What Happens Now: 21st Century Writing in English

2nd International conference, University of Lincoln, 16-18 July 2012

PROGRAMME
Monday 16th July
10-12 coffee/registration
12-1 opening plenary: Professor Peter Boxall, University of Sussex
The Future of the Novel
1-2 lunch (buffet in The Shed)
2-3.30 Panel 1
Dave Eggers and 21st-Century Aesthetics
Wolfgang Funk (Leibniz University Hanover) The core is the core is the core: Dave
Eggers A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and the Authenticity of Metareference
Adam Kelly (Harvard/UCD) Trauma in the marketplace: Dave Eggers New Sincerity
Anthony Hutchinson (Nottingham) The Collapsible Space Between Us: Humanist
Literary Critique in Richard Rorty and Dave Eggers
Dont Look Back: the 1970s and 1980s
Ayse Naz Bulamur (Bogazici, Istanbul) Scheherezade in Western Palace: Martin Amis
The Pregnant Widow
Christopher Vardy (Manchester) 'Neo-1980s fiction: David Mitchell's Black Swan Green
as material-memory text'
Francesco Di Bernardo (Sussex) Looking at the origins of contemporary British society:
The Rotters Club as social bildungsroman between realism and postmodernism
Digital
Nicola Beech (Hull) Only connect : how does fiction mediate our online experience?
Rob Lederer (Edinburgh) Jennifer Egans Wired-In Subjects
Emma Young (Leicester) Theoretical Perspective and Digitalisation: The Resurgence
of the (Post)Modern Short Story in the Twenty-First Century
3.45-5.15 Panel 2
Laughing at the 21st century
Alice Bennett (Liverpool Hope) Her laughing made her laugh: Contemporary Forms
for the Comic in the work of A.L. Kennedy
Graham Matthews (Newcastle) Intentionality and Truth: Satire in the 21st century
Ryan Dobran (Cambridge) The Distended Economy of Wit: Being Funny and
Dislocated in The Golden Age of Paraphernalia
Queer
Jos Yebra (Zaragoza, Spain) Neo-Victorian homosexuality and Biofiction in 21st
century British literature: Colm Toibins The Master and Alan Hollinghursts The Line of
Beauty and The Strangers Child
Kaye Mitchell (Manchester) Queer Metamorphoses: Girl Meets Boy and the Futures of
Queer Fiction
Natasha Alden (Aberystwyth) The Contemporary Queer Past
Future
Kinga Fldvry (Pazmany Peter, Hungary) Children Spoil the Story Uncertain
Futures in Contemporary Fiction

Phil Redpath (Lincoln) Affective Waning: Anxiety Haunting, and the Uncanny Future
Sarah Chihaya (Berkeley, USA) Primers for the Apocalypse: Death as Coming-of-Age
in 21st century Young Adult Fiction

5.15-6.00 Guest reading: Kathleen Jamie (University of Stirling)

6.15-7 C21 Literature launch and Q&A - Electric Bar at The Hilton Hotel
8pm Dinner at The Pyewipe Inn
Tuesday 17th July
9.30-11 Panel 3
New Directions in British contemporary fiction
Nick Bentley (Keele) Hysterical Subcultures in Contemporary British fiction: Nicola
Barkers Behindlings and Kazuo Ishiguros Never Let Me Go
Nick Turner (Liverpool Edge Hill) Moral Realism, Ethics and the Contemporary British
Novel
Martin Ryle (Sussex) British fiction and the latest crisis of capitalism
Gender violence
Beatriz Dominguez Garcia (Huelva, Spain) Memory and Erasure Atkinsons Started
Early, Took My Dog
Lin Pettersson (Malaga, Spain) Neo-Victorian Reworkings of the Public/Private
Dichotomy: Private Life on Public Display in Emma Donoghues The Sealed Letter
Monica Calvo-Pascual (Zaragoza, Spain) Writing the Self: Explorations on Eating
Disorders in Contemporary Womens Narratives
Crossing Continents
Catherine Frances (UCLancs) Transatlantic Stagings: New American Drama on the
English Stage
Deirdre Flynn (Limerick) Postmodern Literature: Murakamis International Chronicle
Lorenzo Mari (Bologna, Italy) Anatomy of a new appearance: Revisiting Italian colonial
legacies in Hisham Matars novels
11.00-11.30 coffee break
11.30 1 Panel 4
Historical relations
Maria Jess Martinez-Alfaro (Zaragoza, Spain) Otherness and the Holocaust Fairy
Tale: The Case of Louise Murphys The True Story of Hansel and Gretel
Rosario Arias (Malaga, Spain) Family Politics and History in Hilary Mantels Fiction
Sneha Kar Chaudhuri (West Bengal, India) Neo-Victorian Interventions in the 21st
century Opium Novels
Authorship
Bridget Vincent (Melbourne, Australia) The Vicarious Voice: Poetry and Public Apology
in the 21st century
Mark OConnell (Trinity College Dublin) JM Coetzee and Roberto Bolano: Vicarious
Memoir in Summertime and The Savage Detectives
Kaja Marczewska (Durham) Plagiarism now: conceptualising contemporary aesthetics
of (un)creativity
Margaret Atwoods Eco-narratives
Fiona Tolan (Liverpool John Moores) Debt and Disaster in Margaret Atwoods 21st
century writings

Hilary Savory (Lincoln) "This Unlikely and Somehow Disturbing Location": The
"Ustopian" Garden in the Speculative Fiction of Margaret Atwood'.
Louise Squire (Surrey) A Discourse of Death and Environmental Crisis in 21st century
fiction

1.00-2 lunch The Shed

2.00-2.45 Poetry reading: Tishani Doshi
3-4pm Panel 5
9/11

Josh Robinson (Cambridge) Lyric Poetry after 9/11

Chung-jen Chan (Taipei, Taiwan) London is Waiting for its Bomb: History, Memory
and Fear of Destruction in Ian McEwans Saturday

Genre
John McKay (Birkbeck) Never judge a book by its cover: the Genreification of Louise
Welsh
Rhys Williams (Warwick) China Miville, Politics & Ontological Mud: Imagining
everything with its trousers down

The Little Stranger

Claire OCallaghan (Leicester) Para-Normal Masculinities: Gender trouble and the
Ghost Story in 21st century writing
Lea Madsen (Malaga, Spain) Exploring Sarah Waters Little Stranger: Exploring the
Neo-Victorian Mode

4.15-4.45 tea break

4.45 5.45 Guest reading: Geoff Dyer
5.45 6.45 drinks at The Shed
7.30pm arrive Charlotte House Hotel (uphill)
8pm conference dinner
Wednesday 18th July
9.30 10.30 Panel 6
Room
Maite Escudero-Alias (Zaragoza, Spain) Beyond Trauma Narrative: Affects and
Attachment in Emma Donoghues Room
Sandra Dinter (Leibniz Hanover, Germany) Its like a TV planet thats all about us:
Postromantic Childhood and Television in Emma Donoghues Room
Urban/city
Berit Michel (Duisburg-Essen, Germany) Urban Complexity: a defining feature in 21st
century Narrative fiction?
Prachi More (Tubingen, Germany) Documenting the Megacity: Urban Topographies in
the 21st century & the Power and Potential of Literary Documentary
Haunting
Catherine Redpath and Carly Stevenson (Lincoln) Explosive Dissociations & Dark
Matter

Timothy Baker (Aberdeen) Northern stories: Sarah Mosss Cold Earth and John
Burnsides A Summer of Drowning

10.30-11.00 coffee break

11- 12.30 Panel 7
Eco

Kate Parry (Lincoln) Ant Perspectives: Humanist, Physicalist and Other Ants in 21st
century Myrmecological Novels
Deborah Lilley (Royal Holloway) John Burnsides Glister and the Contemporary
Pastoral
Carly Stevenson (Lincoln) Monsters, Machines and Mutations in the Post-Millennial
Text

Narrative theory
Caroline Edwards (Lincoln) Towards a Networked Art Form: Hari Kunzru and the
Delinearization of Narrative Time
Cheryl Cliffe (Lincoln) Waves of Remembrance: A Sense of an Ending from Woolf to
Barnes
Lewis Ward (West of England) Trauma and the first-person plural: Aleksandar Hemons
simultaneous multiplication of narrative voices
12.45-1.45 lunch (Barge)
2pm -3.30 panel 8
Post-postmodernism a re-constructive turn?
Irmtraud Huber (Berne) Reconstructive dreams: the fantastic in David Mitchells
number9dream
Kazunari Miyahara (Yamaguchi, Japan) Those sad black names with half a date
dangling after : Reading the Dates and Names in Sebastian Barrys The Secret
Scripture
Martin Eve (Sussex) Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and 21st century
Utopianism
Dave

Iain Robinson (UEA) Apocalypse and Utopia in Will Selfs The Book of Dave: A
Revelation about the Recent Past and the Distant Future
Michelle Braun (Mount Royal, Canada) A Tale of two Daves
Mark West (Glasgow) Hip/Abide/Occupy? : David Foster Wallace and the Politics of
Time

3.30-4.30 closing plenary: Dr Rachel Carroll (Teesside University) Making the Blood Flow
Backward: Disability and the Politics of Representation in Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending.

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