CFP (Re)worlding Jules Verne (proposed seminar) (9/23/2015; ACLA Harvard U 3/17-20/16)

(Re)worlding Jules Verne [Proposed seminar - ACLA Annual Meeting - March 17-20, 2016, Harvard University ]
full name / name of organization:
Etienne Charriere, University of Michigan
contact email:
etiechar@umich.edu
http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/63489

The global character of Jules Verne’s fiction requires no demonstration. Indeed, the work of the prolific French novelist, author of the immensely successful series of the Voyages extraordinaires, appears to deserve an inclusion into the (hypothetical) canon of world literature on at least two accounts.
First, Verne’s novels – with their recurrent themes of discovery, exploration, and conquest – accompanied and reflected the new conceptions of the global that took shape during the nineteenth century, notably in the wake of European imperial expansion. In parallel, the rapid and wide diffusion of Verne’s works on a world level, through translation, adaptation and appropriation, facilitated his integration into an increasingly globalized repertoire of popular narrative forms. As Mariano Siskind has shown, Verne’s work and its “representation of the discursive conditions of globalization” can therefore function as a fertile ground for a productive study of the “novelization of the globe.”

Yet, scholarship has not exhausted the variety of perspectives from which to look at the intersections of Verne’s work with the global. In particular, there exists ample space for scholarly approaches aiming at a "decentering" of Jules Verne’s œuvre. Efforts to situate the Vernian corpus within an expanded comparative framework could, for instance, shed new light on the agency of global mediators and the autonomy of outlying literary fields vis-a-vis the powerful discourses embodied in Verne’s work. Enacting this re-worlding of Verne’s work by emphasizing its relevance to contemporary discussions around the notion of world literature could allow for the formulation of new theoretical models and new methodologies for the study of literary globalization in the nineteenth century and beyond.

This seminar wishes to bring together scholarship engaging with the global dissemination of Verne’s work across the world literary field. It is particularly interested in contributions highlighting:

1) the complex afterlives of Verne’s fictional output outside of Western Europe, from the late nineteenth-century to the present;

2) the creative reception of Verne’s work across genres and media, including examples of adaptation, rewriting, bowdlerization, citation, parody, commodification, cannibalization, etc.

3) contemporary approaches to Verne’s work within the framework of postcolonial studies, gender and queer studies, animal studies, ecocriticism, posthumanism, etc.

Scholars working across disciplinary boundaries and presenting comparative work extending beyond literary studies are particularly welcome.

Abstract can be submitted through the ACLA website between September 1st and September 23rd. Interested parties are invited to contact the seminar organizer at etiechar@umich.edu

Further information about the conference is available at http://www.acla.org/annual-meeting


By web submission at 08/19/2015 - 01:17