{"word_count": 1156, "character_count": 7982}
« The ethics and poetics of genre literature »International Conference Organized by EMMA (Etudes Montpelliéraines  du Monde Anglophone), Université Paul Valéry- Montpellier 3, March  15-16 2013.With the support of the Société de Stylistique Anglaise (SSA).This interdisciplinary international conference, the second section of  the project ‘Ethics &#38; Rhetoric’ within EMMA’s line of research  ‘Ethics of Alterity’, will focus on language and ethics in literary  genres that depict encounters with alterity.The situations in which the subject is faced with different or alien  beings will be studied namely in novels belonging to the genre of  utopia/dystopia, science fiction, fantasy, etc., as the so-called ‘genre  literature’ embodies a heuristic model that dramatises and exacerbates  encounters with alterity, featuring exotic, subhuman or posthuman beings  that defy human knowledge (in SF and fantasy especially). Genre  literature has often been regarded as an entertaining or escapist field  that does not lend itself to ethical and poetical reflections, limiting  itself to a hollow and servile repetition of the genre codes.  Nevertheless, theoreticians of these genres that have not been  sufficiently studied highlight their defamiliarizing power through which  things can be « seen ». This process of defamiliarization is often  associated with the stylistic, poetic and ethical force inherent in  fiction, but in its attempt at meta-conceptualizing the relationship  between language and reality, genre literature seems to problematize and  enhance these phenomena by making them more easily perceivable. Thus  not resting content with merely questioning the mechanism of  estrangement, genre literature explores the confines of readability and  the break-point between the readerly and the writerly.In their desire to represent the Other in all its complexity, writers  are indeed confronted with an ethical and poetical aporia: how to  describe what escapes Humanity in Human language? In the eyes of its  critics, Science Fiction (SF) seems to lean towards the side of the  readerly. On the border between total defamiliarization and cognition  (Darko Suvin speaks of ‘cognitive estrangement’), SF seems to embody a  genre that cannot afford to lose its readers. That may be the reason why  extra-terrestrial languages are often filtered by English—crushing down  linguistic difference under the weight of a single language that  everybody can understand—as in Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle in which the  creole form of English is ironed out through translation. How to  represent a world in which the classical pronominal references (she/he)  are not relevant anymore since ontology no longer relies on binary  distinctions (as in The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin)? Yet  certain SF or dystopia writers do manage to stretch out language and  readability in their description of an alien situation (Russell Hoban’s  Riddley Walker might be the best example here). But fantasy can perhaps  be construed as the most subversive genre in that matter as it wallows  in undecidability and interpretative wavering. In its attempt to  reconcile the inexpressible, what is without a name, and the speakable  or visible, according to Rosemary Jackson, fantasy delimits a zone of  non-signification where the Other cannot be reduced to the self. Should  we thus conclude that reaching the breaking point of intelligibility can  guarantee the birth of the other in its radical alterity?Todorov brought to light the difficulty of apprehending alterity in  schemes other than the ones we are familiar with, questioning the  possibility of mapping the other’s radical difference. The narratives  about the Aztecs are among the first illustrations of this tendency to  project pre-conceived expectations onto the other: ‘One would seek to  transpose it into a familiar cognitive scheme in order to make it  understandable and thereby at least partially acceptable’ (Tzvetan  Todorov, Les Morales de l’histoire, Paris, Grasset, 1991, p. 41, our  translation). Can reducing alterity to the categories of the same or  resorting to the other as a foil to reinforce the self (the other being  then everything the self is not) be said to be part of the more  conservative trend in SF as opposed to more subversive trends of the  genre (what Broderick calls allographers along Terry Dowling’s coinage  ‘xenographies’) or of fantasy?Are we condemned to a certain ethno- or anthropo-centrism—an  accusation that is launched against the socio-constructionists that  contend that our beliefs, desires or intentions are mediated by shared  social and normative conventions that have been learnt and internalized  in the specific discourse community we belong to—or can the other be  ‘known’ to a certain extent while preserving its radical difference? Do  tropes have a heuristic power able to change our conception of the world  and of others? Is there such a thing as ‘rhetorical ethics’ that could  give us access to the other? If, according to Broderick, zeugma and  syllepses are characteristic of the poetics of SF, what relationships do  these tropes of fusion entertain between self and other? How effective  are other figures of speech in their depiction of the Other? Can they be  said to be a product of an all-powerful Reason reducing alterity to the  same? In La Raison classificatoire, for example, Patrick Tort indeed  recalls that the two major classifying systems of human thoughts rely on  metaphor and metonymy. Or, on the other hand, can tropes be said to  ensure a speculative and prospective exploration, producing ‘scandalous  or non-sense effects’ (Rosolato) that are capable of upsetting the  classifications through which we have been trained to perceive the  world? Can stylistic problems like focalisation or reported speech—that  are often a privileged way to access the other’s conceptual schemes—be  seen as anthropocentric blows dealt to alterity? Can the other be  sketched out through lexical and syntactic inventiveness without its  portrait being entirely tamed or harnessed?The focus on this conference will thus be on the linguistic and  poetic means writers resort to in their description of others (rather  than be merely thematic). The point is to bring under scrutiny how  fiction succeeds (or fails) in its discursive mapping of otherness and  what the dialogue it imagines with the other teaches us on language and  the human self. What will be explored are the limits of language and the  linguistic strategies that are displayed by genre literature to get  around this predicament.This interdisciplinary international conference wishes to attract  both literary critics, linguists and stylisticians working on the  literature of the English-speaking countries from the 19th to the 21st  centuries.The following themes could be addressed but they are in no way restrictive:linguistic representation of alteritytropological ethicsstylistics and genreintelligibility and linguistic experimentationthe speakable / unspeakablerepresentation of cognitive structures through focalisation, reported speech, pronominal identification, etc.Deadline for submission: September 20 2012Notification of acceptance: November 30 2012Proposals of around 300 words to be sent to both Maylis Rospide  (maylis.rospide@univ-montp3.fr) and Sandrine Sorlin  (sandrine.sorlin@univ-montp3.fr)Language of the conference: EnglishSelected papers will be considered for publicationGuest speakers:Jean-Jacques Lecercle (Paris Ouest Nanterre la Défense) Peter Stockwell (University of Nottingham, UK)Advisory Board:Catherine Bernard (Paris Diderot), Monique de Mattia-Viviès  (Aix-Marseille), Catherine Emmott (Glasgow), Jacqueline Fromonot (Paris  8), Jean-Michel Ganteau (Montpellier 3), Lesley Jeffries (Huddersfield),  Manuel Jobert (Lyon 3), Catherine Paulin (Besançon), Frédéric Regard  (Paris IV Sorbonne), Mick Short (Lancaster), Paul Simpson (Belfast).