The Condition of the Subject think2 think1
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Themes

'English: The Condition of the Subject’ will present a major opportunity to review current practice in English. Its prime aim is to reflect upon how English has been constituted in the classroom through the changes of the last ten years, how its manifestation in teaching lives alongside its manifestation in research, and what the future of English might be.

The conference will be organised through themes, and the prime theme will be the curriculum. So papers (or strands of papers) are invited on the topic of teaching particular curriculum areas.

Questions asked at the conference will include:-

  • What is the condition of English now, and how are its subjects (the curriculum, the students, lecturers and scholarship) constituted?
  • How have the mechanisms governing our professional lives in the modern university, and the culture of professionalism itself, affected the subject?
  • What is the English ‘class’ and how are we changing it or reinforcing it?
  • Is English a subject without centre or margins? Where is the literary to be located or reinvented?

And the following broad topics will be under review:

  • Interdisciplinary work, subject boundaries, context
  • Global English
  • The future of academic publishing
  • Language and Literature
  • Theory: for and against
  • Teaching Creative Writing
  • The value and point of English

Papers are invited on any of these and related themes. There will also be
Seminar Strands (comprising three seminars of six papers) co-ordinated by
individual (or joint) Chairs to allow sustained discussion on particular
themes. The organisers will be pleased to help with the co-ordination of
seminar strands where appropriate.

If you wish to propose a paper or a seminar strand, please send an abstract
(no more than 200 words for a paper and 350 words for a seminar strand) to
the Subject Centre as soon as possible. Proposals should be emailed to the English Subject Centre Director, Professor Philip Martin or posted to the Subject Centre Office.

Details of the proposed conference volume are available here.