Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Conference, 5th-7th November: Call For Papers

Fractured Narratives: Pinter, Postmodernism and the Postcolonial World

Call for Papers:
The conference is scheduled to take place in the Drama Department at Goldsmiths College in New Cross, South London from Thursday 5th to Saturday 7th November 2009.

Papers are invited for the following panels:
• Narrativity in postmodern drama
• Diasporic narratives
• Terror and territory in postcolonial narratives
• Writing across generic borders
• Intercultural performance and writing
• Postcolonial aesthetics in contemporary fiction
• Postcolonial performance and the fracturing of narrative

If you have an idea for another panel that addresses issues pertinent to the themes of the conference, please email us a proposal

Please email proposals (no more than 200 words) for papers or workshops to pintercentre@gold.ac.uk


Registration fees

Full conference fee: £100
Concession fee (Equity members and students): £50

One-day ticket: £40
One-day concession ticket: £20


Conference Convenor: Professor Robert Gordon
Conference Administrator: Ben Pester

New Event!

‘Berlin-London-Kampal-Minsk: Four Writers, Four Cities: Collaborative Writing for Performance’, 5pm, Friday, 5th June, Goldsmiths College, University of London

As a result of an informal conversation in 2005, four playwrights have embarked on a journey together to write a play, discovering each other’s cultures and approaches to theatre along the way. They meet in each other’s cities, talk to leading theatre makers there and explore why and how each playwright writes for performance.

‘The play’s the thing’ - but the practical question of how four established playwrights from different cultures work together puts into perspective a wider set of questions about intercultural dialogue: Why attempt it? What have they discovered? About themselves as well as the others? What connects them across their differences? And what sort of production will this literally cosmopolitan play become?

On Friday 5th June, the Harold Pinter Centre will be hosting an opportunity to find out what has been achieved so far and about the personal and practical challenges involved. Playwrights David Lindemann (winner of the Stückemarkt, Berlin Theatertreffen) and Gabriel Gbadamosi (the Pinter Centre’s AHRC Creative Fellow) together with dramaturg/administrator Terry Ezra will be talking about and reading fragments of the playwrights’ work, illustrated by video footage and photographs.

Afterwards there will be the opportunity to talk to the playwrights directly over wine and something to eat.

‘Berlin-London-Kampal-Minsk: Four Writers, Four Cities: Collaborative Writing for Performance’, 5-7pm, Friday, 5th June, Ben Pimlott Building, Goldsmiths College, University of London. For directions, see: www.gold.ac.uk/find-us/

If you would like to attend this event or to be kept up to date with developments in the project, please mail: terryezra@hotmail.com

Videos

About the Project

'Beyond the Linear Narrative...' is a 3 year AHRC funded research project being carried out by the Pinter Centre for Performance and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Taking Pinter’s work as a starting point for, or symbol of, the fracturing of narrative across many art-forms in twentieth and twenty-first century work, this research project asks a series of questions about the links between inter-cultural and political change and the emergence, or re-emergence, of non-linear and fractured narrative.

Focussing on literature and performance, particularly in postcolonial and diasporic contexts, it will ask why non-linear narrative has been such a feature of this period’s artistic production. If these fractured and experimental forms are a response to the breakdown of the west’s grand narratives of progress, what forms of resistance or revision do they provide?

In what ways can they be seen to emerge from the increasing interaction of different cultures in the colonial, post-colonial and post-Cold War world? How do such fractured narratives work in postcolonial and diasporic writing and performance? How can these fractured forms explore our culturally diverse society’s competing and conflicting narratives?

The project addresses the ways changing understandings of the self have contributed to the disruption of linear narrative, and in particular, how fractured narratives enable the move away from the Cartesian mind/body duality to an understanding of the embodied self, making the writing of the body such an important element in contemporary performance, fiction and life-writing.

About the Pinter Centre

The Pinter Centre for Performance and Creative Writing is an interdisciplinary research centre at Goldsmiths University involving principally the Departments of English & Comparative Literature and of Drama, with links with Media and Communications, Music, PACE and the Digital Studios.

In line with Harold Pinter’s keen awareness of the centrality of political issues, the Centre is particularly committed to looking at postcolonial and diasporic literature and performance, and the ways in which contemporary creativity is forging new forms that respond to the cultural diversity of the world in which we live. It also has a strong interest in questions of gender, and writing and performing the body.

The Pinter Centre Website

Pinter Centre Events Calendar