Nadine Gordimer : Jump and Other Stories

Deadline for proposals : 30 June 2018

Keynote speakers : Professor Rita Barnard, University of Pennsylvania, Professor Stephen Clingman, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

This international conference seeks to offer new perspectives on Nadine Gordimer’s collection of short stories Jump and Other Stories, published in 1991, the year Nadine Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Contributors are invited to adopt a variety of approaches that will illuminate the main themes, narrative strategies, literary traditions, modes of writing, generic traits, structural principles and any other component of the collection. We encourage contributors to take into account the whole collection rather than individual stories. Proposals may focus on, but are not restricted to, the following topics :

– home and homecoming
– politics and poetics
– post-apartheid literature
– specificity of the genre of the short story
– violence
– polyphony / multivocality
– silence and the unsaid
– Nadine Gordimer as an “interpreter of South Africa” (Clingman)
– self-reflexivity
– fragmentation vs unity
– vulnerability
– the local and the global
– the ex-centric
– the private and the public
– animality
– horror and ironyAll papers will be delivered in English. They will be peer-reviewed for publication in the scholarly journal CYCNOS, a publication of the Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Récits Cultures Et Sociétés of the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis.

Contributors are invited to send a title and an abstract in English (300 words) along with a short biography (200 words) to Vanessa Guignery and Christian Gutleben by 30 June 2018.