.00pm WEST
Peter Holland
(McMeel Family Chair in Shakespeare Studies, University of Notre Dame;
Chair, The International Shakespeare Association)
‘When is King Lear not King Lear?’ (YouTube link)
30 September 2021, 18.00 / 6.00pm WET
Lawrence Venuti
(Professor Emeritus, College of Liberal Arts, Temple University)
‘On a Universal Tendency to Debase Retranslations; or,
The Instrumentalism of a Translation Fixation’
12 November 2021, 18.00 / 6.00pm WET
Maud Ellmann
(Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Distinguished Service Professor, The University of Chicago)
‘Borderation: Fictions of the Northern Irish Border’ (YouTube link)
3 December 2021, 18.00 / 6.00pm WET
Roy Foster (Emeritus Professor of Irish History, University of Oxford; Professor of Irish history and Literature, Queen Mary University of London),
2021
Relational Forms VI: Imagining the Nation: Literature, the Arts and Processes of National Construction
2021
Literature and the Arts Since the 1960s

2018
Relational Forms IV. Literature and the Arts since the 1960s: Protest, Identity and the Imagination

2017
English Literature and the Disciplines of Knowledge, Early Modern to Eighteenth Century – A Trade for Light
Cultures of Commemoration 2016 lecture
Collaboration with the Irish Embassy and ULICES, the University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies, in the programme for St. Patrick’s Festival Lisboa 2016.
This took the form of a lecture by Rui Carvalho Homem on ‘Cultures of Commemoration: the Case of Ireland’ – https://www.dfa.ie/irish-embassy/portugal/news-and-events/2016/st-patricks-festival-lisboa-2016/
Autumn 2016: an international conference on literature, rhetoric and legitimation – apropos the Easter Rising and the Battle of the Somme.
