Details
This conference will explore the experience of the local through consideration of written and oral narratives, in forms including but by no means limited to poetry, novels, and oral history interviews. One of the aims is to bring together papers which engage with different kinds of stories about place, especially literary and/or oral, and thereby to consider relations between the written and spoken word. Along with written texts, we hope to engage with work concerning both oral traditions and oral history, observing the differences between them while allowing for connections. The conference will seek to engage with a diversity of approaches, as represented by Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy, Benedict Anderson's account of “print-nationalism” in contrast to “speech-localities”, and Alessandro Portelli’s ‘What Makes Oral History Different?’

Orality and locality may be considered in relation to nationalism, globalisation, and technological change. We are also keen to explore and critique how some ecocriticism places value on the local and oral. Oral culture is local in so far as it only reaches those within earshot, and is associated with pre-industrial traditions (for example folktales and ballads). One problem with this for environmentalism may be that ecological understanding has to encompass the inter-connectedness of the global ecosystem—it must leap out of the local.

We welcome papers concerning written and/or oral narratives about any locality, while a focus on South West Britain will be one of its distinctive features.

Possible topics include:

• Regional writing
• Oral history
• Oral traditions
• Dialect in novels and poetry
• Voice in performance
• Ballad and musical narratives
• The romance of the local
• Locality and nationality
• Locality and globalisation
• Locality and ecology

Speakers
Confirmed speakers include Nick Groom, Tim Fulford, Richard Kerridge.

Proposals for papers
Please send proposals of 200-250 words (for papers of 20 minutes) to Shelley Trower at S.J.Trower@exeter.ac.uk and Dafydd Moore at D.R.Moore@plymouth.ac.uk by 28 February 2008.