CFP: The First World War in European Children's Literature, 1970-2014

International Research Society for Children's Literature

June 27th, 2014

Trinity Long Room Hub

Dublin, Ireland

Deadline for Submission: January 31st, 2014

Website: IRSCL

Papers are invited for a one-day international symposium on the subject of the First World War in late-twentieth and twenty-first century literature for children and young adults. Building on recent research into literary constructions of childhood in the years leading up to and during the Great War, this event will focus on the processes at play in more recent literary production, investigating and comparing representations of the War in materials produced across Europe since the beginning of the so-called ‘post-memory’ period in the 1970s right up until the present day. The symposium will be held in English but we welcome international and comparative perspectives; a particular emphasis will be placed on the translation and transnational reception of children’s war literature.

We invite proposals for twenty-minute papers that engage with any aspect of the representation of the First World War in children’s literature in this period. Proposals might engage with, for example, the works of John Boyne, John Quinn, Aubrey Flegg, Carol Ann Duffy, Michael Morpurgo, Anne-Marie Pol, Paule du Bouchet, Catherine Cuenca, Arthur Ténor , Geert Spillebeen, Klaus Kordon, or Willi Fährmann, and potential topics might include, but are not limited to:

• the challenge of representing horror and violence in children’s war literature.
• family and intergenerational memory.
• challenges specific to representing the First World War to children.
• twin tales: integrating First World War stories into other national and international historical narratives ( the Irish revolutionary period; the Second World War; the Holocaust).
• TV and film adaptations.
• translation and transnational reception
• the use of First World War literature in the classroom.
• graphic novels and picture books.
• crossover texts: teenage experiences of war as ‘adult’ fiction, ‘adult’ war fiction through teenage eyes.

Though the focus of the symposium will be on post-1970 literature, contributions on earlier material may be considered if presented in the context of modern reading culture (reception, belated canonisation, translation and re-translation etc.)

Abstracts (max. 300 words) should be submitted by e-mail to both Nóra de Buiteléir (debuitn@tcd.ie) and Nora Maguire (nomaguir@tcd.ie) by January 31, 2014.

21st IRSCL Conference: Children's Literature and Media Cultures

21st IRSCL conference

10th-14th August 2013

2013 Congress, Maastricht, The Netherlands

Theme: Children’s Literature and Media Cultures

The 21st biannual IRSCL conference will be be hosted this year by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of Maastricht University in Maastricht, the Netherlands, on August 10th -14th, 2013.

Contemporary children and adolescents divide their time over many different media. These media do not develop in isolation. Rather, they shape each other by continually exchanging content and modes of mediation. This conference addresses the exchanges between children’s literature and adjacent newer and older media (oral narrative, theatre, film, radio, TV, digital media).

Media are best defined as cultural practices that forge specific links between senders and receivers of messages, facilitating certain types of communicative behavior. As newer media tend to imitate if not absorb older media, they force older media to continually reassert their uniqueness and indispensability in a rapidly changing media landscape. How has children’s literature staked out its own niche in these historically variable ‘mediascapes’ in the course of time? How do electronic and digital media affect children’s emergent literacy and literary competence? How have children’s books and the newer electronic and digital media impacted on children’s play? What sort of communicative behaviors are facilitated by the diverse media available to children and adolescents nowadays? Which ethical and political issues are raised by the fact that children’s literature has to share its claim to the audience’s attention with a whole gamut of alternative media? These questions are central to the 21st biennual conference of the IRSCL.

The aim of the conference is to strengthen the ever closer ties between children’s literature scholars and media experts, and to bridge the gap between hermeneutic methods from the humanities and empirical, experimental methods from the social sciences.

 
The conference will include the following tracks:

I Historical Perspectives:

• orality and literacy
• the changing place of children’s books within shifting media ecologies
• adaptations of children’s literature to other media
• remediation (the absorption and reorganization of older media in newer children’s media)
• children’s media and children’s play
• narratives across media (picture books, comic strips, graphic novels, games etc.)

II Sociological, Ethnographic and Cultural Studies’ Perspectives

• children and online communities
• fan practices (fan videos, comics, fiction, role play and costume play)
• age and media: how do media solidify and destabilize distinctions between age groups?
• the circulation of social stereotypes (class, ethnicity, gender, nationality, religion) between children’s media
• migration, globalization and children’s media

III Pedagogical Perspectives

• emergent literacy and literary competence  in a multimedia  world
• the dynamic acquisition of media literacy
• the acquisition of cultural literacy through diverse children’s media
• online contexts for promoting children’s literature
• digital environments  for researching children’s literature

IV Ethical and Political Perspectives

• strategies of (dis)information in children’s media
• children’s media and issues of  age-appropriateness (media moral panics)
• the ethics of social media
• children’s media and global inequality (digital divides)

V  Other related topics

Internatl. Research Society for Children's Literature CFP

Call for papers

The 21^st biennial conference of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature on

Children’s Literature and Media Cultures

will be hosted by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University, The Netherlands

Conference Convenor: Lies Wesseling

Conference dates: August 10-14, 2013

Conference theme:

Contemporary children and adolescents divide their time over many different media. These media do not develop in isolation. Rather, they shape each other by continually exchanging content and modes of mediation. This conference addresses the exchanges between children’s literature and adjacent media (oral narrative, theatre, film, radio, TV, digital media).

Media are best defined as cultural practices that forge specific links between senders and receivers of messages, facilitating certain types of communicative behavior. As newer media tend to imitate, if not absorb, older media, they force older media to reassert their uniqueness and indispensability in a rapidly changing media landscape. How has children’s literature staked out its own niche in these historically variable ‘mediascapes’ in the course of time? How do electronic and digital media affect children’s emergent literacy and literary competence? How have children’s books and the newer electronic and digital media impacted on children’s play? What sort of communicative behaviors are facilitated by the diverse media available to children and adolescents nowadays? Which ethical and political issues are raised by the fact that children’s literature has to share its claim to the audience’s attention with a whole gamut of alternative media? These questions are central to the 21st biannual conference of the IRSCL.

The aim of the conference is to strengthen the ever closer ties between children’s literature scholars and media experts, and to bridge the gap between hermeneutic methods from the humanities and empirical, experimental methods from the social sciences.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Adriana Bus, Gudrun Marci-Boehncke, Jackie Marsh, Kerry Mallan, Junko Yokota

For further information about the conference, the call for papers, and the submission of abstracts, go to: www.irscl2013.com