CALL FOR PAPERS: Boundaries and Transgressions - Oxford Graduate Conference 2019

Date: 7th June 2019

What constitutes a boundary? What is it to transgress? Who sets the boundaries, and how often can we
cross or negotiate them? The Oxford English Graduate Conference 2019 will begin to address these
questions. Considering how we read thresholds and liminal spaces, under what conditions are literary
actions thought illicit? We might consider the boundaries of our literary periods and disciplines, and
how alternative curricula might transgress and problematise these. What is the purpose of boundary-
markers, and how do notions of transgression clarify them?

Papers relating to this topic could explore the boundaries of classical genres to which early modern
poets aspired to conform, or the transgressions that female authors in the Victorian period made in any
literary act. The transgressions of Grendel might be worth exploring alongside the modes of etiquette
explicated and satirised by Austen. It might explore the prison writing of Spinoza, or the depiction and
critiquing of queerness as it was once problematically framed as a transgression. Further, what
boundaries do the avant-garde of modernism transgress? How do modernist forms in a text like Ulysses
redefine the boundaries of periods that came before? In contemporary literature, what does and does
not constitute a world literature or postcolonial text? How might we challenge the boundaries of the
material text?

The importance of physical boundary crossing cannot be understated in this period of unprecedented
global forced migration. Humanitarian and policy concerns raised by the refugee crisis demand an
interrogation of boundaries as we perceive them: physically, emotionally and metaphorically.

The Oxford English Graduate Conference welcomes papers crossing all periods, genres, and literary
disciplines, on themes including but not limited to:

▪ Communities
▪ Homes and thresholds
▪ Geopolitical borders
▪ Politics (neighbours, strangers, migrants, refugees)
▪ Movement and restriction
▪ Environment and nature
▪ Boundaries of the body
▪ Manuscripts and other material texts, marginalia
▪ Ethics and theology
▪ Societal and cultural boundaries (such as those of race, gender, sexuality)
▪ Linguistic crossings
▪ Boundaries of identity and belonging
▪ The canon and curricula
▪ The limits of literary form
▪ Critical thought
▪ Propriety and impropriety
▪ Academic hierarchies and terms such as 'academic' and 'layman'

Finally, papers considering the boundaries and limitations of our own field of study are strongly
encouraged.

We welcome individual proposals for twenty-minute papers (250 words). Three-person panel proposals
(500 words) are also encouraged. Please send all submissions
to grad.conference@ell.ox.ac.uk by 15th February 2019.