Student News

The University of Roehampton is to host Will Self, one of the most notorious and exciting contemporary writers as well as one of Britain’s most visible public intellectuals.

Will Self and the Art of the Contemporary is a conference being hosted by the university of December 1 that will present a unique opportunity to reflect on the significance of Self’s achievements, bringing together the foremost critics working on contemporary fiction. Short papers and panels are invited on aspects of Self’s writing focusing on topics including the work’s relation to genre, intertextuality and form; (post)modernism and new realism; political and cultural geography and the contemporary; satire and surrealism; place, psychogeography and the urban environment; (semi-)documentary fiction/gonzo and life-writing; mental illness, psyche and consciousness; gender, sexuality and alterity; morality and ethics; class, Englishness and Otherness. The deadline for the call for papers is November 1. 

The conference will be led by Roehampton’s own Sebastian Groes, Invited speakers include Peter Childs (Gloucestershire); Caroline Edwards (Lincoln); M. Hunter Hayes (Texas A&M University-Commerce, USA); Hugo Spiers (UCL); Philip Tew (Brunel).