Thursday 15 March 2012

FROM GRANITE TO RAINBOW: TRANSMUTING THE MATERIAL INTO TEXT

A one-day conference on post-1980 writing for postgraduates and early career researchers.
University of East Anglia, Saturday 12th May 2012. 
Keynote speaker: Inga Bryden, Winchester 

Virginia Woolf wrote that the challenge of biography is to represent “that perpetual marriage of granite and rainbow”. In all writing the material world is transmuted into something other than itself, but what is the precise relation between written representation and material object? Does this interconnection allow for an opening of imaginative possibility, or constitute a limiting reification of the organic?

Object histories and material culture studies have recently introduced an emphasis on the material existence of their subjects, but the implications of materiality in a literary context invite further consideration. This conference seeks to explore the workings of this transformation from material to text in post-1980 writing, both fiction and creative non-fiction. 

We would like to encourage interactive papers, especially involving actual objects, and the conference will include a roundtable discussion using props.  Please email abstracts of 250 words for 20-minute papers to Carina Hart and Rebecca Harris at granitetorainbow@gmail.com by 12th March 2012. 

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