CFP: Comics and Adaptation in the European Context / U of Leicester (Nov 17; Apr 10 2015)

Call for Papers

Comics and Adaptation

in the European Context

Friday 10 April 2015

University of Leicester

This one-day symposium aims to bring the fields of comics and adaptation studies into critical dialogue, and to provide an academic context for the discussion of adaptation from, and into, comics in the European context, including but not limited to France and Belgium, Italy, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Iberian Peninsula.

Topics could include, but are not limited to:

• Case studies exploring adaptation from/into comics (into/from live-action film, animation, literature, but also less studied media such TV, radio, or video game) within a national context or across European national contexts, within the same era/through time.
• Comics adaptation within the cultural industry.
• Adaptation from/into comics as a genre (e.g. collections such as Fétiche devoted to comics adaptation of literary works).
• Comparison between comics and adaptation in the European and in the US contexts.
• Authorship in comics adaptation.
• Serial and multi-modal characters.
• The adaptation of the medium of comics to new formats (e.g. digital comics).
• Broader theoretical and methodological approaches to adaptation from/into comics.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers in English. Please send your abstract of no more than 300 words by 17 November 2014 to Dr Armelle Blin-Rolland, abr6@le.ac.uk. We intend to publish a selection of the papers as an edited collection or journal special issue.

CFP: Backroom Business: The Production of Periodicals / Netherlands (October 1)

As posted on SHARP-L

Call for Papers

Backroom Business:
The Production of Periodicals

10-11 April 2014
Radboud University
Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Proposals deadline: October 1, 2013

This conference seeks to explore every aspect related to the production of European periodicals, from the early eighteenth century to the present day. Papers could address issues of financing, sponsoring, editing, designing, advertising, printing and digitization. We are for instance interested in what Barbara Onslow called the “back-room workers”: the printers, typesetters, engravers and illustrators who are often invisible in periodical histories. We invite scholars to send in proposals for 15 to 20 minute talks on the above themes, both dealing with individual magazines and discussing wider trends, such as the evolutions in the production of periodicals. We especially look for papers that reach beyond national borders and challenge traditional literary-historical boundaries. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Editors and editing
• Financing and sponsoring
• Printing and digitization practices
• Photography, illustrations, and advertising
• Periodicals as producers of culture

Please send a 250 word proposal for a 15 to 20 minute presentation by October 1 to the conference organizers at esprit@let.ru.nl. A selection of papers will be published in a special issue of the future ESPRit e-journal.

CFP: Texts, Forms and Readings in Europe (18th-21st Centuries) [SHARP; France] (Dec. 7; May 22-24)

While this CFP doesn't explicitly mention comics, there certainly seems to be room for work on the form here...

Call for Papers

Texts, Forms and Readings in Europe

(18th – 21st Centuries)

22-24 May 2013 - Université du Maine, Le Mans, France

(SHARP International Focussed conference)

This conference will question the relevance of the notion of a common European reader with regard to the evolution of reading practices from the so-called reading revolution in the 18th century until the current digital revolution. Europe is known as the birthplace of books, and it remains a major seat of book publishing and translating. Since an early stage its strongly established book culture has implied the durable circulation of books. This tradition has contributed to cultural exchanges and to the creation of reading communities across national borders. A relationship to the book and to reading, as well as their promotion and enhancement, seems to be a common value and a significant component of European identity. However, book policies and reading practices in Europe have varied from one region to another throughout history. Such idiosyncrasies – whether regional, national, social, economic, cultural or legal – make European identity recognizable even though nowadays globalization and the digital revolution tend to reduce those specificities.

Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier’s A History of Reading in the West (Polity Press, 1999) has taught us that reading is not an abstract action: it realizes itself through practices, situations, and readers, who “are never faced with an abstract, ideal text detached from everything material: they manipulate objects; they listen to words whose modalities govern the way they read or listen, but in the process also govern ways of comprehending the text.” Taking into account the strong link between texts, forms and readings as well as the fact that reading has not remained immutable, this interdisciplinary conference will study the elements of continuity and disruption that are characteristic of the uses of texts and of reading practices in 18th-21st-century Europe.

The conference welcomes proposals on the following topics:

• The relationship between reading practices and the evolution of printed material forms.
• The effect of new formats (audio, digital etc.) on reading theories and practices.
• The relationship between new social issues, new groups of readers and new kinds of reading practices.
• The correlation between cultural policies, educational policies, national identities and reading.
• The existence, resistance or erosion of potential European reading models.
• New and former sites of communal or solitary reading.
• Access to science and knowledge through books and reading.
• The role and issues of image and non-book printed material in informal reading practices.
• The representation of reading in the arts (film, literature, painting, photography).

We have planned a pre-workshop for early career researchers (including PhD students and post-docs) interested in all aspects of children’s, teenagers’ and young adults’ reading practices. This pre-workshop will consist of a poster session with a moderator.

Recommendations:

• Proposals should adhere to the aforementioned spatiotemporal frame and may consist of a case study or of a broader theoretical approach.
• Papers with a comparative approach are particularly welcome.
• The languages of the conference are English and French.
• The proposals (a 500-word abstract in French or in English, specifying the theoretical and methodological context, sources, etc.) will be reviewed by the program committee.
• Papers will be considered for further publication.

Proposals for 20-minutes presentations should be sent to the program committee before December 7th, 2012: Prof. Brigitte Ouvry-Vial Textes-Formes-Lectures2013@univ-lemans.fr

Proposals of posters (A1) for the pre-workshop should also be sent to Corinna Norrick-Rühl norrick@uni-mainz.de

Schedule:

• Deadline for submission of proposals: 7th December 2012
• Notification of acceptance: 15th January 2013
• Deadline for confirmation of participation: 1st February 2013Practical details (registration fees etc.) will be sent with the notification of acceptance

Guest speakers:
Opening lecture by Prof. Roger Chartier (Collège de France)
Closing lecture by Prof. Bernard Lahire (Ecole Normale Supérieure Lettres et Sciences Humaines)

Program committee: Laurent Bazin (University Versailles - Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines), Jean-François Botrel(University Rennes II), Lodovica Braida (University Milano), Hans-Jurgen Lüsebrink (University Sarreland), BrigitteOuvry-Vial (University Maine), Nathalie Richard (University Maine), Jürgen Ritte (University Paris III – Sorbonne Nouvelle)

Institutional partners: SHARP; Université du Maine (Le Mans) ; Lab « Langues, Littératures, Linguistique » Universities of Angers and Maine; Dipartimento di Studi storici from Università degli Studi Milano and APICE; Ville du Mans ; Carré Plantagenêt, Musée d’Art et d’Histoire (le Mans).

Location: Le Mans is located 50 mn from Paris by train. In the middle of Region Pays-de-la-Loire, it is famous for its white wines, its Rillettes special pâté, and aside from the formula One race « 24 heures du Mans », it features several theater companies and a stunning historical district, Cité Plantagenêt (the film Cyrano de Bergerac was shot there), where conference participants will enjoy crawling.

Thank you for your attention and proposals,

Yours,
Brigitte Ouvry-Vial
Professeur des Universités
Université du Maine (Le Mans, France)

Special Offer: New Book on European Comics

February sees the publication of Dr. Bart Beaty's Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s (University of Toronto Press). Here's how the publisher describes it:

In the last fifteen years or so, a wide community of artists working in a variety of western European nations have overturned the dominant traditions of comic book publishing as it has existed since the end of the Second World War. These artists reject both the traditional form and content of comic books (hardcover, full-colour ‘albums’ of humour or adventure stories, generally geared towards children), seeking instead to instill the medium with experimental and avant-garde tendencies commonly associated with the visual arts. Unpopular Culture addresses the transformation of the status of the comic book in Europe since 1990.

Increasingly, comic book artists seek to render a traditionally degraded aspect of popular culture un-popular, transforming it through the adoption of values borrowed from the field of ‘high art.’ The first English-language book to explore these issues, Unpopular Culture represents a challenge to received histories of art and popular culture that downplay significant historical anomalies in favour of more conventional narratives. In tracing the efforts of a large number of artists to disrupt the hegemony of high culture, Bart Beaty raises important questions about cultural value and its place as an important structuring element in contemporary social processes.

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Dr. Beaty is the author of, among other works, Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture. We've known each other for quite some time, and he's officially a Friend of ComicsResearch.org. I've been hearing about his work on this book for a while now (while, I must say, quite envying his fieldwork opportunities), so I'm very much looking forward to reading it!

Special offer for ComicsResearch.org readers: Thanks to an offer by Dr. Beaty, you may click here for a PDF file which allows you to purchase Unpopular Culture for 20% off the list price.

Link