Call for Papers

SPINNING SCOTLAND:  Exploring Literary and Cultural Perspectives

A one day postgraduate conference

Department of Scottish Literature    

      School of English and Scottish Language and Literature

Saturday 13 September 2008

The Postgraduates of the Department of Scottish Literature invite proposals for papers to answer the need for greater opportunity to explore and present postgraduate work on the subject of Scottish literature and its conjunctions with Scottish culture - from the local to the global.

The conference considers the metaphor of the fabric of the Scottish nation – the collaboration between Literature, Culture, Language, History and Thought - to engage with the texture of a nation’s artistic output.

The conference anticipates engaging with the construction and contextualising of Scotland through a multi-panel one-day format, imagining refashioned contexts for Scotland.  These postgrad-chaired panels will consist of papers either focusing on a theme, (re)approaching a particular time period, or interrogating the boundaries of both, and are aimed at attracting both home and international postgraduates engaged with Scottish Literature and its contexts. How does the Scottish nation represent its collaborations with literature and context? Do certain aspects of Scottish culture invite a comparative approach? Where might the intersections of history and language forge new alliances with philosophy and literature? 

Papers might approach the conference aegis in the following, though feel free to suggest other methodologies or ideas:

(Re)claiming the cloth - deconstructing tartanry & iconography in Scottish culture

Fluctuating fabric of Scottish literary culture - new contexts, new comparisons

Spin doctors - political agenda in Scottish culture and literature, critical bias

Tailoring translation and transmission - the act of weaving culture and language together

Text, texture, textile - Scottish literature's interaction with other areas of the arts

Tartanry special - pop culture and its place in the fashioning of 'Scot. Lit.'

Threading together the local and the global - 'Wha's like us?' - comparative studies

The weft and weave - constructing a national literary canon, concepts of nationality

Spinning Scot lit and birling the binaries - conflicts inherent in the culture and canon

Location, location – local, national, international issues of setting, place, periphery

We invite abstracts of no more than 250 words for 20-minute papers to be submitted electronically by 13 June 2008 to spinningscotland@arts.gla.ac.uk.  Please include your institution affiliation and contact details with your submission.

The conference committee intends to publish select papers arising from the conference, and a limited number of fee waivers and travel grants will be available. Please apply in advance for information.

Glasgow Shipyard Workshop by Muirhead Bone