Oxford English Graduate Conference on 'Progress', 3 June 2016

(deadline: 19 February 2016)

full name / name of organization:
gota Mrton / University of Oxford
contact email:
agota.marton@ell.ox.ac.uk
OXFORD ENGLISH GRADUATE CONFERENCE 3 JUNE 2016: PROGRESS
When any real progress is made, we learn and unlearn anew what we thought we knew
before. (Henry David Thoreau)
Throughout history the complex and contested idea of progress has held wide-ranging
implications for literature and literary criticism. We see the meanings and consequences
of progress translated across world literature, from The Pilgrim's Progress to the Futurist
Manifesto; Renaissance Humanism to the Post-Human; from colonialism to postcolonial
literature and theory.
The Oxford English Graduate Conference 2016 invites you to explore and dismantle
progress in literature and literary criticism. What do we mean when we talk about
progress? Progress for whom and towards what? In what ways might an investment in
progress have been radically compromised by recent geopolitical events? These
questions are open for debate, and we look forward to engaging with your ideas
throughout this one-day conference. Contributors might consider, but are not limited to,
the following:
Scientific progress and literature
Technological advancement
Internet/social media
Digital humanities
Impact of Cinema/home media
Formal progress
Readers literal progression through a text
Experimental writing
Narrative (e.g. linearity/non-linearity)
Intertextuality

 Reading difficult texts

Period-specific conceptions of progress
Meaning of progress throughout history
Value of progress as theory of history/literature
Progress as ideology
Cultural degeneration/improvement
Meaning of contemporary or avant-garde
Literary & cultural criticism
Function of criticism in society
Notions of taste/the correction of taste (T.S. Eliot)
Leaps forward/steps backwards
Literary activism (Can literature change the world?)
Interdisciplinarity
This one day conference will be held in the University of Oxford English Faculty on Friday
3 June 2016. We welcome proposals for twenty-minute papers, to be delivered as part of
panels of three. Individual proposals (of 250 words) are accepted, but panel proposals (of
500 words) from three speakers, for three papers that interact under a common theme,
are also strongly encouraged.
Please send all submissions to progress.conference@ell.ox.ac.uk by Friday 19 February
2016 and for more information, see: https://progressconference.wordpress.com/.
cfp categories:
african-american
american
bibliography_and_history_of_the_book
childrens_literature
classical_studies
cultural_studies_and_historical_approaches
ecocriticism_and_environmental_studies
eighteenth_century
ethnicity_and_national_identity

film_and_television
gender_studies_and_sexuality
graduate_conferences
humanities_computing_and_the_internet
interdisciplinary
medieval
modernist studies
poetry
popular_culture
postcolonial
religion
renaissance
rhetoric_and_composition
romantic
science_and_culture
theatre
theory
travel_writing
twentieth_century_and_beyond
victorian