Updated programme – register now!

Now is your last chance to register for the Contemporary Experimental Women’s Writing conference at Manchester. Don’t delay! Do tell your friends!

Here’s the updated programme:

CONTEMPORARY EXPERIMENTAL WOMEN’S WRITING

PROGRAMME

Saturday 12^th October

9.00-10.00    registration (Foyer, Martin Harris Centre)

10.00-11.30  panels 1, 2, 3

Panel 1: Angela Carter 1 (Chair: Helen Snaith) (Room: F20)

• Jeannette Baxter (Anglia Ruskin), ‘Surrealisms, Fascisms and the Post-War Imagination: Re-reading The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman’
• Anna Watz (Uppsala), ‘The Feminist-Surrealist Poetics of Leonora Carrington and Angela Carter’
• Heidi Yeandle (Swansea), ‘“I experiment therefore I am”: Angela Carter’s Experiments with Cartesian Thought’

Panel 2: Contemporary Novelists (Chair: Nadine Muller) (Room: SU14)

• Zeynep Z. Atayurt (Ankara), ‘“This is a world of spectacles”: Metafictional Subtleties and Stylistic Variations in Elif Shafak’s Gaze’
• Jude Roberts (Birkbeck), ‘“Tell me a story”: Catherynne M. Valente and the Role of Narrative’
• Christopher Vardy (Manchester), ‘“Deliriously ramshackle … history in paradigm”: Nicola Barker’s Darkmans’

Panel 3: Contemporary US poets (Chair: Vona Groarke) (Room: SU15)

• Simon Haworth (Manchester), ‘“It’s always some fortuity that traps me”: Unaccountable Subjects, Form and the Poetry of Chance – Marianne Moore and Jane Yeh’
• Claire Hurley (Kent), ‘“What girl ever flourished in such company?”: Barbara Guest and the New York School’
• Kat Peddie (Kent), ‘Questing beyond Disjunction: Susan Howe’s “Hope Atherton’s Wanderings” and Veronica Forrest-Thompson’s On the Periphery’

11.30-12.00 tea and biscuits (G16)

12.00-1.30    panels 4, 5, 6

Panel 4: Christine Brooke-Rose (Chair: Natasha Alden) (Room: F20)

• Joseph Darlington (Salford), ‘“Read less, live more”: Christine Brooke-Rose and May ‘68’
• Stephanie Jones (Aberystwyth), ‘“To belong nowhere”: the Experimental Woman Writer and the Work of Christine Brooke-Rose’
• Rebecca Pohl (Manchester), ‘“Formidable but engaging”: The Pleasure of Recognition in Christine Brooke-Rose’s Fiction’

Panel 5: Jennifer Egan (Chair: Ian McGuire) (Room: SU14)

• Alice Bennett (Liverpool Hope), ‘“A New Lesson about Time”: Temporality, Social Networks and Reworked Modernism in A Visit from the Goon Squad and NW’
• David Hering (Liverpool), ‘Play it Again: Jennifer Egan and Dana Spiotta’s Musical Narratives’
• Hope Jennings (Wright State), ‘“Form and Flux”: Music, Memory and the Permeable Past in Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia’

Panel 6: Translations (Chair: Jeannette Baxter) (Room: SU15)

• Frances Kruk (Royal Holloway), ‘“slammed into walls”: Violence and the Impersonalized Subject in Danielle Collobert’s It Then’
• D.M. Grundy (Cambridge), ‘“Suicide of Dynamite”: Sophie Podolski’s le pay où tout est permis’
• Dominic Williams, Milena Marinkova (Leeds), ‘Translation as Relational Poetics in Erin Moure’s Poetry’

1.30-2.30       lunch (G16) / CWWA AGM (F20)

2.30-4.00       panels 7, 8, 9

Panel 7: North American Experiments (Chair: Linda Stupart) (Room: F20)

• Georgina Colby (Westminster), ‘récriture feminine: Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School’
• Alex Porco (North Carolina), ‘Alice in Micropress: The Poetics of Alice Burdick’
• Michelle Ryan-Sautour (Angers), ‘Surrealist Eroticism and Experimental Writing in Rikki Ducornet’s Short Stories’

Panel 8: Anna Kavan and Ann Quin (Chair: Joseph Darlington) (Room: SU14)

• David Hucklesby (de Montfort), ‘“Clarity and Boldness”: Experiment and Autobiography in the Writing of Ann Quin’
• Hannah Van Hove (Glasgow), ‘“Upright for the Upsidedown World”: Resituating Anna Kavan’s Ice and Ann Quin’s Passages’
• Victoria Walker (King’s), ‘The Experimental and Political Poetics of Anna Kavan’s Ice’

Panel 9: Reading differently (Chair: Scott Thurston)  (Room: SU15)

• David Kennedy, Christine Kennedy (Hull), ‘“Daughter’s inconsequence unloosed”: Reading, Writing and Theorizing in Emily Critchley’s “When I Say I Believe Women…”’
• James Bailey (Sheffield), ‘Salutary Scars: The “Disorienting” Fictions of Muriel Spark’
• Alice Entwistle (South Wales), ‘Between Form and Function: Reading Topos in Frances Presley’s “Stone Settings” and Carol Watts’ “Zeta Landscape”’

4.15-5.30       poetry reading, featuring Carrie Etter, Sophie Mayer, Frances Presley, Anna Reckin and Lucy Sheerman, and wine reception sponsored by Cardiff University (Room: John Thaw Studio Theatre)

6.00                Ali Smith event (Cosmo Rodewald Hall, Martin Harris Centre)

 

Sunday 12^th October

9.00-10.30    panels 10, 11, 12

Panel 10: Creative Experiments (Chair: Katharine Cox) (Room F20)

• Holly Pester (Birkbeck), ‘Code: Lyric: Clairvoyance. A Re-enactment of Hannah Weiner’s Work by Holly Pester’
• Susan Sellers (St Andrews), ‘How Today’s Marketplace Stifles Experimental Writing: Thoughts from a Practitioner’

Panel 11: Image + Text (Chair: Liedeke Plate) (Room: SU14)

• Diarmuid Hester (Sussex), ‘Lynne Tillman and Méret Oppenheim: Agency and Influence in Experimental Aesthetics’
• Rachel May (Rhode Island), ‘Intermedial Work by Contemporary Women: Image + Text’
• Linda Stupart (Goldsmiths), ‘Against Critical Distance: Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus and the Empathetic Exchange of Objects’

Panel 12: Politics and social change (Chair: Dominic Williams) (Room: SU15)

• Diana Arterian (Southern California), ‘“Something Binding”: How Claudia Rankine’s American Lyric Weaves Public and Private Catastrophe’
• Rosemary Deller (Manchester), ‘Ventriloquising Meat: Deborah Levy’s Diary of a Steak’
• Chris Witter (Lancaster), ‘The Subaltern Modernism of Anzia Yezierska, Tillie Olsen and Grace Paley’

10.30-11.00  tea and biscuits (G16)

11.10-12.10  keynote: Rachel Carroll (Teeside), ‘How Soon Is Now: Constructing the Contemporary, Gendering the Experimental’ (Room: John Thaw Studio Theatre)

Chair: Susan Watkins (Leeds Metropolitan)

12.10-1.00    lunch (G16)

1.00-2.30       panels 13, 14, 15

Panel 13: Devolutions (Chair: Heidi Yeandle) (Room: F20)

• Ben Davies (Portsmouth), ‘Experiments in Dwelling: (being) in Ali Smith’s There but for the’
• Jane Stedman (Manchester), ‘Overspill: Location and Experimentation in Janice Galloway’s The Trick is to Keep Breathing’
• Bronwen Williams (Aberystwyth), ‘Memory and the City in the Work of Zoe Skoulding’

Panel 14: Feminist experiments (Chair: Kaye Mitchell) (Room: SU14)

• Chris Clarke (Southampton), ‘Tracing the Survival of Eva Figes’s Early Experimental Fiction’
• Kyoo Lee (CUNY), ‘Simone de Beauvoir as an Experimental Writer: The Second Sex as a Case in Point’

Panel 15: North American experiments 2 (Chair: Diana Arterian) (Room: SU15)

• Jonathan Evans (Portsmouth), ‘Unoriginal Genius: Collage, Quotation and Pastiche in the Work of Lydia Davis’
• Liedeke Plate (Radboud), ‘How to Do Things with Books in the Digital Age: Anne Carson’s Nox, Uncreativity and the Aesthetics of Bookishness’
• Bryan Radley (York), ‘After Minimalism: The Case of Mary Robison’

 2.30-3.00       tea and biscuits (G16)

 3.00-4.30       panels 16, 17

Panel 16: Archival/intertextual experiments (Chair: Diarmuid Hester) (Room: SU14)

• Natasha Alden (Aberystwyth), ‘Queering the Archive: Archive Fever and Contemporary Lesbian Historical Fiction’
• Katharine Cox (Cardiff Met), ‘The Ties that Bind: Jeanette Winterson’s Narratives of Adoption’
• Helen Snaith (Swansea), ‘The Hooded Executioner: Japanese Puppet Theatre in Angela Carter’s Fireworks’

Panel 17: New voices (Chair: Alex Porco) (Room: SU15)

• Angelica Michelis (MMU), ‘“I rename myself/Ufo woman”: The Experiment of Urban Performance Poetry’
• Lucy Sheerman (Independent), ‘Out of Order: Conservatism and Experiment: The Relationship between Language and Technology in the Work of Susan Hiller, Imogen Stidworthy and Rachel Lichtenstein’
• Scott Thurston (Salford), ‘Innovative Women Poets: The Next Generation’

4.30-4.45       closing comments (G16)

 

 

Draft programme

We now have a draft programme for the conference – and we’d be grateful for any offers to chair sessions! Please circulate to friends, colleagues and students…

CONTEMPORARY EXPERIMENTAL WOMEN’S WRITING

PROGRAMME

Saturday 12^th October

9.00-10.00    registration

10.00-11.30  panels 1, 2, 3

Panel 1: Angela Carter 1

• Jeannette Baxter (Anglia Ruskin), ‘Surrealisms, Fascisms and the Post-War Imagination: Re-reading The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman’
• Anna Watz (Uppsala), ‘The Feminist-Surrealist Poetics of Leonora Carrington and Angela Carter’
• Heidi Yeandle (Swansea), ‘“I experiment therefore I am”: Angela Carter’s Experiments with Cartesian Thought’

Panel 2: Contemporary Novelists

• Zeynep Z. Atayurt (Ankara), ‘“This is a world of spectacles”: Metafictional Subtleties and Stylistic Variations in Elif Shafak’s Gaze’
• Jude Roberts (Birkbeck), ‘“Tell me a story”: Catherynne M. Valente and the Role of Narrative’
• Chris Vardy (Manchester), ‘“Deliriously ramshackle … history in paradigm”: Nicola Barker’s Darkmans’

Panel 3: Contemporary US poets

• Simon Haworth (Manchester), ‘“It’s always some fortuity that traps me”: Unaccountable Subjects, Form and the Poetry of Chance – Marianne Moore and Jane Yeh’
• Claire Hurley (Kent), ‘“What girl ever flourished in such company?”: Barbara Guest’s Sociability and Reception in the Avant-Garde Assemblage’
• Kat Peddie (Kent), ‘Questing beyond Disjunction: Susan Howe’s “Hope Atherton’s Wanderings” and Veronica Forrest-Thompson’s On the Periphery’

11.30-12.00 tea and biscuits

12.00-1.30    panels 4, 5, 6

Panel 4: Christine Brooke-Rose

• Joseph Darlington (Salford), ‘“Read less, live more”: Christine Brooke-Rose and May ‘68’
• Stephanie Jones (Aberystwyth), ‘“To belong nowhere”: the Experimental Woman Writer and the Work of Christine Brooke-Rose’
• Rebecca Pohl (Manchester), ‘“Formidable but engaging”: The Pleasure of Recognition in Christine Brooke-Rose’s Fiction’

Panel 5: Jennifer Egan

• Alice Bennett (Liverpool Hope), ‘“A New Lesson about Time”: Temporality, Social Networks and Reworked Modernism in A Visit from the Good Squad and NW’
• David Hering (Liverpool), ‘Play it Again: Jennifer Egan and Dana Spiotta’s Musical Narratives’
• Hope Jennings (Wright State), ‘“Form and Flux”: Music, Memory and the Permeable Past in Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Good Squad and Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia’

Panel 6: Translations

• Frances Kruk (Royal Holloway), ‘“slammed into walls”: Violence and the Impersonalized Subject in Danielle Collobert’s It Then’
• D.M. Grundy (Cambridge), ‘“Suicide of Dynamite”: Sophie Podolski’s le pay où tout est permis’
• Dominic Williams, Milena Marinkova (Leeds), ‘Translation as Relational Poetics in Erin Moure’s Poetry’

1.30-2.30       lunch / CWWA AGM

2.30-4.00       panels 7, 8, 9

Panel 7: North American Experiments

• Georgina Colby (Westminster), ‘(r)écriture feminine: Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School’
• Alex Porco (North Carolina), ‘“This one goes out to all the humans”: The Poetics of Alice Burdick’
• Michelle Ryan-Sautour (Angers), ‘Surrealist Eroticism and Experimental Writing in Rikki Ducornet’s Short Stories’

Panel 8: Anna Kavan and Ann Quin

• David Hucklesby (de Montfort), ‘“Clarity and Boldness”: Experiment and Autobiography in the Writing of Ann Quin’
• Hannah van Hove (Glasgow), ‘“Upright for the Upsidedown World”: Resituating Anna Kavan’s Ice and Ann Quin’s Passages’
• Victoria Walker (UCL), ‘The Experimental and Political Poetics of Anna Kavan’s Ice’

Panel 9: Reading differently

• David Kennedy, Christine Kennedy (Hull), ‘“Daughter’s inconsequence unloosed”: Reading, Writing and Theorizing in Emily Critchley’s “When I Say I Believe Women…”’
• James Bailey (Sheffield), ‘Salutary Scars: The “Disorienting” Fictions of Muriel Spark’

4.15-5.30       poetry reading, featuring Carrie Etter, Sophie Mayer, Frances Presley, Anna Reckon and Lucy Sheerman, and wine reception sponsored by Cardiff University

6.00                Ali Smith event (Cosmo Rodewald Hall, Martin Harris Centre)

 

Sunday 12^th October

9.00-10.30    panels 10, 11, 12

Panel 10: Creative Experiments

• Holly Pester (Birkbeck), ‘Code: Lyric: Clairvoyance. A Re-enactment of Hannah Weiner’s Work by Holly Pester’
• Susan Sellers (St Andrews), [Reading from new work]
• Isabel Waidner (Roehampton), [Paper on work in progress]

Panel 11: Image + Text

• Diarmuid Hester (Sussex), ‘Lynne Tillman and Méret Oppenheim: Agency and Influence in Experimental Aesthetics’
• Rachel May (Rhode Island), ‘Intermedial Work by Contemporary Women: Image + Text’
• Linda Stupart (Goldsmiths), ‘Against Critical Distance: Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus and the Empathetic Exchange of Objects’

Panel 12: Politics and social change

• Diana Arterian (Southern California), ‘“Something Binding”: How Claudia Rankine’s American Lyric Weaves Public and Private Catastrophe’
• Rosemary Deller (Manchester), ‘Ventriloquising Meat: Deborah Levy’s Diary of a Steak’
• Chris Witter (Lancaster), ‘The Subaltern Modernism of Anzia Yezierska, Tillie Olsen and Grace Paley’

10.30-11.00  tea and biscuits

11.10-12.10  keynote: Rachel Carroll (Teeside), ‘How Soon Is Now: Constructing the Contemporary, Gendering the Experimental’

12.10-1.00    lunch

1.00-2.30       panels 13, 14, 15

Panel 13: Devolutions

• Ben Davies (Portsmouth), ‘An Experiment in Dwelling: (Being) in Ali Smith’s There but for the’
• Jane Stedman (Manchester), ‘Overspill: Location and Experimentation in Janice Galloway’s The Trick is to Keep Breathing’
• Bronwen Williams (Aberystwyth), ‘Memory and the City in the Work of Zoe Skoulding’

Panel 14: Feminist experiments

• Chris Clarke (Southampton), ‘Tracing the Survival of Eva Figes’s Early Experimental Fiction’
• Cecily Davey (St Andrews), ‘Towards an Ontology of Otherness: New Perspectives on the Life Writing of Hélène Cixous’
• Kyoo Lee (CUNY), ‘Simone de Beauvoir as an Experimental Writer: The Second Sex as a Case in Point’

Panel 15: North American experiments 2

• Jonathan Evans (Portsmouth), ‘Unoriginal Genius: Collage, Quotation and Pastiche in the Work of Lydia Davis’
• Liedeke Plate (Radboud), ‘How to Do Things with Books in the Digital Age: Anne Carson’s Nox, Uncreativity and the Aesthetics of Bookishness’
• Bryan Radley (York), ‘After Minimalism: The Case of Mary Robison’

2.30-3.00       tea and biscuits

3.00-4.30       panels 16, 17, 18

Panel 16: Angela Carter 2

• Sarah Gamble (Swansea), ‘Acrobat of Desire: Angela Carter’s Literary Gymnastics’
• Jago Morrison (Brunel), ‘Debating Invisibility: Angela Carter’s Wise Children’
• Helen Snaith (Swansea), ‘The Hooded Executioner: Japanese Puppet Theatre in Angela Carter’s Fireworks’

Panel 17: Queer experiments

• Natasha Alden (Aberystwyth), ‘Queering the Archive: Archive Fever and Contemporary Lesbian Historical Fiction’
• Katharine Cox (Cardiff Met), ‘The Ties that Bind: Jeanette Winterson’s Narratives of Adoption’
• Reina van der Wiel (Birkbeck), ‘From Form to Feeling: Trauma, Autobiography and Jeanette Winterson’s Shifting Aesthetics’

Panel 18: New voices

• Angelica Michelis (MMU), ‘“I rename myself/Ufo woman”: The Experiment of Urban Performance Poetry’
• Lucy Sheerman (Independent), ‘Out of order’
• Scott Thurston (Salford), ‘Innovative Women Poets: The Next Generation’

4.30-4.45       closing comments

 

 

Registration is now open!

Registration for the conference is now open, at a cost of £85 full price and £45 postgrad/unwaged. This includes tea and coffee across two days, two lunches, a poetry reading, a wine reception, and the Ali Smith event on Saturday night.

To register, please follow the link here:

http://estore.manchester.ac.uk/browse/product.asp?compid=1&modid=2&catid=302

A full conference programme will be available shortly.

Conference updates

Planning for the Contemporary Experimental Women’s Writing conference is well under way and we will soon be posting information on registration, fees, and accommodation. In the meantime do please pass on news of the conference to your colleagues and students. Here’s a few details to whet your appetite:

• 12th-13th October, University of Manchester
• 50+ papers on a range of authors, including: Kathy Acker, Patience Agbabi, Christine Brooke-Rose, Anne Carson, Angela Carter, Helene Cixous, Lydia Davis, Jennifer Egan, Eva Figes, Susan Howe, Anna Kavan, Chris Kraus, Ann Quin, Claudia Rankine, Mary Robison, Lynne Tillman, and more.
• A reading and Q&A with Ali Smith, included as part of the conference fee.
• A keynote lecture from Dr. Rachel Carroll, Principal Lecturer at Teeside University, and author of Rereading Heterosexuality: Feminism, Queer Theory and Contemporary Fiction (2012).
• A reading from poets included in the Infinite Difference collection: Carrie Etter, Frances Presley, Anna Reckon, Sophie Mayer, and Lucy Sheerman.
• A wine reception, sponsored by Cardiff University.

We look forward to welcoming you in October.

Kaye and Becky

Call for papers: Contemporary Experimental Women’s Writing

 

Call for papers

Contemporary Experimental Women’s Writing

12^th October 2013, University of Manchester, UK

Keynote lecture: Dr. Rachel Carroll (University of Teesside)

Special guest speaker: Ali Smith

The recent, monumental, Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature (2012) aims to cover ‘the history of literary experiment from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present’ yet, according to the narrative it offers, women form only the most marginal part of that ‘history’; just one chapter devotes itself to women’s experimental writing, and the other chapters are dominated by references to male authors. As Ellen G. Friedman asserts, in that lone chapter: ‘For the most part, women experimental writers in the twentieth century were absent from surveys of innovative writing, and they were also absent from studies that focused entirely on women writers’ (Bray et al., 2012: 154). Similarly, recent discussions of literary experiment after postmodernism, of the legacies of modernist literary innovation, of ‘metamodernism’ and ‘altermodernism’ in the wider artistic and cultural realm, and of the new ‘avant-gardes’, primarily concern themselves with male authors such as David Peace, Thomas Pynchon, David Mitchell, J.M. Coetzee, David Foster Wallace, W.G. Sebald and Dave Eggers.

This one-day symposium – under the aegis of the Contemporary Women’s Writing Association – therefore sets out to investigate, analyse and celebrate the more experimental end of the wide spectrum of women’s writing since the 1960s. Like Friedman and Miriam Fuchs’ Breaking the Sequence (1989), the symposium aims to be both ‘archaeological and compensatory’, attending to established and emerging authors alike, and asking what counts as ‘experiment’ within contemporary women’s writing. What are the uses of experiment for women writers? What varieties and what degree of experimentalism can we trace in contemporary women’s writing? And how might an attentiveness to different manifestations of experimentalism broaden and complicate our understanding of ‘women’s writing’ as a (fraught) category?

The organisers invite papers on a range of topics and authors, including, but not limited to:

• The meanings, definitions and uses of ‘experiment’ in contemporary women’s writing
• The gendering of experimental writing, and of that writing’s reception, in the contemporary period
• Experimental prose, poetry, drama, life writing, non-fiction and art writing by women
• New readings of established, canonical authors such as Angela Carter, Ali Smith, Jeanette Winterson, and others
• Experimental women writers who have, to date, received relatively little critical attention, such as Kathy Acker, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Christine Brooke-Rose, Maxine Chernoff, Lydia Davis, Eva Figes, Nikki Giovanni, Barbara Guest, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, Bernadette Mayer, Suniti Namjoshi, Alice Notley, Ann Quin, Michèle Roberts, Sonia Sanchez, and others
• Emerging experimental voices such as Naomi Alderman, Jennifer Egan, Chris Kraus, Lynne Tillman, and others
• The experimental fiction of women theorists and critics, such as Hélène Cixous and Monique Wittig
• Contemporary (post-1960) experimental poetry by, for example, Lucille Clifton, Jorie Graham, Geraldine Monk, Wendy Mulford, Maggie O’Sullivan, Denise Riley, and others
• The ‘Other Poetries’ of Emily Critchley, Carrie Etter, Marianne Morris, Zoë Skoulding, and others
• The late works of modernist authors such as Jean Rhys, Anaïs Nin, and others
• Experimental women’s writing in translation, including the works of Isabel Allende, Marie Darrieussecq, Marguerite Duras, Elfriede Jelinek, Clarice Lispector, Marlene Streeruwitz, Nathalie Sarraute, Luisa Valenzuela, Christa Wolf, and others
• The sampling and deployment of ‘experimental’ techniques within otherwise ‘realist’ works by women writers such as Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates and Zadie Smith
• Postmodernist writing by women
• Reading the legacies of modernist experiment in contemporary women’s writing
• Multimodal literature by women
• Experimental presses
• The digital revolution and related experiments in the form and genre of women’s writing, e.g. in hypertext literatures, collaborative compositions, digital and interactive writing

Please send abstracts of c.300 words and a brief bio to Kaye Mitchell at kaye.mitchell@manchester.ac.uk by Friday 3^rd May 2013. Proposals for panels of three interlinked papers are also welcome.

Dr. Kaye Mitchell (University of Manchester)

Dr. Becky Munford (Cardiff University)