RENAISSANCE SOCIETY OF AMERICA – DUBLIN, 2022
Call for papers:
VOCAL ENCOUNTERS IN PRE-MODERN FRANCE
Proposed session(s) for the Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting:
RSA DUBLIN, March 30-April 2, 2022
Co-organizers:
Andreea Marculescu & Corinne Noirot
From sermons to lectiones to street criers or performances, the pre-modern world is dominated by auralscapes, by modes of hearing and listening shaping most fields of knowledge and activity. What happens when such an aural culture encounters forms of alterity? What ‘other’ or ‘othered’ voices are heard, ventriloquized, or rendered as forms of presence, in pre-modern (i.e., late-medieval/early-modern) French literature? And ‘other’ to whom, in the first place: the author(s), sources of patronage, the reader(s)…? How do authors invent, interrogate, complicate, or model the act of listening to the Other? What modalities of listening stand out? And for what purposes are those voices echoed?
Submissions addressing one or more of the following topics are invited:
Textual ways of listening to or making other(ed) voices heard
Otherness as religious, ethnic, national, sexual, racialized, gendered, etc.
Polyphony and plurivocality
Non-verbal vocal expression and communication
Non-human voices, such as monsters, animals, or deities
Spectral voices
Children’s speech
Hierarchies, power structures, control of speech
Dialects, sociolects, idiolects, and other linguistic constructs
Political dissidence
Deviance and heterodoxy
Theorizing the voice of the Other
Voices of ostracized, persecuted, or marginalized communities
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We encourage submissions addressing different literary genres and theoretical approaches, ranging from – but not limited to – rhetorical analyses (such as poetic personae or prosopopoeia) to discourse analysis, biopolitics to posthumanism, sensory history to cognitive literary studies.
By July 30, 2021, please send a paper title (15 words max), 130-to-150-word abstract, and 2-page CV, along with complete contact information (name, title, affiliation, electronic and mailing addresses) to Corinne Noirot (cnoirot [at] vt.edu) and Andreea Marculescu (andreea.marculescu [at] ou.edu).
Only English-language submissions will be accepted, as this topic may lead to eventual publication in an edited volume.
For more information on RSA abstract expectations, see: https://www.rsa.org/page/AnnualMeetingSubmissionsGuide#abstract1
Nota bene:
All participants are responsible for their own conference expenses. The RSA offers no travel funds to join the Annual Meeting.