Workshop Belgrade, 14-16 April 2011
The next meeting of the Working Groups of COST Action WWIH will take place in Belgrade (14-16 April, an MC meeting being planned for April 13, at 3.00), and will be organized by Biljana Dojcinovic, in collaboration with other members of the Serbian team of COST Action IS0901, and the Faculty of Philology of the Belgrade University.
Two of the three days are work meetings for the Action members, to the third day (Saturday 16 April) external visitors are also invited.
Provisional program:
Thursday, April 14th: presentations of work in progress
9.30
- Welcome by
- Aleksandra Vraneš, dean of the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade,
- Biljana Stojanovi?, COST National Coordinator for Serbia,
- Biljana Doj?inovi?, Coordinator of the Serbian COST Action IS0901 Team
- Aleksandra Vraneš, dean of the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade,
9.50
- Suzan van Dijk, Chair of COST Action IS0901: Milestone 1 to Milestone 2 (presentation)
10.10
- Discussion (general issues)
10.20
- Ele Carpenter (Goldsmiths College London): Presentation of the Open Source Embroidery Project initiated some years ago, and going on since then in different countries of Europe - a parallel activity, indirectly commenting in a particular way on our scholarly discussions about femininity and the question if writing belongs to it.
10.30
- Break
10.45
- Session I "Networks and Genealogies"
- Chairperson: t.b.a.
13.00
- Lunch
14.00
- Session IIa "Male-Female Transvesting"
- Chairperson: t.b.a.
- Session IIb "Evaluating Women Authors"
- Chairperson: t.b.a.
15.30
- Break
16.00
- Session IIIa "Norms and Exceptions"
- Chairperson: t.b.a.
- Session IIIb "Gender vs. National Identities"
- Chairperson: t.b.a.
18.00
- Chairperson t.b.a.: Conclusions of the first day
- Chairperson t.b.a.: Conclusions of the first day
19.00
- Dinner
Friday, April 15th: discussing the work in progress
9.30
- Separate meetings per Working Group
- Chairpersons: WG leaders
11.00
- Break
11.15
- Continuing the separate WG meetings
- Chairpersons: WG leaders
13.00
- Visit to the Museum of Serbian Orthodox Church: Jefimija’s Embroidery
14.00
- Lunch
15.00
- Common meeting: each WG presenting items and ideas considered important and to be discussed
- Chairperson: Henriette Partzsch
17.00
- Break
17.30
- Conclusions concerning possibilities for links between WGs
- Chairperson: Vanda Anastacio
19.00
- Dinner
Saturday, April 16th: "International Female Networks" (presenting the COST Action)
10.00
- Welcome (Biljana Doj?inovi?)
10.15
- Keynote Lecture
- Aleksandra Vraneš: Transnationality
11.00
- Break
11.15
- Keynote Lecture
- Ele Carpenter:What is femaleness - the Ada Lovelace case
12.00
- Important announcement
- Biljana Doj?inovi?: A new project in Serbian women's literary history
13.00
- Lunch
14.00
- Presentation of COST Action Working Groups
- Viola Capkova: WG1
- Marie-Louise Coolahan: WG2
- Tovi Bibring and Hendrik Schlieper: WG 3
- Gillian Dow: WG4
- Viola Capkova: WG1
15.00
- Ljiljana Markovi?: Reception of European Women’s Writing in Japan till the end of 19th Century
15.30
- Closing Lecture
- Suzan van Dijk: Embroidery, networks and networking
16.00
- End of the Meeting
- Ele Carpenter: Presentation of outcome of the Open Source Embroidery project
In this meeting we will continue the presentations and discussions of the first COST year, from which we have tried to draw some conclusions ("Milestone 1"); at the same time we will prepare the November conference ("Milestone 2"). Just as the Turku meeting constituted a preliminary meeting preparing the Madrid conference, this Belgrade meeting will relate to the Chawton conference (November) as an (internal) brainstorming session to the presentation of results.
Entering our second COST year, we now start preparing the 2nd Milestone. In this second phase we will be focusing on “qualitative and comparative research”. Ideally selection of the texts to be analysed and compared will have taken place on the basis of their quantitative importance. These texts will be discussed on their degree of “femininity”, “feminism”, “normality”, “transgression” – as intended apparently by the authors and/or as perceived by contemporary readers. Comparisons (by the authors themselves or by their readers) with other female activities than writing (such as: helping others; educating; sewing or embroidery) may be focused on, in order to understand the women’s degree of (non-)conformity to the doxa, and their willingness to participate in public debate.
For discussion of these questions a certain number of narrative elements will be particularly useful (as far as novels and stories are concerned): those which present:
- Women’s role in society according to current norms, or deviant from them;
- Marriage and refusal to marry;
- “Normal” clothing and travesty;
- “Normal” sexuality and deviation from norms;
- “Normal” and “abnormal” women’s activities;
- More generally: norms concerning women’s behavior as respected by female authors and their characters (male as well as female).
You are invited to find these kinds of elements in the women’s texts you are studying, and in the comments on the women’s texts by contemporary readers. Narrative topoi such as those studied within SATOR (Société pour l’Analyse de la TOpique Romanesque, see www.satorbase.org) for pre-1800 French literature are considered as providing good possibilities for tracing and selecting relevant fragments.
SvD, February 2011
- Conferences > NEWW international conferences > Belgrade April 2011