CFP - L.M. Montgomery and Vision

CFP: L.M. Montgomery and Vision
The L.M. Montgomery Institute’s Fourteenth Biennial Conference
University of Prince Edward Island, 25-28 June 2020

“My fingers tingle to grasp a pen—my brain teems with plots. I've a score of fascinating dream characters I want to write about. Oh, if there only were not such a chasm between seeing a thing and getting it down on paper!”
–Emily Climbs (1925)

“If for Montgomery Nature was eternal and eternally present, then the memory pictures of Nature reflected were perhaps meant to help her and her viewers to transcend time and, in entering the imaginative landscape, initiate generative seeing and fresh reverie.”
–Elizabeth Epperly, Through Lovers Lane: L.M. Montgomery’s Photography and Visual Imagination

The 2020 conference invites proposals for research pertaining to L.M. Montgomery’s life, writings, and/or scholarship through the lens of vision. Montgomery found inspiration in what she saw around her, and she spent a lifetime translating what she saw into her writing and other creative works. The word vision derives from the Latin videre, “to see,” but as Montgomery knew, there is never a direct or straight line between the observing eye and the object that is seen (or not seen). Beyond topics relating to “visuality,” “vision” might also suggest, among others, (in)visibility, prescience, dreams, wisdom, imaginary or supernatural phenomena, apparitions, and the visioning and re-visioning of material – including her own life – for which Montgomery is renowned.

The conference theme might inspire papers that explore:

• Montgomery’s visual descriptions and aesthetic; how she “sees” the world through her writing
• Adaptations or revisions of Montgomery’s life and works on/in film, stage, art, new media, and beyond
• The art and artistry of the illustrators of Montgomery’s works
• Connections between vision and other senses in her fiction
• Sight/seeing and the limitations of it or the enhancements and physical aids to it (e.g., glasses, binoculars, telescopes, camera lenses, etc.)
• Metaphors of vision (e.g., re/views, perspectives, visionaries, reflections, blindness, opacity/transparency, etc.) in and around the world of Montgomery
• Re-seeing, revision, remembering, and nostalgia in Montgomery’s creative and/or autobiographical processes
• Things unseen, invisible, imaginary, or otherwise out of sight

Please submit 250-300-word proposals and 100-word biographical statements by 16 August 2019. Proposals should clearly articulate a strong argument, but they should also situate that argument in the context of established Montgomery scholarship. Proposals that view Montgomery’s life and art from different cultural and theoretical perspectives are welcomed. All proposals are blind reviewed. Proposals for pre-conference workshops, special exhibits, films, performances, or other visual displays are encouraged and welcomed.

The proposal submission form is available on the LMMI website: https://www.lmmontgomery.ca/lmmi-conference-2020-proposal-submissions.