CALL FOR PAPERS
Electronic Literature: Texts, Readers and Teaching Practices
3-4 October 2014
Casa de Convalescència – Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Electronic literature is introducing significant changes in current book production for children and teenagers. These changes should not be ignored by education communities, as they not only have a direct impact on readers’ uses but raise specific challenges for literary pedagogy.

In the framework of this growing phenomenon, Grupo de Investigación en Literatura Infantil y Juvenil y Educación Literaria (GRETEL) research group has been exploring the constructive mechanisms of digital works and their reception by children and young readers, as well as didactic actions arising at the intersection between ICT and literary education.

The layout and features of these products, their affordances, their implied reader, children’s and teenagers’ specific responses to digital fiction, family and school practices related to it and the impact of this new reality on the classroom – in terms of teaching programs and pedagogical planning – are nuclear issues of a topic located at the epicenter of an emerging research field: electronic reading.

For these reasons, GRETEL is organizing an International Symposium to showcase research results in this field, as well as to share specific intervention tools and strategies to improve teaching.

Objectives:

• To present and discuss features and different analyses of current electronic production for children and young adults.
• To present and discuss recent education research advances in terms of reading uses and children’s interpretative processes using digital devices,
  both in classrooms and outside school contexts.
• To share experiences and teaching practices using digital devices or digital literature in different educational levels to enhance literary education.
• To promote research on electronic literature, its impact on readers and its uses in classrooms, as well as its effects in the development of a reading
  itinerary.

Therefore, we invite you to submit a paper proposal for a maximum of 20 minutes on one of these topics:

• Current electronic literary production for children and teenagers: types, characteristics and literary learning possibilities.
• Reading electronic literary works: uses and interpretative processes in different situations and educational levels.
• Teaching-learning experiences including digital literature and new technologies to develop literary education.

Catalan, Spanish and English will be the Symposium languages. Spanish‐ English translation services will be provided. Please email an abstract of 1,500 to a max. of 3,000 characters and a short resumé with your contact details (name, institution, position, CV, address, phone, paper title and paper brief summary) as two attached documents.

The deadline for paper proposals is 22 May 2014. Notification of acceptance will be sent by 31 May 2014. Please note that the final acceptance of proposals is subject to payment of the enrolment fee. Full papers should not exceed 20,000 characters and will be required by July 2014, as they will be included in the Symposium proceedings. Please send paper proposals to the following email: gretel@uab.cat

You can also post them to:

Grupo GRETEL
Departamento de Didáctica de la Lengua y la Literatura
Edificio G5, Room 109
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
08193 Bellaterra

Orphanhood, Foster Care and Adoption in Youth Media
A Special Issue of Children’s Literature Association Quarterly
Edited by Sarah Park Dahlen and Lies Wesseling

Deadline: November 1, 2014

This special issue of ChLAQ will focus on the different ways in which orphanhood, foster care, and adoption have been depicted in media for youth past and present. We also aim to take perspectives from birth countries and birth parents into account. We invite papers that both extend and disrupt existing adoption discourses, including but not limited to:

• the cultural construction of “adoptability”: constructions of children in need (deserving/undeserving children); of birth parents, foster parents and adoptive parents (deserving/undeserving parents)
• presence/absence of birth parents and birth countries in Western stories of adoption and fostering
• the genres of orphan narratives: the sentimental novel and beyond
• adultism and the hidden adult in orphan narratives
• the (ab)uses of children’s literature as a socialization tool in raising and educating adoptees
• representations of intercountry adoption in birth countries
• the politics of belonging; intersectional perspectives on race, class, nation, gender and sexuality in orphanhood, foster care and adoption
• the adoptees write back: adoptees’ perspectives on the cultural construction of orphanhood and adoptability
• the impact of narratives and visual art (action art, intervention art, etc.) on adoption laws, policies, and practices

Papers should conform to the usual style of ChLAQ and be between 5,000-7,000 words in length. Queries and completed essays should be sent to Sarah Park Dahlen and Lies Wesseling (chlaq.adopt@gmail.com) by November 1, 2014. The selected articles will appear in ChLAQ in 2015.

Text/ures: Books as Objects, from Print to Digital
International Symposium

Les Archives nationales, Bibliothèque nationale de France, École nationale des Arts Décoratifs (Paris)
November 19-21, 2014
With the support of Labex Arts-H2, EA 1569, and Paragraphe (EA 349), Université Paris 8
Sponsored by ANR program Investissements d’avenir (ANR-10-LABX-80-0.)

« Text/ures » Project Chairs: Anne Chassagnol and Gwen Le Cor (Université Paris 8, EA1569)
textures@univ-paris8.fr
Project website: http://www.labex-arts-h2h.fr/fr/text-ures-l-objet-livre-du-papier.html

Keynote Speakers:

David A. Carter (pop-up artist, USA), Bertrand Gervais (UQAM, Montreal), Jerome Fletcher (Falmouth University, UK), Steve Tomasula (University of Notre Dame, USA)

Call for Papers

Text/ures: Books as objects, from print to digital is an international and trans-disciplinary project that explores a wide scope of hybrid objects ranging from artist books, movable books and book sculptures to composite works of contemporary literature and digital books. Situated at a crossroads of literature and graphic and visual art culture, all these works elude labeling. We intend “Text/ures” as an investigation of the links between text and fabric—the way textual material is emphasized, activated even, by paper or digital mechanisms. Who are these objects intended for? Which reading temporality or which temporizing do these works necessitate? How is sense offered, proposed, displayed? More generally, are these book-objects destined to be seen, read, exhibited, unfolded, collected or archived? We would like the proposals to delve into the material and fabric of the textual compositions as well as to focus on the haptic dimension of these three-dimensional unfolding paper structures. This symposium seeks to explore the intersections between children’s literature, contemporary literature and artist books through their shared history or evolution towards a new form of materiality. We encourage proposals on the following themes as well as those that weave diverging approaches on possible forms of texture in book-objects:

Textures of Children’s Literature

Pop-up books, flip-books, tunnel books, and carousel books can be analyzed from a historical perspective. Hybrid by nature, neither children’s books nor solely artist’s books, they offer a reading dynamics where the realm of childhood and the world of art meet in a variety of experimentations by creating enchanting origami or typographic sculptures. To what extent can we consider pop-up books as sensory objects? How does the reader navigate through the different textures of these books? To what extent can we consider that architecture, kinetic art, photography and cinema may have influenced the texture of animated books? How do they negotiate the refashioning of old media by new media?

Contemporary Textures and Writings

We seek to explore texts whose work with substance, texture and visual forms makes them permeable to the themes captured in artist books. Proposals should investigate the poetic textile in its very materiality by focusing on book-objects and art works whose textures question writing as a purely textual form. Whether we think of W.J.T. Mitchell’s imagetexts and other forms of visual and textual interweavings (Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland), or whether we consider layerings (Tom Phillips A Humument), die-cuts (Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes), or stitching and weaving effects (Jen Bervin, Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Fifty Year Sword), what is at stake here is the way sense becomes touch generated in the texture of the book-object. Proposals can also focus on the way in which contemporary writings rework the notion of the book—what is a page, a leaf? What is a digital “book”?—and, in turn, question the act of reading. For Johanna Drucker, the temporality of reading is distinct from that of viewing, and thus of visual art: “books are time-based media. They unfold in sequence (fixed or not) over time, require a certain amount of attention, and can’t be taken in in the ‘all at once glance’ mode we have come to believe is the correct way of viewing visual art” (Figuring the Word). Should books as objects be grasped as visual works of art or do they inaugurate a new type of narrative sequencing? How then, do we read the texture of book-objects?

Archiving Texture: Exhibiting, Distributing and Restoring Books as Objects

The three dimensional format of book-objects and their distinct architectural features, also invite reflections on issues of conservation. As Jacques Derrida explains, “consignation aims to coordinate a single corpus, in a system or a synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration” (Archive Fever). In this respect, we might ask ourselves how can we record the heterogeneity of the book-object. More precisely, how do we conserve the plurality of meaning that is woven in the volume, touch, and folds of the text? How do we record the compound sense construction that emerges from the fleeting nature of a reading-performance? How do libraries interact with book-objects? We could also delve into the remediation of texture in its transition from print to the digital, or focus on digital porting with its array of constraints and selections.

Submission Guidelines

Please submit your 300-400 word abstract using the EasyChair Conference system (https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=t2014) before April 30, 2014. Proposals can be in English or in French and should include a title, biography and contact information of contributors. For further information please contact: textures@univ-paris8.fr.