Forbidden Fruit: The censorship of literature & information for young people

 

Southport, UK

19^th & 20^th June 2008

 

This two-day conference offers an exciting opportunity for practitioners from libraries, information services and education, researchers from a range of disciples, publishers, authors and policymakers from all sectors interested in to meet, network and share experiences.  The conference will focus on the censorship of print, electronic and other literary and information resources for young people.

 

This will be a truly international event with speakers from the UK, the United States, Malta, the Philippines, Greece, South Africa and Canada.

 

Topics include:

• Graphic novels
• Gay & lesbian fiction
• Students' perspectives on book banning
• Attitudes towards censorship in Malta, the Philippines and Greece
• The history of censorship
• Internet and mobile censorship
• The availability of controversial titles
• Pre-censorship
• Professional attitudes towards censorship.

 

There will also be talks by young adult authors:

• David Belbin
• Bali Rai
• Claire Hennessy

 

Cost for full conference: £190 (£90 for students)

Cost for one day: £100 (£50 for students)

 

For more information, go to the conference wiki http://forbiddenfruitconference.wetpaint.com/

Or email ffruit@hotmail.co.uk

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CFP: Contemporary Gothic Science Fiction (11/31/2007; collection) Papers are sought for an uncontracted critical collection exploring gothic traces in science fiction film and text since 1980.  'Gothic science fiction' is a hybrid genre, even arguably oxymoronic: as Fred Botting notes, unlike 'gothic', science fiction usually projects its contemporary anxieties onto the future rather than the past.  Recent forms of science fiction like alternative history 'steampunk' may unsettle this contradiction.  Papers are invited which explore or challenge this hybrid category.

© Almacan 2006

Gothic tropes in contemporary science fiction can express a wealth of contemporary anxieties over gender, race, class, sexuality, and age.  Monstrous transformations and disintegrations write large the dreads of each period.  Such anxieties are also written within the very spaces of text and film, with Anthony Vidler’s 'architectural uncanny' embodying ambivalence over urban change.

Chris Baldick argues that Gothic texts comprise a 'fearful sense of inheritance in time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing one another to produce an impression of sickening descent into "disintegration"'. (Baldick 1992 xiii).  The Gothic text often flourishes in spaces that imprison or restrict efforts to move or exist comfortably and that the combination of both circumstances creates the feeling of disintegration or fragmentation. This recurrent preoccupation and fascination with psychological or mental instability is a notable trope in the Gothic novel; as Linda Dryden notes, that 'Gothic fiction is often a literature of transformations where identity is unstable' (Dryden 19). Catherine Spooner sees the contemporary Gothic  as preoccupied by ‘the legacies of the past and its burdens on the present; the radically provisional or divided or 'other'; the preoccupation with bodies that are modified, grotesque or diseased (Spooner 2006: 8). The key word is 'transformation', of body or mind.

Following a recent successful conference at Napier University, Edinburgh, this uncontracted collection invites abstracts of 300 words on different aspects of contemporary Gothic science fiction, engaging with literary texts and films produced since 1980. 

 Possible subjects for papers include, but are not limited to:

1)      Gothic monstrosity and gender in science fiction

2)      Gothic tropes enacting anxieties over gender/class/race/sexuality

3)      Anthony Vidler’s “architectural uncanny”

4)      Intersections between Moers’ ‘female gothic’ and contemporary texts

5)      ‘terror’ versus ‘horror’ in recent texts

6)      China Mieville

7)      M. John Harrison

8)      The Matrix

9)      Iain M. Banks

10)  Richard Morgan

11)  James Blaylock

12)  Maurice Renard

13)  Richard Matheson

14)  William Gibson and later revisions of cyberpunk gothic

15)  ‘steampunk’ science fiction