Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations (GIFCon), the creative and academic event for scholars and creators of Fantastic works, has just announced dates for next year’s event and a new call for papers. GIFCon 2019 will take place over 23rd – 24th May 2019 and is looking for abstract submissions on the theme of ‘Mapping the Mythosphere’.
This is my third event for GIFCon, and this time I’m stepping back for workload reasons* to focus on the GIFCon Facebook page, assisting the new Social Media Manager, Marita Arvaniti. I’m really looking forward to reading all your brilliant submissions to our Call for Papers for 2019. And if this is the first time you’ve submitted to an academic event, why not check out our Abstract Submissions Guide?
For more on GIFCon 2019, check out our official website at www.gifcon.org.
In the meantime, here’s an extract from this year’s call for papers on our new theme, ‘Mapping the Mythosphere’:
In her novel The Game (2007) Diana Wynne Jones speaks of the ‘Mythosphere’, an expanding system of inter-related narratives ‘made up of all the stories, theories and beliefs, legends, myths and hopes, that are generated here on Earth […] constantly growing and moving as people invent new tales to tell or find new things to believe’. Fantasy as a mode or genre can be said both to draw on this organic system and to show an intense awareness of the links between its many roots and branches. Whether we approach the Fantastic through the study of written literature, the visual arts, games, journalism, internet culture or film and television theory, a close study of its workings enables us to better understand the dominant strands of Jones’s Mythosphere and to explore its rapidly widening outer limits. Sometimes refusing to endorse the subjective values and cultural commitments that sustain contemporary ideologies, sometimes imaginatively confirming them with its own misguided rebellions, the Mythosphere is an expanding web of intertextual narratives which we are all both producers and products of. Over the course of the 23rd and 24th of May 2019, Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations (GIFCon) seeks to celebrate all aspects of critical and creative work that help to map-out this intricate network of intersecting narratives.
Constantly disrupting genres and disintegrating the designations of canonicity, Fantasy delights in breaking down borders and defying expectations, a fact supported by numerous contemporary scholarly studies. For instance, Celtic mythology emerges transformed from the pages of twenty-first century children’s literature in the work of the University of Glasgow’s own Dimitra Fimi, while Darryl Jones points out that the Fantastic ‘slasher’ film’s obsession with violence and gore can be found in both classical sculpture and Christian artworks from as early as the twelfth century. As such writers have shown, Fantasy draws connections through history, geography and the full range of representational media, upsetting and questioning everything as it does so by exploring and reinventing every corner of our psyches, philosophies and societies. Driven by the desire to imagine the impossible, spurred on by radical shifts in politics, economics, technology and available means of communication, Fantasy has become the language of our time, the aptest means of tracing, altering and extending the contours of the myths and stories we live by.
For the rest of the GIFCon 2019 Call for Papers: ‘Mapping the Mythosphere’, see www.gifcon.org.
*More on those in due course.