CFP: Re-presenting David Jones

‘Re-presenting David Jones’ 

(Proposed seminar at American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting, 7–10 March, 2019, Georgetown University, Washington, DC)

Organizer: Thomas Berenato (University of Virginia)

Co-Organizer: Anna Svendsen (University of York)

The centenary of the First World War has prompted new publications on and public interest in the life and work of the Anglo-Welsh poet and painter David Jones (1895-1974). In 2015 Chichester’s Pallant House Gallery devoted a major exhibition to Jones, its detailed catalogue by Paul Hills and Ariane Bankes attracting attention in the scholarly and popular press. English composer Iain Bell adapted Jones’s war poem In Parenthesis (1937) for the Welsh National Opera in 2016. BBC Radio 4 featured Thomas Dilworth’s biography of Jones, the fruit of three decades’ research, as a Book of the Week in April 2017. Chapters in recent monographs by Anthony Domestico, Matthew Griffiths, and W. David Soud, among others, have considered Jones alongside his better-known peers. In late 2017 Brill presented a collection of essays addressing the question of Jones’s status as a “Christian Modernist.” In summer 2018 the journal Religion & Literature released a David Jones Special Issue and Bloomsbury Academic included an edition of Jones’s unpublished prose in its Modernist Archives series, with an edition of his unpublished poetry to appear in December.

This seminar, convened with the cooperation of the new David Jones Research Center, calls students and scholars of Jones to capitalize on and contribute to this growing corpus. Some spurs:

– Investigations of Jones archives in North America and the UK

– Approaches to editing and exhibiting Jones’s work and correspondence

– Jones among his contemporaries

– Jones’s inheritance and legacy

– Jones’s cultural and aesthetic theories

– Jones and theology, religion, the Second Vatican Council, “the post-secular”

– Jones’s politics, political theology

– Jones’s women

– Jones’s wars

https://www.acla.org/re-presenting-david-jones

If interested in being a part of this seminar proposal, please submit an abstract via the ACLA website by 20 September. For more info about submission, see the guidelines on the ACLA website: https://www.acla.org/node/add/paper