Pub: Lancashire, Ian. FORGETFUL MUSES.

Lancashire, Ian.  Forgetful Muses: Reading the Author in the Text.  Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2010.

Read the related essay, "Vocabulary Changes in Agatha Christie's Mysteries as an Indication of Dementia: a Case Study," by Lancashire and Graeme Hirst, here: http://ftp.cs.toronto.edu/pub/gh/Lancashire+Hirst-extabs-2009.pdf.

Read Amanda Fortini's review, "Literary Alzheimer's" in the New York Times here:  http://www.nytimes.com/projects/magazine/ideas/2009/#arts.

Read Judy Stoffman's review, "An Agatha Christie Mystery: Is Alzheimer's on the Page?", in The Toronto Star of January 23, 2010, here: http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/754723--an-agatha-christie-mystery-is-alzheimer-s-on-the-page.

Gaffield, Chad. "We Need Literary Theorists." UNIVERSITY AFFAIRS April 6, 2010.

In the February issue of University Affairs, Rosanna Tamburri wrote a provocative article (“Give us the Dirt on Jobs”) about what universities are doing, or not doing, to prepare graduate students for the likelihood that they will be working in non-academic careers after graduation. This question is particularly relevant for the social sciences and humanities in the globally engaged and digitally connected 21st century. The notion that successful pathways for  undergraduate students in fields such as literature and political science lead only to graduate programs and then to research careers has been wrong for decades. About half of our fellowship-winning graduates pursue research careers. The other half go on to contribute across the private, public and non-profit sectors. Happily, both expectations and curricula are changing, with the realization that Canada needs more graduates with postsecondary education at all levels; only some of them will occupy research positions. Today’s rapidly changing economy, society and culture make it increasingly important that we confront these misperceptions and continue to update the curricula to embrace the diversity of ways that advanced education connects to subsequent experience.

Does Canada need students studying fields such as literary theory? More than ever, if we can judge by the example of scholars like Ian Lancashire, an English professor from the University of Toronto, and his colleague Graeme Hirst, a computational linguist, who topped the New York Times annual list of the best ideas of 2009. Their idea was to analyze Agatha Christie’s novels based on the knowledge that written vocabulary changes subtly but perceptively with the onset of dementia. Their textual analysis demonstrated for the first time that the prolific Christie did, in fact, write her last novels while suffering from Alzheimer’s. Moreover, their work suggests new diagnostic tools for identifying the initial onset of dementia which, in turn, make possible new preventive treatments. . . .

Read the rest here: http://www.universityaffairs.ca/we-need-literary-theorists.aspx.

Cfp: "Medieval and Early Modern Authorship," SAMEMES, University of Geneva, June 30-July 2, 2010.

The Second Biennial Conference, Swiss Association of Medieval and Early Modern English Studies. Authorship has come to the forefront of medieval and early modern English studies in recent years, as is shown by the wealth of important publications in this area. The objective of this conference is to take stock of a duly socialized form of authorship, which recognizes that while authors have agency, that agency is circumscribed by the multi-faceted social, legal, institutional, and intertextual pressures within which authorship takes place. Contributions are invited on any aspect of medieval and early modern authorship. Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• The history of authorship – The pre-history: authorship in antiquity; the history of medieval authorship; the reception of Chaucer and/or other medieval authors in early modern England; the history of early modern authorship; the post-history: from early modern to modern authorship
• Authorship and critical theory – Eliot, Bloom, Barthes, Foucault and beyond: theorizing the medieval and/or early modern author
• Authorship and its social contexts – Authorship and gender; authorship and censorship; authorship and patronage; the economics of authorship; early professional authorship; authorship and copyright, authorship and the law; authorship, forgery and plagiarism; authorship and the culture of authority; authorship and anonymity
• Authorship and its literary contexts – Authorship, imitation, intertextuality; authorship and literary style; authorship in medieval and/or early modern literary theory
• Authorship and the theatre – Authorship and playwriting; authorship and theatrical collaboration; authorship and acting
• Authorship and literary genres – Authorship and genre; authorship and early ‘lives of the poets’; the ‘I’ in medieval and early modern poetry; authorship and commendatory verse; authorship and miscellanies
• Authorship and the material text – Authorship and paratext; authorship and the book trade; authorship and the scriptorium; authorship and publication; authorship and media: manuscript, and print
• Medieval and early modern literary careers – Authorship and the Virgilian cursus; Spenser, Jonson, Milton and print-constructed careers; careers of medieval and early modern female writers
• Constructing the medieval and early modern author through the centuries – The Making of ‘Chaucer’, ‘Gower’, ‘Langland’, ‘Malory’, ‘Marlowe’, ‘Sidney’, ‘Shakespeare’, ‘Donne’, ‘Milton’
• Authorship attribution – Modern methods of determining medieval and early modern authorship; Chaucer and the Chaucer apocrypha: authorship and co-authorship questions; Shakespeare and the Shakespeare apocrypha: authorship and co-authorship questions; the case of Middleton: collaboration, authorship, and The Collected Works; disputed authorship attributions: from Shakespeare and the Funeral Elegy to Milton and de doctrina Christiana; editing, authorship, and authorial intention

Proposals for full panels are very welcome. These should include three proposed speakers, including, or in addition to, a chair and/or a respondent. Individual papers will be grouped with two others. Parallel sessions will last an hour and a half, which means that papers should be no longer than 20 minutes to leave sufficient time for discussion. The final deadline for proposals is January 15, 2010, but early submissions are encouraged. Proposals should contain a title, an abstract (ca. 200 to 400 words) as well as a short bio sketch (no more than 100 words). Proposals will be reviewed in the weeks following their submission, so that prospective participants will usually be notified of the decision within a month of reception of the proposal. Proposals should be sent to authorship2010@unige.ch. A selection of papers presented at the conference will be published in a collection. Access the conference website here: http://home.adm.unige.ch/~erne/authorship2010/.