Interdisciplinary Conference
‘Play, Recreation, and Experimentation:
Literature and the Arts since the Early Modern Times’
8-9 Dec 2017
Hosted by the Centre for Modern European Literature (CMEL) at the University of Kent, Canterbury, with the generous support of CMEL, the MHRA conference award, and the British Comparative Literature Association (BCLA).
venue: Kentish Barn seminar room, Canterbury Cathedral Lodge (enter via the main Cathedral gate and follow the signage)
(*spaces limited, early registration strongly encouraged)
Conference schedule:
8 Dec 2017
1-1:30pm: coffee and registration
1:30pm start of conference
1:30-2:20pm Keynote 1: Peter Dayan (Edinburgh): ‘What were they playing at?’ Chance in art, and how Dada put it in its place
Chair: Xiaofan Amy Li (Kent)
2:30 – 4pm Panel 1. Poetry
Chair: Xiaofan Amy Li (Kent)
Richard David Williams (SOAS): Rajput Play: practicing aesthetics in courtly culture
Kate Costello (Oxford): Machine Translation, Cyberbabble, That Ringing in My Ears: On Multimedia Practices in Hsia Yu’s Experimental Poetry
4 -4:30pm coffee/tea break
4:30-6pm: Panel 2. Space and Aesthetics
Chair: Samuel McAuliffe (Goldsmiths)
Lucie Glasheen (Queen Mary): Play, transformation and the re-newing of urban space in the children’s cartoon ‘Casey Court’
Jennifer Gustar (University of British Colombia): Ludic Feminism and Literary Liminality
Yaniv Hagbi (Amsterdam): The Horror of the Errorless Play: Georges Perec, Dennis Potter, and William Golding
9 Dec 2017
9:30-10:20 Keynote 2: Ulrike Zitzlsperger (Exeter): Capital Games: The Politics and Culture of Recreation in Interwar Berlin
Chair: Reinhard M. Moeller (Goethe University, Frankfurt)
10:30-12:00 Panel 3. Playful Qualities
Chair: Barbara Bollig (University of Hagen)
Reinhard M. Moeller (Goethe University, Frankfurt): Playing, Experimenting and Coping with Chance: Serendipity as a Creative Paradigm in Literature and Theory
Samuel McAuliffe (Goldsmiths): Decorum and Insolence in Robert Walser’s Dialectic of Manners
Cornelia Rémi (LMU Munich and University of Tübingen): Radical Playfulness: World Hacks and Survival in Contemporary German Writing
12:00-1:00pm lunch with coffee/tea
1:15-2:05pm Keynote 3: Thomas Karshan (UEA): Nabokov Playing on the Flowered Brink of Parody: Teaching through Play
chair: Lucie Glasheen (Queen Mary)
2:15-4:15pm Panel 4. Philosophy and literature in play
Chair: Xiaofan Amy Li (Kent)
Jordi Larios (St Andrews): Benjamín Jarnés’s playful fictionalization of Ortega’s ‘raciovitalismo’: Viviana y Merlín (1929)
Elodie Laugt (St Andrews): Senses of ‘play’ at work in Jacques Rancière’s reading of Mallarmé
Barbara Bollig (University of Hagen): Toying with Text(ure)s: Un-Mythicising Margwelaschwili’s “Medea” and the Ontotext
4:15-4:45pm coffee/tea and end of conference
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