Colloque : "Genre Studies: Transforming/Challenging Generic Boundaries"
Tunis
PRESENTATION
A growing theoretical interest in genres is emerging in culture, history and literature. Indeed ancient, modern and postmodern notions of genres are intertwined and transformed into novel genres. Biographies, autobiographies and coming-of age stories are blurred into one composite. Storytelling acquires a testimonial dimension in the guise of Freud’s talking cure. Fiction and history are blurred into historical fiction about ancient and modern time periods.
The historical novelist and the cultural materialist produce one text challenging the generic boundaries of fiction, non-fiction, literature and culture. Such transformations highlight the peculiarity of generic instability of genres as well as constructing genres as hybrid and various. “A new genre” asserts Tvetzan Todorov “is always the transformation of one or several old genres: by inversion, by displacement, by combination”[1].
Consequently literary genres evolve and are “ reborn and renewed at every stage in the development of literature (…)This constitutes the life of the genre (…) A genre lives in the present, but always remembers its past, its beginning. Genre is representative of creative memory in the process of literary development”[2]. Literary genres therefore possess a life of their own.
AXIS
Thus this project aims to clarify the status of contemporary genres and genre studies yet it does not target a historical, typological or epistemological approaches to genres. It rather deals with transformations of traditional genres and sub-genres as caused by challenges imposed by novel studies. We seek to provoke an interdisciplinary study of genre that encompasses a theoretical, diachronic, synchronic and social analysis. Scholars and researchers can cover, but are not limited to the following themes:
History of genre
Genre and ESP
Aesthetic of Genre
Genre: Norms/Exception
Globalization and literary genre
Approach to Genre
Theory of genre
Sociology of Genre
Genre analysis
Memory and Genre
Fuctional Systemic Approach to Genre
Genre: readers, writers, users
Genre pedagogies
Genre vs content
Genres:Varities/peculiarities
Travel literature and genre
Articles should be sent to: blurredgenre@gmail.com
CALENDAR
Proposal submission deadline: October15th, 2018
Full paper submission deadline: November 15th, 2018
NOTES
[1] The Origin of Genre (161)
[2] Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (106). Bakhtin