GESTURES: Writing That Moves Between – Call for Papers

by | Sep 18, 2018 | Calls for paper | 0 comments

A two-day conference to be held at the Whitworth Art Gallery, The University of Manchester, on Friday 15 – Saturday 16 February 2019.

 Co-sponsored by The Centre for New Writing and Art History and Visual Studies, University of Manchester, in partnership with University of Liverpool’s Centre for New and International Writing, and the University of Salford’s English Literature, Language and Creative Practice Research Group.

 Keynote speakers: Renee Gladman and Maria Fusco. With a performance reading by Anne Boyer.

“We exist in a society of complex gestures,” writes Renee Gladman in the 2017 Houses of Ravicka, “all running along their own time; we are all interrupting, witnessing, performing simultaneously.” Gladman’s invented city-state of Ravicka is shaped by these interpersonal gestures, which as they overlap, also threaten to upend the social world that inhabits it. Houses of Ravicka is ostensibly a novel, but it belongs to a broader project that combines prose, nonfiction and visual art. As in the world of Ravicka, where writing can be thought of as drawing, movement, and gesture, its author moves between multiple art forms. The past fifteen years have seen an explosion of such cross-disciplinary movement across forms: the work of Gladman, Hannah Black, Anne Boyer, Maria Fusco, Carol Mavor, Maggie Nelson, and Holly Pester. This conference, aimed at scholars, writers and artists, takes such writing as its focus, and explores the role of gesture – a term more usually associated with Art History and Performance Studies – within it.

Please send proposals of no more than 300 words to gesturesconference@gmail.com by Monday 29 October 2018, 5pm. Please include a short biographical note of no more than 100 words.

This conference is organised by Alice Butler, Nell Osborne, Hilary White (University of Manchester) and Dr Alicia J Rouverol (University of Sheffield), in partnership with Dr David Hering (University of Liverpool), and Dr Ursula Hurley and Dr Scott Thurston (University of Salford).

This conference has been awarded the NWCDTP Collaborative Skills Development Fund.

Further details.

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