Author: modernistudies

The Country House in Britain, 1914-2014

Newcastle University, Friday 6th – Sunday 8th June 2014

http://www.countryhouseconference.wordpress.com

Keynote Speakers: Deborah Cartmell, Christine Geraghty, Ellie Jones and Alison Light

Call for Papers: From Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) to Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child (2011), the country house has had a strong presence in British culture of the past decade. This is the culmination of a century’s interest in the spaces and places of the country house, an interest that burgeoned following the break-up of the great estates around the First World War. In texts ranging from P. G. Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle Saga to Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazlet Chronicles, and in television series such as ITV’s Brideshead Revsited (1981) and Downton Abbey (2010), British culture continues to return to the country house setting in both popular and high culture. Since the rise of the British heritage film in the 1980s and the proliferation of Austen adaptations in the 1990s the country house has played an equally important role in British cinema and continues to gain currency as a national icon. This preoccupation with the country house is fuelled by institutions such as the National Trust and English Heritage, as well as through documentary programmes such as BBC1’s The Edwardian Country House (2002), Channel 4’s Country House Rescue (2008) and Julian Fellowes’s Great Houses on ITV (2013). Often overshadowed by the country house in other centuries such as the seventeenth-century country house poem or the nineteenth-century country house novel, studies of the twentieth and twenty-first century country house are scarce.

This three-day interdisciplinary conference will trace the representation of the country house in British literature and film between 1914 and 2014. The conference will explore how space, class and gender operate in the wealth of filmic and literary texts which have been concerned with the country house throughout the last century, as well as considering how it functions in documentaries, historical monographs and reality television. We invite 300-word abstracts (for 20-minute papers) on any topic relating to the country house; possible topics might include, but are by no means restricted to:

· Historical Fictions

· The Downton Effect

· The Modernist Country House

· The Country House Abroad

· The Middlebrow and Prize Culture

· Costumes and Design

· Cycles of Pride and Prejudice

· Adaptation

· Murder in the Country House

· Haunted Homes and the Gothic

· The Wartime Country House

· Period Drama

· Servants and Servitude

· Class and the National Trust

· Toy Soldiers and the Dolls House

· Romance Fiction

Abstracts should be submitted via email to countryhouseconf@ncl.ac.uk by 1 November 2013; successful applicants will be notified by 2014. Send any queries to the above email.

Conference Organisers: Faye Keegan and Barbara Williams

Supported by the Newcastle University Gender Research Group

20th Century Women’s Writing and the Capital(s) of Recuperation

ACLA Annual Conference March 20-23rd, 2014 at New York University

“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” Muriel Rukeyser’s often-cited sentiment unfortunately resonates as strongly today as it did in 1968. In this seminar, we hope to split open and illuminate alternate modes of access to the worlds of capital in order to rethink its human, cultural and political investments in twentieth century women’s literature. While capitals elicit fantasies of a cosmopolitan ethos predicated upon inclusivity and community, we want to trouble this narrative’s simplicity by questioning why women writers of the twentieth century more often than not lacked the cultural purchase to navigate cosmopolitan capitals around the world. We ask how this exclusion was renegotiated and represented in disparate texts. Instead of engaging in debates that can only ever aspire to equality, we want to understand more clearly how exclusion constitutes capital, and, more importantly, how women writers renegotiate and capitalize upon this exclusion.

We hope this line of questioning will invite papers about underexplored women’s literature and underrepresented women writers so that we might also reflect upon the enterprise of recuperation. Can we recuperate previously lost, buried, and out of print texts by women writers of the twentieth century without assimilating differences into a literary history that privileges white, heteronormative patriarchy? How do conditions of literary production and material, social, and cultural contexts inform our understanding of these texts’ vitality? Ultimately, what are we capitalizing upon when we recuperate women writers?

To submit an abstract, please visit the conference website and choose “propose a paper” or click here. You will be prompted to choose a seminar title when you submit your abstract. Be sure to choose “20th Century Women’s Writing and the Capital(s) of Recuperation.”

Abstract Deadline: November 1, 2013

Feel free to email me (sarahcornish@gmail.com or sarah.cornish@unco.edu) or Peter Murray (pmurray24@fordham.edu) with any questions.

“Detouring Tradition’s Capital”

Organizers: Peter Lurie (University of Richmond), Tyler Williams (State University of New York at Buffalo)

Despite its conservative emphasis on stability, “tradition” has been conceptually uprooted by twentieth and twenty-first century literature and theory. Recent critical attention to tradition has begun to demonstrate its fragile foundations, politically and metaphysically, by suggesting that the unequivocal solidity traditionalism seeks in a nostalgic past ultimately relies on the unpredictable future into which each inheritor carries tradition’s legacy. Such structural unmooring at the heart of tradition, its constitutive exposure to differentiation and its genealogical precariousness, thus accounts for the possibility of comparatism and translation, as well as appropriation, re-contextualization, revisionism, homage, and betrayal. Tradition’s capital, in other words, only ever seemingly secured, is always displaced elsewhere as “other” to itself.

Contributors are encouraged to consider any of the following questions:
•What constitutes tradition’s survival and/or maintenance?
•How are traditions understood via their faithful and/or unfaithful inheritors?
•What politics are involved in the transnational or transcultural migration of traditions away from predominate capital hubs?
•How do subjects or individuals defined as “eccentric” to traditionally-inclusive groups (enforced along regulatory lines of race, gender, family, sexuality, native languages, region, the state, capital centers, etc.) both constitute and undermine tradition’s stability?
•How does literature transgress, undermine, or produce tradition’s hegemonic structure?
•How do cultural or literary efforts to maintain (or transform) tradition point up limits to tradition’s claims of veracity—as well as those of the literary itself?
•What other media or discourses (aesthetic, scientific, political) inform literature’s relation to tradition?

SEMINAR KEYWORDS: Tradition, inheritance, difference, modernism, crisis, subaltern, diaspora, transnationalism, region, cosmopolitanism, post-colonialism, third-/developing-world, queer, translation, interdisciplinarity.

To submit a proposal, visit the conference website (http://acla.org/acla2014/propose-a-paper/ )then click on “Submit a paper proposal.” Select our seminar title — “Detouring Tradition’s Capital” — from the drop-down menu and include your professional information and paper description. Feel free to contact me (plurie@richmond.edu) or the other seminar organizer, Tyler Williams (tmw26@buffalo.edu), with any questions.

Capital(s) of Avant-Garde Theater

Seminar Organizer(s):

Martin Harries (University of California, Irvine), Christian Gerzso
(Pacific Lutheran University)

Avant-garde theater and performance demand a comparative framework. This
seminar seeks to gather a wide range of work on avant-garde and
experimental theater and drama across national and linguistic borders.
Papers focusing on the historical avant-garde as well as on more recent
and contemporary avant-gardes are welcome, as are discussions of the
historical roots of avant-garde practice in the nineteenth century or
earlier periods.

Papers related to the conference theme are especially welcome. The
theater has been closely linked to capital(s): geographic, political,
and economic. But what is the relationship of avant-garde and
experimental theater and drama in particular to these varieties of
capital? How does avant-garde theater de-stabilize or rearticulate the
relationship of theater production and consumption to centers of
financial, political, and cultural hegemony, especially with the claims
of avant-garde and experimental drama to anti-nationalism,
internationalism, cosmopolitanism, and/or anti-capitalist localism? How
does avant-garde drama resist ever-expanding networks of finance and
communication, and how do these, in turn, enable its production and
transmission? What new kinds of spectacle and publics do avant-garde and
experimental drama create through these new means and how do they
challenge or reinforce national, linguistic, and media boundaries?
Conversely, how does avant-garde drama represent the mediation of these
competing capitals? Is the theatrical stage still a privileged site for
representations of these vexed encounters in modernity?

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The ACLA will be in New York City, March 20-23, 2014:

acla.org/acla2014/

The procedure for proposing a paper is described here:

http://acla.org/acla2014/propose-a-paper/

The ACLA deadline for paper proposals is November 1st.