The Prosaic Imaginary: novels and the everyday, 1750-2000
University of Sydney
July 1-4, 2014
Deadline: March 31, 2014
Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
Professor Maud Ellmann, Randy L. & Melvin R. Berlin Professor of the Development of the Novel in English, Chicago Associate Professor Julie Park, Vassar Professor John Plotz, Brandeis
The conference will open up the nuances of the term ‘prosaic’ by exploring the privileged relationship between the novel genre and multiple and complex categories of the ‘everyday’. Building on John Plotz’s notion of the novel as exemplary ‘portable property’, the conference will address the relationship between novel-reading as everyday activity and the novel’s prosaic subject matter, whether this is conceived as material object, cultural practice, or speech act.
Suggested topics:
- The novel and things
- The novel and film/and TV
- Readerships of the novel
- The novel and gender
- The novel and childhood
- Queer novels
- Psychologies of the novel
- Novel genres
- The odd or uncategorisable
- The secular imagination
- Book history and the novel
- The novel and the digital everyday
- Characters as quasi-persons
- Novel worlds
- The novel and the institutionalisation of affect
- The novel as political action
- Temporalities of the novel
- The novel and the forms of property
- The scale of the novel
Proposals for 20 minute papers or for 3 paper panel sessions should be sent to Vanessa Smith (Vanessa.smith@sydney.edu.au) by March 31 2014. Postgraduate submissions welcomed.