"stains / les taches" : the Cambridge French Graduate Conference 27th-28th May 2016 Emmanuel College, Cambridge http://stainsconference.wordpress.com Twitter: @stains_taches
The Cambridge French Graduate Conference has been running, with great success, for well over a decade. This respected annual event is a wonderful opportunity for graduate students from all over the UK, as well as from France, elsewhere in Europe and the world, to meet and exchange ideas — in 2015, we hosted speakers from as far away as Québec. The publication of conference proceedings with Peter Lang provides a fantastic opportunity for early publication for many of the conference's speakers.
The 2016 conference, on the topic of "stains / les taches", will take place at Emmanuel College, on Friday 27th and Saturday 28th May. We hope that our theme will enable researchers to engage, if they wish to, with recent theoretical turns towards the material; the full Call for Papers with further suggestions can be found below. We have been lucky enough to secure two fantastic keynote speakers: Laura McMahon, from the French Department and Gonville and Caius, and Pierre Bayard, from Université Paris VIII. Pierre Bayard is a psychoanalyst, and professor of French Literature at Université Paris VIII. His best known work, Comment parler des livres que l'on n'a pas lus ? (How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read) was released in 2007 to great critical acclaim, and has been translated into thirty languages. He has also published on Freud, Proust, and detective fiction. Laura McMahon is lecturer in French at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Her research interests lie in connections between cinema and philosophy, with a particular focus on the works of Jean-Luc Nancy and Claire Denis. She is the author of Cinema and Contact: The Withdrawal of Touch in Nancy, Bresson, Duras and Denis (2012).
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Call for Papers
“Materialism means that the reality I see is never “whole” – not because a large part of it eludes me, but because it contains a stain, a blind spot, which signals my inclusion in it.”
– Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View
We invite abstracts for papers of 20 minutes in English or French on the theme of ‘stains’.
guilt, (original) sin, stains on conscience and consciousness. blood-stains, ink stains, rorschach tests, dirt stains, rust, food stains, paint stains. cleansing, cleaning, detergent, stain removal, spotlessness, purity. blemishes, blots, erasure, blind spots, shadows, scars and scarring, marks, spots, discoloration. disgust, abjection, sublimation, stigmata. surface, material, medium. staining as artistic process: woodstaining, stained glass, dyeing and tinting, tattoos, pigments. staining as scientific or diagnostic process: contrast, chemical reaction
Abstracts not exceeding 250 words should be sent to
stainsconference2016@gmail.com by 15th February 2016.