About

Contemporary cities are sites of new and deeply challenging social, political and aesthetic experiences; from gentrification to migration to climate change, they are vexed sites of intersection between local experience and the novel global challenges of the twenty-first century. These often radically new challenges provoke radical responses; both aesthetic, in the form of innovative and experimental approaches to representation, and political, in the form of new movements like Occupy.

This conference will address ways in which contemporary narrative forms, procedures and practices are shaped by the particular experiences of the twenty-first century city. It will also consider how the contemporary city itself – its spaces, conflicts and politics – might be conceptualised in narrative terms. Involving both critical and practice-based perspectives, it intends to provide a forum for a novel interdisciplinary conversation on the relations between narrative and contemporary urban forms, speaking especially to literary scholars and geographers with interests in the intersections of narrative art and urban experience. It will also provide an occasion for dialogue between critical and practice-based approaches to narrative and the city, addressing both the theory and practice of contemporary urban narrative.

The conference will address three overarching questions: in what ways might the new and challenging forms and experiences of the contemporary city provide paradigms for the critical study of contemporary narrative? How might thinking about the contemporary city in narrative terms expand our understanding of it? In what novel ways are contemporary narrative practices informed by the city as we experience it now?

Within these questions, areas that might be addressed include:

• Formal, structural and stylistic responses to the city in the contemporary novel
• Urban and narrative forms in contemporary poetics
• Responses to the contemporary city in non-literary narrative forms (film, performance art, television etc.)
• Relationships between contemporary architecture and narrative
• New relations between public and private space, and their impact on narrative forms
• Terrorism and the city narrative; narrating the post-9/11 city
• Narratives emerging from gentrification and new conflicts surrounding class and race in urban spaces
• Narrative responses to precariousness and contemporary city life (employment, housing etc.)
• Cities and narratives of ecology and climate crisis
• Narratives of new urban politics/protest: direct action, Occupy etc.
• Migration, the city and narrative forms
• Gender and narrative in contemporary urban space

Radical Cities, Radical Narratives will be taking place on October 20th 2017, located at Senate House in London.

This conference has been organised by an inter-disciplinary committee of PhD students from Royal Holloway, University of London. The committee is made up of:

• Laurie McRae Andrew, Department of English
• Serge Larocque, Department of English
• Ahmed Honeini, Department of English
• Gareth Damien Martin, Department of English
• Emily Hopkins, Department of Geography