CALL FOR PAPERS
University of Iceland, Reykjavík, Iceland
25-27 May 2022
The conference ‘Emotion and the Medieval Self in Northern Europe’ is the final event in a funded international research project. It aims to bring together a broad range of scholars working on emotion and/or selfhood in medieval literature to explore the interconnections between emotions and the medieval self across Northern and Western Europe. Selfhood is understood here as a literary selfhood, i.e. the narrative representation of a presumed subject. We are looking to foster comparative dialogue regarding the multilingual and cross-cultural representation of emotion and selfhood across Northern Europe and beyond.
Topics of interest could include (but are not limited to):
- The performance of emotion and its relation to selfhood
- Narrative staging of emotion and the presumed self
- Cultural contingencies of narrative emotionality and self-representation
- The borders of the narrative self and the illusion of ‘interior’ emotionality
- Embodied emotions
- Historicity and fictionality of emotion
- Emotion and audience reception
Plenary speakers include:
- Guillemette Bolens, Université de Genève
- Gareth Evans, University of Oxford
Proposals are invited on any of the topics above. To submit a proposal please send 300 word abstract and a brief curriculum vitae (max one page) to medievalemotion@gmail.com by 15 December 2021. General inquiries should be sent to sifr@hi.is. Notifications will be sent out by 1 Feb 2021. The conference is planned as an in-person event and registration is free of charge. The organisers plan to publish a special issue of selected papers in a peer-reviewed journal. Further information about the project can be found here: https://medievalemotion.hi.is/