Université de Provence 3-5 June 2010, Aix-en-Provence, France.
Registrations:
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Organising institutions.
The Dickens Society; Société Française d’Études Victoriennes et Édouardiennes; LERMA (Laboratoire d’Études et de Recherches sur le Monde Anglophone, Université de Provence)
Scientific committee.
Malcolm Andrews (University of Kent), Nancy Aycock Metz (Virginia Tech), Luc Bouvard (Université de Montpellier III), Laurent Bury (Université de Lyon II), Marianne Camus (Université de Bourgogne), Marie-Amélie Coste (Classes préparatoires, Lycée Saint Louis), Françoise Dupeyron-Lafay (Université de Paris XII), Clotilde de Stasio (University of Milan), Michael Hollington (Université de Toulouse II), Christine Huguet (Université de Lille III), Nathalie Jaëck (Université de Bordeaux III), Alain Jumeau (Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne), David Paroissien (University of Buckingham), Natalie McKnight (Boston University), Norbert Lennartz (Universität Julius Maximilian, Würzburg), Francesca Orestano (University of Milan), Sara Thornton (Université de Paris VII), Nathalie Vanfasse (Université de Provence), Paul Vita (St Louis University, Madrid).
Organisers.
Marie-Amélie Coste (Lycée Saint Louis) ; Christine Huguet (Université de Lille III) ; Nathalie Vanfasse (Université de Provence, Aix-Marseille I)
Accommodation and social programme.
Accommodation will be in Aix-en-Provence with shuttle service to and from the conference centre.
In addition to panel sessions, the conference will feature a visit to the Palace of the Popes in Avignon and a tour of the city of Marseilles.
Call for papers.
Paper topics on any aspect of Dickens and his works are welcome, but this 2010 conference of the Dickens Society will focus more specifically on a few thought-provoking and challenging questions: is Charles Dickens still worth reading in the twenty-first century and if so why? Shouldn’t we even be wondering whether he is still read at all, particularly outside schoolrooms and academic spheres?
At a time of increasing globalisation, a stance like that of Professor and writer Lafcadio Hearn who discouraged students from reading Dickens at the University of Tokyo in 1900 because the world described in his books was too different from Japanese realities no longer holds. The Victorian world and its main writers are now known in most parts of the world, albeit superficially. This good news raises nevertheless a new set of problems and paradoxes. Dickens is indeed often familiar to people who have never opened any of his books and have discovered him through film or radio adaptations, musicals and other by-products. Do such adaptations serve Dickens’s work or do they draw us further and further away from it?
It is the aim of this conference to find out how Dickens’s work is understood, interpreted and taught nowadays, and whether his novels, letters, travel writing and journalism answer twenty-first-century concerns. The conference will also examine how today’s public views the mid-Victorian period through Dickens’s writing. Presentations devoted to current critical approaches to Dickens’s works are also welcome. Last but not least, papers are sought on recent adaptations ranging from postcolonial re-writings, like Lloyd Jones’s 2007 Mister Pip, to film and TV adaptations, like Little Dorrit or A Christmas Carol, not to mention theme parks like the “Dickens World” which opened in Kent a few years ago. Though the twenty-first century has just begun, we may wonder whether these different angles of study already delineate a specific twenty-first-century approach to Dickens’s work.
Papers will be in English. A selection of the proceedings will appear in a special issue of the leading French journal, Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens, published by the University of Montpellier Press. Please submit proposals in English (300 words) and short speaker biographies no later than 15 March 2010 to: christine.huguet-meriaux@univ-lille.fr and nathalie.vanfasse@univ-provence.fr