Global Modernism and Civil War
(CFP for #msa17)
Wyndham Lewis’s Blast is perhaps the most famous modernist declaration of civil war: “We set Humour at Humour’s throat. / Stir up Civil War among peaceful apes.” Lewis himself was named after an eccentric English mercenary who fought in the U.S. Civil War (by his American father, a veteran of the same war), and he returns to the trope in his 1937 autobiography, Blasting and Bombardiering: “You will be astonished to find how like art is to war, I mean ‘modernist’ art…I have set out to show how war, art, civil war, strikes and coup d’etat dovetail into each other.”
This panel proposes extending recent interest in the Spanish Civil War to a comparative, structural, and intertextual analysis of internecine modernism. How does sectional conflict reframe our understanding of nationalism and world war? Papers could return to well-known national narratives, identify less familiar histories of schism, or develop new transnational or inter-historical approaches.
Read more: http://bit.ly/modcivilwar
Contact Ryan Weberling (ryanweb@bu.edu) to discuss possibilities for the panel, or send a 300-word paper proposal by April 10.
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