The Following activities have direct and indirect links with AWP Review. Do please contact the organizers if you are interested in participating.
Imagining
Secret Wars While at Peace and Imagining Secret Paths to Peace While at War:
Diplomatic Longing and Propaganda in Espionage Novels
Study Day, March 1, 2013, UFR Études
Anglophones, Université de Paris-Diderot, 10 rue Charles V, 75004 Paris. Please
note that by the time of this journée d’étude the UFR Études Anglophones,
Université de Paris-Diderot will be located in the building Olympe de Gouges,
13 rue Antoine de Baïs, 75013 Paris.
Contact: Mark Meigs
Arts of War and Peace Review On Line and
LARCA (Laboratoire de Recherche sur les Cultures Anglophones) propose a study
day in preparation for a number of Arts
of War and Peace Review dedicated to the Espionage Novels and their relationship
to politics and international relations at times of world conflicts and between
world conflicts.
Espionage
novels can be seen as an expansion of the detective story that promoted the
idea that special talents and intelligence were required to understand new
urban mysteries and crimes at a time of great urbanization and
industrialization in the first half of the nineteenth century. If Edgar Allen
Poe invented the detective who can travel up and down a complex social ladder
in dim, crowded, urban landscapes, that figure continued to evolve with Arthur
Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Peter Wimsey and many others up to our day,
always rendering our more familiar urban world uncanny and frightening with
their explanations of strange crimes. Espionage novelists and the spies they
have created move over a larger, international geography and have added the
problems of national, political and economic ideological loyalties to the
problems of good and evil, truth and appearance that the detective had already
grappled with.
Clearly, the
espionage novel has a particular relationship with the First World War.
Generally considered the inventor of the genre, E. Phillips Oppenheim’s
earliest work was published in 1887 and the last in 1940, embracing the period of
rival colonization, a series of crises that led to the war, along with an
unsatisfactory peace after. The first great best seller of the genre, The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope,
was published in 1894 and was followed by Rupert
of Hentzau, serialized beginning in 1896 and appearing in hardback in 1898.
They took place in a fictitious Balkan country, following the logic of Otto von
Bismarck’s famous remark that a general European war might well be caused by
“some damn thing in the Balkans.” Winston Churchill took up the idea,
publishing Savrola in 1899. John
Buchan would take it up again in Greenmantle,
his second Richard Hannay novel, published in 1916, while he was working for
the British Bureau of Propaganda. All these authors, in fact, worked for British
intelligence, information or propaganda services during World War One, which
might be an indication of how a total war enlisted all efforts. But when
Woodrow Wilson’s advisor, Colonel House is added to the list for his novel Philip Dru: Administrator, the
connection between international politics and fiction suggests that as a
diplomacy of balance of power succumbed to the pressures of colonial,
technological and other kinds of competition, the earliest inklings of
collective peace keeping, were imagined as the actions of novelistic, talented,
heroes acting on their own.
In one segment,
this “journée d’étude” will gather papers to explore the possibility that an
optimistic fictional imagination had played a role in pre-war years to channel
the gathering dangers of international conflict, especially coming from the
Balkan peninsula, into a conservative narrative of resolution.
A second segment
will examine how the genre has continued. The espionage novels of the 1920s and
1930s will be explored for their relationship to the failing peace efforts of
the period. Studying the novels of the Cold War, balanced between “cold” peace
in the suddenly old European theatre of Espionage novels and “hot” proxy wars
in the Third World will explore the limits and demise of that genteel anomaly,
the Eurocentric spy invented at the end of the 19th century.
The
Uses of Bodies and Injuries both as Counters in Peace Settlements and as
Reasons for War
Study Day, April 26, 2013, UFR Études
Anglophones, Université de Paris-Diderot, 10 rue Charles V, 75004 Paris. Please
note that by the time of this journée d’étude the UFR Études Anglophones,
Université de Paris-Diderot will be located in the building Olympe de Gouges,
13 rue Antoine de Baïs, 75013 Paris.
Contact Mark Meigs
Arts of War and Peace Review On Line and
LARCA (Laboratoire de Recherche sur les Cultures Anglophones) propose a study
day in preparation for a number of Arts
of War and Peace Review dedicated to the uses of military dead in the 20th
Century. Questions concerning causes of war, the uses of revenge, and the
official necessity of attaching large national significance to anyone who has
died in national service are the point of departure for this theme along with
memorials and commemorations. But of course the distinction between military
and civilian martyrs and targets blurred through the century. That blurring of
the national status of the dead along with the blurring of meaning between
remembering the dead to demand peace and remembering the dead to demand war to
create peace, is an essential subtext of this study.
Religion and the Sacred at War or Promoting Peace: Discourse, Propaganda, Arts, and Literature from the Civil War to the Present.
La religion et le sacré, leurs rapports avec la guerre ou avec la recherche de la paix : modalités d'expression, propagande, arts et littérature, de la guerre de Sécession à nos jours.
Contact Ineke Bockting, Linda Martz, and Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec.
CFP at afea.fr
.