Call for Papers
Steve Tomasula: The Art of Representation
June 12 and 13, 2025. Paris, France.
The first international conference devoted to the work of Steve Tomasula
deadline for submissions: November 4, 2024
contact email: Monica Manolescu manoles@unistra.fr
Keynote speakers: David Banash (Western Illinois University), Mary K. Holland (State University of New York, New Paltz).
Organized jointly by several institutions (Université Paris Cité, Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, Sorbonne Université, Université de Rennes, Université de Rouen, Université de Strasbourg), this is the first international conference devoted to the work of Steve Tomasula.
Steve Tomasula is an American novelist, essayist, critic, and short story author known for cross-genre narratives that explore conceptions of the self, especially as shaped by language and technology.
With six novels, as well as a collection of short fiction, an anthology of “conceptual writing,” critical contributions and essays on art, literature and culture, published over the course of twenty years, Steve Tomasula is considered a leading figure in innovative writing. His writing has been called a "reinvention of the novel" for its formal inventiveness, play with language, and incorporation of visual imagery.
Encyclopedic in scope, Tomasula’s fiction questions representation and its relation to the creation of knowledge, the formation of the self, and of culture: writing, to be understood in the larger sense of leaving traces open to interpretation. His fiction is a hybrid of multiple genres (experimental literature, historical fiction, science writing, poetry) and is noted for its use of visual elements and nonfiction narratives. In the novel, for example, these include the rise of genetic and body modification (VAS); the history of portraiture from the invention of writing to data mining (The Book of Portraiture); competing conceptions of time as a human construct (TOC); the relation of class and market forces to art (IN & OZ); and the invention of nature (Ascension). His short fiction and essays also take up similarly grand themes, especially the depiction of the self as a construction of society, and the impact of technological and cultural change.
The main ethical power of Tomasula’s art lies in a shift that deprives the individual of an illusory dominant stance. Through its subversive forms, often including visual imagery, Tomasula’s work undoes hierarchies, exploiting the intricate relations between ethics and aesthetics, as well as the very gesture of fiction. His body of work insists that the reality of everyday life is composed of a collage of evolving stories based on facts that continually change as the assumptions of sciences, technologies, economies, politics, belief systems and other frames of reference change. His tangential, respectful approach to how new cultural contexts shape what it means to be human allows for a complex ecology to unfold through his art, while exploring the place of the human in this environment.
This conference aims to bring together specialists of his fiction and criticism, as well as researchers, at all stages of their careers, interested in innovative literatures, contemporary American literature, multi-modal literatures, and post- or metamodernist literatures. Any aspect of Tomasula’s fiction and/or critical œuvre may be chosen as an object of study, so that the largest scope may be offered by the conference.
Abstracts of 300 to 350 words together with a short biographical note should be sent by November 4, 2024 to Monica Manolescu (manoles@unistra.fr), Françoise Sammarcelli (francoise.sammarcelli@sorbonne-universite.fr) and Anne-Laure Tissut (anne-laure.tissut@univ-rouen.fr).