*Apologies for cross-posting*

Dear Colleague,

We are inviting papers from postgraduate students and early career 
researchers for the University of Stirling English Studies Postgraduate 
Conference which will take place on the 29th and 30th of May. The title of the 
conference is “Transgression and Its Limits” and our call for papers invites 
papers which consider transgressive tactics in literature, film, critical theory 
and other cultural productions. Confirmed speakers are Professor Fred Botting 
and author Iain Banks. The deadline for receipt of abstracts is 19th March, 
2010.

You can visit our website at www.transgression.stir.ac.uk for more information.

 
Thank you very much in advance, 

Best regards,

Aspasia Stephanou, Matthew Foley and Neil McRobert

 

Transgression and its Limits
29-30th May 2010
University of Stirling

Plenary Speaker:
Professor Fred Botting
Reading followed by Q&A Session:
Iain Banks

 

To discover the complete horizon of a society’s symbolic values, it is also 
necessary to map out its transgressions, its deviants ~ Marcel Détienne.

 

Rule-breaking has always been a central aspect of literary and cultural 
development. The works of Marquis de Sade, William Burroughs and Kathy 
Acker help define the canon of transgressive fiction, while Bakhtin, Bataille and 
Foucault have become its philosophers and apologists. From the law-breaking 
obscenity of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover to the immoralilty of 
Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, transgressive art has offended the old order 
for the sake of a new.

The commodification of extreme horror in recent movies and the faux-
antagonism of Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk both reveal the paradox 
of a transgression which has now established its own conventions. Is 
transgression more than the tradition of subverting tradition? Have the 
conditions of post-modernity exhausted our ability to be shocked?

The aim of this conference is to provide an interdisciplinary forum to consider 
transgressive tactics in literature, film, critical theory and other cultural 
productions. To what extent has transgression helped shape sexual, cultural 
and artistic landscapes of its own period? We invite abstracts for 20-minute 
papers focusing on transgressive, taboo-breaking and politically resistant acts 
in literature and the arts.

Possible topics may include (but are not limited to):
§ Violence
§ Profanity
§ The Sacred
§ Sexuality and the body
§ Obscenity and pornography
§ Aberrance, Fetish, Perversion
§ The New Horror – ‘torture porn’
§ Avant-garde cinema, Cinema of Transgression
§ The Carnivalesque
§ Gender roles
§ Censorship – cultural reactions to transgressive texts
§ Violence against the text – formal/textual transgression
§ Postmodernism’s transgression of the high/low cultural divide

Please send a 300-word abstract and a 50-word biography to Aspasia 
Stephanou, Matthew Foley and Neil McRobert at [log in to unmask] by 
March 19th 2010.