CFP: "The Oral, The Written, and Other Verbal Media: Interfaces and Audiences"

[Denis Salter]

Call for Proposals for "The Oral, The Written, and Other Verbal Media: Interfaces and Audiences": A Conference and Festival

University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, June 19-21, 2008

The organizers of the first international, interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and trans-historical conference and festival focusing on the interface of the oral and the written invite proposals for participation. In keeping with the plenitude of modes and forms of oral and textual discourse, the organizers will welcome diverse modes of presentation, including, but not limited to, oral performances, academic talks and panels, readers' theatre (dramatized readings of scholarly dialogues), workshops, and projects-in-progress sessions. Our goal is to generate conversations among performers, audiences, and scholars, including graduate students, from a wide range of academic disciplines, cultures, and historical periods, and to foster opportunities for collaboration among those interested in speech and other voicings on the page. Because Saskatoon is located in a territory highly populated with Indigenous peoples whose oral traditions are still vital and developing, the festival will highlight Aboriginal performers in a Crow Hop Café featuring storytelling, Indigenous Hip Hop, music, and other oral performances.

Are you studying legal contracts in medieval Europe as they move from the oral to the written, or Indigenous treaty narratives from decolonizing parts of the world? Are you asking what happens to oral stories when they are transmuted into fiction, drama, printed poetry, or visual media? Are you trying to reconstruct the oral delivery of sermons or epics on the basis of their printed forms? Are you working with Elders on the transcription of oral narratives, and would you like to discuss successes and obstacles in a workshop with others engaged or interested in this sort of work? Are you an oral storyteller/keeper or dub or spoken word poet interested in talking about your practice with scholars? Do you have other ideas for workshops related to the conference and festival theme? If you see your work reflected in these or related questions, please contact us.

Other issues and topics that might be addressed:
. aesthetics, ethics, & politics at the interface of the oral & the written
. the body &/or gender at the interface of the oral & the written
. contesting writing's empire
. memory and commemoration at the interface of the oral and the written
. oral occasions, contexts, circumstances & modes of public address as represented in writing
. oral and written poetics & modes of meaning-making
. orality, textuality, & authority; orality, textuality, & modernity
. orature, writing, and genre: sacred narratives, proverbs, jokes, ballads, sagas, legends, folklore, sermons, oratory, & disputations
. recording oral narratives for community histories or school curriculum
. translation/transcreation of orature
. the oral and the written in visual arts
. strategies for textualizing the oral
. what audiences are well or ill served by textualizing the oral

Please forward inquiries and proposals (300-500 words) by 31 December 2006 to either of

Professor Susan Gingell
Department of English
University of Saskatchewan
Saskatoon, SK Canada S7N 5A5
sag178 at mail.usask.ca

or

Professor Neal Mcleod
Department of Indigenous Studies
First People's House of Learning
Peter Gzowski College
Enweying Building
1600 West Bank Drive
Peterborough, ON K9J 7B8
nealmcleod at trentu.ca


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" . . . we have to accept that our tragedy lies always in our past, that we have to live with our ancestors' folly and suffer for it, just as they, in their turn, suffered, and as we, through our vanity and ignorance, ensure the pain and suffering of our own children. How to correct history, that's the thing."--Robert Fisk
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"In 2005, the world . . . pass[ed] the trillion-dollar mark in the expenditure, annually, on arms. We're fighting for $50 billion annually for foreign aid for Africa: the military total outstrips human need by 20 to 1. Can someone please explain to me our contemporary balance of values?" --Stephen Lewis.
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Denis Salter
Professor of Theatre
McGill University
853 Sherbrooke St. West
Montréal, QC
H3A 2T6
Tel (514) 398 6592 
Regular Fax (514) 398 8146
Computer Fax (309) 294 0444
denis.salter at mcgill.ca
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