III INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE VISIONES DE LO FANTÁSTICO:
“Horror and its Shapes”
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
28, 29 and 30 of June 2017
Since its birth, the fantastic has been an excellent way to explore our fears of the unknown – “the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind”, as Lovecraft stated in his well-known essay The Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927). The aim of the fantastic is to destabilise the codes that we have established to understand and represent the real: when we are confronted with the conflictive coexistence of the possible and the impossible in a realistic world like ours, our certainties about the real stop working. Faced with this, fear is our only defence.
This is the type of experience that we want to examine in this conference. For this reason, we will exclude forms of fear that arise from a natural source (serial killers, terrorism, animal attacks, etc.). Instead, we encourage reflections on the multiple ways through which what we have called “metaphysical fear”– an effect that is inherent and exclusive to the fantastic – is spread, generated by the transgressive irruption of the impossible.
Furthermore, we want to dedicate an important part of this conference to pay tribute to two masters of the fantastic: H.P. Lovecraft, as 2017 will mark the 80th anniversary of his death; and Cristina Fernández Cubas, a key figure of this genre in Spanish literature recently awarded with the Spanish Literary Prize Nacional de Narrativa.
Our keynotes will be four specialists in the fantastic, horror and the work of the two authors to whom tribute is being paid: Gilles Menegaldo (Université de Poitiers), Ángeles Encinar (Saint Louis University-Madrid), Paul Julian Smith (City University of New York), Cecilia Eudave (Universidad de Guadalajara-México) and Maria Beville (Limerick Institute of Technology).
The Grupo de Estudios sobre lo Fantástico (GEF) invites the submission of abstracts focusing on Horror and its shapes in modern and postmodern fantastic fiction (20th and 21st centuries), including narrative as well as theatre, cinema, comic, TV or videogames, in any language and from any country.
Main themes:
- Theoretical perspectives on horror
- The rhetoric of fear
- From classical fears to postmodern horror
- The monster as the fantastic anomaly
- Space as source of horror
- Horror and its boundaries
- H. P. Lovecraft
- Cristina Fernández Cubas
To participate :
Abstracts of a maximum of 300 words (including title, author and affiliation) must be submitted to:
[email protected]
Deadline for submissions is January 1, 2017. The organizing committee will notify the reception of proposals, and those accepted will be notified before February 1, 2017.
Presentations must not exceed 20 minutes. Languages of communications will be Spanish, Catalan, Galician, English, French, Italian, and Portuguese.
Any researcher willing to be included in the congress minutes must send their papers within a deadline to be notified. The academic committee will evaluate the papers and select the best proposals for their inclusion in the minutes.
Register:
Up until March 15, 2017, registration rate is 90 euros, 50 euros for attendees. After this date and up to June 1, registration fee will be 100 euros, and 60 euros for attendees. Once you have been notified the acceptance of your proposal, you can register via wire transfer to the following account:
IBAN ES73 2100 3675 7122 0020 5430 // BIC CAIXESBBXXX
Important dates and deadlines:
- January 1, 2017: deadline for submission of proposals
- February 1, 2017: deadline for notification of acceptance
- March 15, 2017: first registration deadline
- June 1, 2017: second registration deadline