Author: modernistudies

One day symposium, Maynooth University, 21^st March 2022.

Call for papers

How might we understand the at times fraught, at times generative relationship between poetry and criticism? 

What does it take for poetry to be, as Matthew Arnold proclaimed, “a criticism of life”, or as Audre Lorde insisted, “a vital necessity… toward survival and change?” And what steps must we take to, in the words of Adrienne Rich, “enter an old text from a new critical direction”?

How might epigraphs function as critical measures of the poem which follows? Is there a different rhythm for reading reviews in the same magazine as we encounter poems? How does the poet-critic negotiate the demands of both roles in relation? And what work can poetry criticism do to bring about cultural awareness and even change? 

Our chiasmus takes account of the symbiosis that exists between poetry and criticism, seeking to explore the reciprocity and tensions therein. Poems such as Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism (1711), Anne Carson’s Glass Essay (1994), W.H. Auden’s The Sea and The Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1944), and Vahni Capildeo’s reviews-in-verse in Skin Can Hold (2019) melt the distinctions we usually make between verse and prose, poetry and criticism, into air. Essays such as Sandeep Parmar’s ‘Not a British Subject: Race and Poetry in the UK’ (2015) and ‘Still Not a British Subject: Race and UK Poetry’ point to the work to be done in addressing the structures of whiteness in Anglophone poetry criticism, and “expanding the definition of innovative or avant-garde to account for challenges to the expressive and individual lyric mode posed by poets of colour.”

Whatever the relationship between poetry and criticism, it is one of vital importance, shaping how poems are written and received, canons formed, interrogated, and reformed, and poetic energies unleashed in both verse and prose. 

This one-day symposium on March 21^st at Maynooth University, Ireland, seeks to address such questions, and more, bringing together scholars working on poetry, poetics, literary studies, and other relevant areas. We especially welcome work from BAME/BIPOC scholars, poets and writers. 

We are honoured to host Professor Sandeep Parmar and Dr Mary-Jean Chan as our joint plenary speakers.

While we hope this symposium will be in person (abiding by the Covid-19 measurements required by the Government of Ireland, which includes mandatory mask-wearing), we reserve the right to pivot online in the interests of public safety. 

Please send us an abstract along with a brief biography to Dr Karl O’Hanlon and Dr
Catherine Gander at poetryascrit@gmail.com by January 15th 2022.

• Possible topics might include, but are not limited to:
• Critical poetic forms (e.g. poetic essays, odes and palinodes, elegies, epistles, parody,
• burlesque, reviews-in-verse)
• Public-facing critical cultures (platforms, media, audience)
• Poetry criticism and race
• Poetry criticism and gender
• Poetry criticism and ‘craft’
• Poetry responding to criticism and vice versa
• The social function of poetry
• Reviewing and rhetoric: critical arguments in the ‘poetry wars’
• Canon formation, occlusion and marginalisation
• The role of the poet-critic
• Lyric subjectivity and new lyric studies
• The roles of various reviewing platforms
• Literary politics, self-fashioning and critical reputations
• Prose criticism and style

CFP  

Cadernos de Literatura Comparada, no. 46 (June 2022)

Modernisms Revisited II: 1922-2022

In 2022, we will celebrate the centenary of the Modern Art Week, consensually hailed as a landmark in Brazilian art and literature and as the event that gave rise to Modernism in Brazil. As Alfredo Bosi has noted, the Week was “the meeting point of the various trends that had been taking hold in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro since the First World War and the platform that allowed the consolidation of particular groups”, which, in the following years, would significantly change the direction of the country’s intellectual production.

However, even though the debate around national identity is an essential part of the period, it should not be ignored that Modernism, as a movement of artistic renewal from the first twenty years of the last century, has, in Brazil and in the world, characteristics that predate the Week and cut through it, undergoing new transformations in its wake. Thus, there is still a need to reflect on the beginnings of Brazilian Modernism in light of its relationship, for example, with the European vanguards, or even with other defining events of Modernism, which took place around the same year as the Week.

1922 is, after all, celebrated in the Anglo-American space as the annus mirabilis of Modernist literature, so named for bringing together the publication of three of the most important works in the English language of the last century: The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot; Jacob’s Room, by Virginia Woolf; and Ulysses, by James Joyce, which was published in the same month as the Modern Art Week. In 1924, in France, Yvan Goll and André Breton each published their own Manifeste du Surréalisme, a few months after Oswald de Andrade launched, in Rio de Janeiro, the Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil. In short, as a world movement, there is still a vast field of Modernism to be explored, which can greatly benefit from a comparative perspective.

Thus, this issue invites researchers from diverse areas to submit articles that address the Modernisms of different countries, emphasizing their particularities and their points of contact. Although this issue of the Cadernos de Literatura Comparada celebrates the centenary of the Modern Art Week, we also intend to bring together texts aimed at the comparative study of the most diverse Modernisms, as well as approaches that emphasize their interartistic, intermedial and interdisciplinary character. In this sense, the journal will feature articles that focus on topics like (but not exclusively) the following:

Brazilian Modernism and European Vanguards;
Other compared modernisms;
The Spirit of 22 and its place in the contemporary era;
Modernism and Intermediality: literature, music, painting, cinema, etc;
Genders and sexualities in Modernism(s);
Modernist Manifestos and Literary Magazines.

All articles must be sent, by e-mail, to cadernospreviewjune@gmail.com by February 28, 2022. Submitted articles must comply with the publication rules of the Cadernos de Literatura Comparada available at: https://ilc-cadernos.com/index.php/cadernos/about/submissions

We will consider previously unpublished essays written in the following languages: Portuguese, English, Spanish and French.

Issue 46 of the Cadernos is organized by:
Joana Matos Frias (ILCML – FLUL)
João Paulo Guimarães (ILCML – FLUP)
Ivana Schneider (ILCML – FLUP)
Daniel Floquet (ILCML – FLUP)

Watch Words: John Furnival and Text (as) Art

Royal College of Art, London, 25 March 2022

Submission deadline 31 January 2022 (expressions of interest asap): johnfurnivalsymposium@gmail.com 

@watchwords22

Supported by the Paul Mellon Foundation

The English text-artist John Furnival (1933-2020), who died last year, made extraordinary contributions to a number of national and international movements at the juncture of text and image. These include Kinetic Art, Mail Art, British Pop Art, Book Art, and the global Concrete Poetry movement. Furnival also worked with, and influenced, a number of important graphic designers and typographers such as Edward Wright. Today, Furnival’s practice continues to excite and inspire, and bears relevance to a number of contemporary critical discourses and paradigms within art theory and history, including new materialisms and conceptions of the post-digital.

Watchwords: John Furnival and Text (as) Art is an interdisciplinary one-day symposium, co-organised by Dr. Natalie Ferris, Lecturer in Post-1945 Literature at the university of Durham and Dr. Greg Thomas, author of Border Blurs: Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland (Liverpool UP, 2019) in collaboration with the Writing MA at the Royal College of Art. The art press Bricks From The Kiln will produce an accompanying special edition of their journal series celebrating Furnival’s life and work and exploring his relevance to British and international art history, featuring creative and critical contributions from symposium participants and contemporary artists and poets.

Our confirmed keynotes are the writer Eley Williams, author of Attrib. and Other Stories, winner of the 2018 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and Professor Stephen Bann, Emeritus Professor of History of Art at the University of Bristol and editor of Concrete Poetry: An International Anthology (1967). We are also delighted to be welcoming textile artist Astrid Furnival, John’s frequent collaborator, and his curator and publisher Bernard Moxham.

Possible topics for papers – which should be rooted in an engagement with John and/or Astrid Furnival’s practice – include but are not limited to:

·         Concrete poetry

·         Mail art

·         Small press practice

·         Kinetic art and constructivism

·         British pop art

·         Typography

·         Collaboration and pedagogy

·         Cut-up and machine poetry

·         Neo-dada and intermedia art

·         Book art

·         Textile and fibre arts

·         Craft as critical practice

·         Subversive stitching

·         Feminist craft

·         Craft and ecology

·         West-country and regional avant-gardes

·         Post-war avant-gardes

·         Text art and new materialisms

·         Post-digital making

·         Communication and media, Marshall McLuhan and after

·         Cybernetics and information theory

·         Social and cultural history of the post-war

·         Sociologies of small press culture

·         Artistic and literary practices – contemporary or historical – informed by the Furnivals’ work

200-word abstracts for 15-20 minute papers should be sent to JohnFurnivalSymposium@gmail.com before 31 January 2022. However, participants are asked to respond with expressions of interest as soon as possible. 

We’d like to invite humanities scholars to contribute to our edited volume, Humour in Times of Confrontations, 1901 to the Present, to be published in 2022/23 by Routledge in the Humour in Literature and Culture series.

This volume seeks to offer a broad understanding of humour in the 20th and 21st centuries by examining how humour emerges as a reaction to and/or against various dramatic conflicts across the period through the new modes of representation and new technologies that have emerged. Some humour is ageless and other humour dies in the moment. This volume stands out by exploring how the new modes and new technologies produce and share humour, and how they can be said to have changed humour in some way. Each chapter will begin with an overview of one of the confrontations below and move on to provide a case study of how that confrontation contributes to the creation, enjoyment, and sharing of humour via different media. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

1.    The WWI
2.    The Great Depression
3.    The WWII
4.    The cold war between the US and the USSR
5.    The rise and fall of the Berlin Wall
6.    The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China
7.    May 68
8.    The Stonewall riots
9.    The age of postmodernism
10.  Asian financial crisis
11.  9/11 attacks
12.  Climate change and global warming
13.  Black Lives Matter
14.  The Me Too movement
15.  The surge of Trumpism and Brexit
16.  The Covid-19 pandemic

By 31 December 2021, please submit an abstract of 400 words max and a brief bio to the editors Prof Shun-liang Chao (sleon.chao@gmail.com), Dr Alvin Dahn (alvindahn@gmail.com), and Prof Vivienne Westbrook (dr.v.westbrook@kimep.kz). Full-length articles of 6000 to 8000 words will be due on 31 August 2022.

Outside/rs 2022 is a conference for postgraduate researchers, early career researchers and community parties, that provides a space to explore topics of sex, gender and queerness at the margins. The conference will be a hybrid of in-person, at the University of Brighton, and online sessions.

Example topics of submissions could include:

• Social marginalisation, disruptive gender identities and dissident sexual cultures
• Creating safe-spaces and navigating unsafe ones in terms of gender, sex or queerness
• LGBTQIA+ and Queer political movements or history
• Gender, family and kinship issues or politics
• Queer arts, literatures, aesthetics and/or performance
• New technologies for LGBTQ people: reproductive, non-reproductive and more
• (Auto- )Biographies and ethnographies within and beyond the gender binary
• Queer subjectivities, intersubjectivities and phenomenologies
• Gendered or bodily boundaries, political borders and abolitionist responses
• Outsides: nomadism, liminality and mobilities

We invite submissions in the form of:

• Abstracts for complete papers (300 words)
• Abstracts for panels (panels consist of 3 papers: include 300 words for each abstract and a cover letter)
• Workshop proposals (400 words describing the topics, structure and aims of the workshop)

Abstracts and proposals should be sent to <outsiders2022@gmail.com> by 9 January 2022. See the conference website for more details. <https://outsiders2022.wordpress.com/academic-submissions&gt;

For all enquiries or to join our mailing list for the conference, please email: outsiders2022@gmail.com