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List of workshops

The 90s was a decade of social, political and environmental upheaval, precariously spiced with a handful of millennial angst. Unlike the 70s and 80s where British youth had looked to American fiction "to depict the urban scene" ("Shopping in Space", Elizabeth Young 1992), in the 90s it suddenly became "cool" to write and read British fiction. Innovative writers like Irvine Welsh, Helen Zahavi and John King emerged to tell the stories of the "jilted generation", a multi-racial generation of young, clubbing, socially cynical yet culturally aware adults, who wanted to read about what was happening on the high streets, in the tower-blocks, housing estates and in the clubs of Britain.

In a culture that has become increasingly "eyeminded," to use John Dos Passos's 1920's label, literary, historical and cinematic representations intertwine, overlap and converse throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Both within and outside its borders, English-language films in general and Hollywood productions in particular have fertilized or infected readings in more traditional media and within classrooms across Europe, whether in the shape of novels or historical documents adapted to film, films resulting in novelizations, fiction or historical writings incorporating cinematic techniques and subject matter, or genres positioning themselves along the text/film continuum. This workshop accordingly seeks to explore the (trans)national relationships between the worlds of film, literature and/or history, from a variety of angles such as film adaptations, literary/historical figures on film, (auto)biographies of film stars, (trans)national film reception, film in the inter/national classroom, literary theory and film theory, representations of race and ethnicity, representations of the body, and more.

For anyone studying the nature of political, cultural or social identity, Canada has been a valuable 'laboratory' since its creation in 1867. Here, a myriad of ethnic, regional and national identities compete for hegemony. The most commonly known dichotomy is the one between Francophones and Anglophones, but also the relationships between the United States and Canada, native peoples and non-native Canadians, and between different ethnic groups make for highly interesting case studies. Canadians have expressed their identity/ies in many and varied ways; they include official symbolism, literature, visual arts, music, political behaviour, etc. The workshop attempts to embrace as many as possible of these areas and facilitate discussion about identity-building processes, unity in diversity, conflict management and other related issues.

The study of the mass media and their cultural products has often revolved around the popularity of media artifacts in a variety of approaches sometimes grouped together and labeled populist. Yet within or in relation to such approaches there has been an ongoing engagement with dichotomies such as mass / cult, broad (appeal) / niche (market), underground / mainstream. A related set of questions concerns how recent developments in media and communication technologies have (or haven’t) democratized technology through the egalitarianism of access to media previously available in physically distinct spheres. What often seems to be at stake in much work on popular culture and the media is thus an interest in what we may understand by popular, and consequently how the popular is constituted. Is there a such thing as non-mass mediated popular culture? Is there a such thing as a non-popular mass mediated cultural artifact? Do the mass media need the popular? Does the popular need the mass media? What is the relationship between the form of popularity and specific media and the constitution of publics/markets in relation to the medium and/or the product/artifact? Answers to these questions can be explored in various periods of popular culture. In this workshop, speakers are invited to investigate issues suggested by these questions, focusing on popular culture and media since the 1960s.

Since the events of 9/11, the political and cultural debate has been dominated by the issue of terror. Taking its point of departure in discussions of literature, this workshop seeks to consider the variousaspects of terror which have been the focus of recent debates, as well as those which have been omitted or occluded.

This workshop examines the problems students have in writing at university level, particularly when working in a second language, and examines approaches to helping them to improve their writing skills. Participants in the workshop are invited to contribute their own teaching experiences and suggestions in the final discussion.

Workshop papers will focus on literature and language in Ireland or by Irish writers working abroad during the period 1750-1900. The workshop will seek to establish the relationship between society, discourse, and linguistic/social cognition in an historical period of nationalism and colonialism in Ireland.

The workshop session is an experiment in hands-on analysis. The workshop invites participants to focus on a piece of short prose by William Carleton (1794-1869). Carleton wrote through a period of shift - social, cultural, linguistic, and economic, etc. - and his was one of the first Hiberno-Irish voices of Irish literature in English. The workshop will examine Carleton's responses to his colonized inheritance. The object of this experiment in workshop organization is to gather a group of scholars who share an interest in Carleton's writing and/or issues raised by his works, in order to examine a text from linguistic and literary perspectives, and develop strategies of analysis.