Relational Forms: Medial and Textual Transits in Ireland and Britain

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

https://www.cetaps.com/research-areas/relational-forms-medial-and-textual-transits-in-ireland-and-britain/

 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

    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

https://www.cetaps.com/research-areas/relational-forms-medial-and-textual-transits-in-ireland-and-britain/

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

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) 

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)