[Dino] City Peripheries / Peripheral Cities Conference, Helsinki 29-30.8 - registration extended

[ameel at mappi.helsinki.fi]

It is still possible to register for the City Peripheries / Peripheral  
Cities Conference.
(University of Helsinki Main Building, 29-30.8.2013)

Registration extended until Thursday 22 August 2013.

Registration: http://blogs.helsinki.fi/hlc-n/registration/
Conference website: http://blogs.helsinki.fi/hlc-n/conference/

The conference “City Peripheries / Peripheral Cities”, the first  
conference organized by the international Helsinki Literature and the  
City Network, presents new approaches to the study of literary cities,  
city peripheries and peripheral cities.

The keynote speakers are Professor Tone Selboe, University of Oslo and  
Professor Jeremy Tambling, University of Manchester. Professor Selboe  
has written extensively on city literature and urban theory. Her  
latest articles in English include “Home and City in Dickens’s Great  
Expectations and Flaubert’s L’éducation sentimentale”, and “Virginia  
Woolf and the Ambiguities of Domestic Space”. Professor Tambling is  
the author of numerous books on comparativist literary themes with an  
urban focus, including Lost in the American City: Dickens, James and  
Kafka (2001), Going Astray: Dickens and London (2009) and, with Louis  
Lo, Walking Macao: Reading the Baroque (also 2009).

The Conference fee is 60 € (40 € for students).

During the conference, a round table discussion will be held to  
discuss the development of the network and the possibilities for  
further cooperation between international scholars in the field of  
urban literary studies. A peer-reviewed publication on the basis of  
selected conference papers is planned.

On behalf of the organizing committee,

Lieven Ameel
HLCN coordinator
The Finnish Doctoral Programme for Literary Studies
Department of Finnish, Finno-Ugrian and Scandinavian Studies
P. O. Box 3, 00014 University of Helsinki

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The conference “City Peripheries / Peripheral Cities”, the first  
conference organized by the international Helsinki Literature and the  
City Network, presents new approaches to the study of literary cities,  
city peripheries and peripheral cities.

The keynote speakers are Professor Tone Selboe, University of Oslo and  
Professor Jeremy Tambling, University of Manchester. Professor Selboe  
has written extensively on city literature and urban theory. Her  
latest articles in English include “Home and City in Dickens’s Great  
Expectations and Flaubert’s L’éducation sentimentale”, and “Virginia  
Woolf and the Ambiguities of Domestic Space”. Professor Tambling is  
the author of numerous books on comparativist literary themes  
including, with an urban focus, Lost in the American City: Dickens,  
James and Kafka (2001), Going Astray: Dickens and London (2009) and,  
with Louis Lo, Walking Macao: Reading the Baroque (also 2009).

The city has always occupied a special position amongst literary  
spaces. From the very earliest surviving literary texts, city images  
appear in all their contradictory complexity: as nodes of creative and  
destructive energy; as beacons of utopian possibility and of moral  
warning. As Burton Pike has pointed out, ‘[w]e unthinkingly consider  
this phenomenon modern, but it goes back to early epic and mythic  
thought. We cannot imagine Gilgamesh, the Bible, the Iliad, or the  
Aeneid, without their cities, which contain so much of their energy  
and radiate so much of their meaning’. Cities in literature appear as  
organisms: they are described as rising and falling, as growing,  
blooming, prospering, and decaying. Recent centuries have seen the  
kind of rhetoric used concerning cities and their literature modulate  
from the centripetal perspectives of the nineteenth-century urban  
novel to the increasingly centrifugal perspectives found in modernist  
and postmodernist literary visions.

Cities tend to be defined by a sense of centrality and density,  
contrasted to a (suburban, rural, colonial) hinterland or periphery.  
As urban sprawl and the implosion of post-industrial cities have  
shown, a sense of peripheral urbanity may, however, turn out to be  
essential to many contemporary city centres. Simultaneously, some of  
the most interesting urban phenomena are being acted out in what was  
formerly considered the periphery: in Europe, redeveloping harbour  
areas; in China and in developing countries megacities arising in  
regions that until recently were barely urbanised. In another sense,  
an interest in city peripheries can be seen as central even to many of  
the most canonical city novels and poems, from the evocations of the  
prostitute and urban scavenger in Baudelaire and Dickens, to the  
sudden and often uncanny appearance of such peripheral figures as the  
immigrant, the suburban outcast, the isolated housewife, or the  
tourist passing through, in a plethora of city novels.

The difference between centre and periphery is often not only a  
question of spatiality, but also of temporality: the differences in  
experiences of urban time are as momentous when suburban cyclicality  
is compared with the time experiences of the bustling city centre, as  
when the expanding time of a subjectively experienced moment of  
epiphany is set against the temporal consciousness of the urban crowd.  
This experiential range finds appropriate expression in urban and  
suburban narratives, which reflect, exaggerate, and sometimes mix or  
juxtapose, specific types of spatio-temporal experience.

What kinds of new theoretical frameworks can be brought to bear on  
peripheral cities and city peripheries? The most helpful will perhaps  
be those which are able to explain both cities that seem peripheral  
from the perspective of the capitals of modernity and post-modernity,  
and which also include an awareness of the multiple senses of  
geographical, social, gendered and racial city peripheries to be found  
in literature.

During the conference, a round table discussion will be held to  
discuss the development of the network and the possibilities for  
further cooperation between international scholars in the field of  
urban literary studies. A peer-reviewed publication on the basis of  
selected conference papers is planned.

For more information contact:
Lieven Ameel, University of Helsinki (lieven.ameel at helsinki.fi)
Jason Finch, Åbo Akademi University (jfinch at abo.fi)
Markku Salmela, University of Tampere (markku.salmela at uta.fi)

HLCN website:
http://blogs.helsinki.fi/hlc-n
http://blogs.helsinki.fi/hlc-n/conference/



-----
Lieven Ameel
MA, junior researcher
The Finnish Doctoral Programme for Literary Studies
Department of Finnish, Finno-Ugrian and Scandinavian Studies
P. O. Box 3, 00014 University of Helsinki
lieven.ameel at helsinki.fi
http://blogs.helsinki.fi/hlc-n/
https://tuhat.halvi.helsinki.fi/portal/en/persons/lieven-ameel%286c2e6af6-f20b-4f4d-bb91-58ec2abf8953%29.html