CALL FOR  PAPERS

Creating the Child’s Voice
A workshop hosted by the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London, on Friday, 28 January 2011.
Deadline for submissions: 30 September 2010

Following the success of the two Launch Events on ‘Writing Childhood’ (October 2009 and May 2010), the CCWW is organising a third event to further explore this topic from a narratological/discursive perspective.

This one-day workshop will look at works by contemporary women writers in Western Europe that represent the experience of childhood. Again concentrating on works in French, Germanic, Hispanic, Italian and Portuguese languages, it seeks to combine the broad comparative cross-cultural perspective of the previous events with a thematic investigation focusing on the narrative creation of the child’s voice. In exemplary analyses and /or theoretical explorations, the papers will address questions such as the following:

• What narrative and stylistic techniques are at play in the creation of the child’s voice?
• To what extent can a child’s voice in a literary work by an adult author be considered ‘authentic’?
• How does the authorial perspective affect the child’s voice?
• In narratives that depict the development of a child into adulthood, what is the relationship between the child and the grown-up s/he turns into? How is this relationship conveyed through the handling of voice?

We welcome proposals that compare the construction of the child’s voice in texts written by adults (‘childhood autobiographies’) and books written by children.

300-word abstracts for papers of 30 mins. length should be sent by 30 September 2010 to Gill Rye, [log in to unmask] .

It is envisaged that a selection of papers from this seminar and from the two previous events will be published in an issue of the Journal of Romance Studies.