Author: modernistudies

Adaptation and the Novel

Saturday 9 November 2013, Keele University

Organisers: Joanna Taylor and Nick Seager

Plenary lectures by Rachel Carroll (Teeside University) and Sarah Wootton (Durham University)

Are novels tainted or legitimated in the process of adaptation? What aesthetic challenges and opportunities does the transition of a story from one genre to another present? And in what cultural, commercial, and artistic contexts have processes or adaptation and appropriation taken place?

This one-day conference invites proposals for 20-minute papers addressing any aspect of adaptation and the novel, from the origins of the genre to the present day. Papers may choose to address one of the following topics:

•Adaptations of prose fiction to the screen (big and small)

• The novel’s presence on the stage – in drama, dance, musicals, and opera

•Textual histories and amendments (abridgement, continuation, translation, rewritings)

• Novels’ visual afterlives, from high art to cartoons, graphic novels, and video games

•The appropriations of novels in fictional reworkings (from The Swiss Family Robinson to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies)

•The production and reception of adaptations

•The relationship of ‘literary’ forms to ‘popular’ cultural ones

•Adaptations for different age groups

•Appropriations across national and cultural boundaries

•Adaptations of other genres into prose fiction

•Theories of adaptation, as these relate to the novel

•The creative practice of adapting to or from the novel

This is far from an exhaustive list and we are open to approaches that engage with adaptation and the novel in literal or in more abstract senses. We are eager to receive proposals that address Anglophone and non-Anglophonenovels, and which reflect the long history of efforts to adapt the novel, efforts which are surely as old as the genre itself and which continue to this day.

Please send a proposal of 300–500 words by 13 September 2013 to j.e.taylor@keele.ac.uk & n.p.seager@keele.ac.uk. Informal enquiries are also welcome. We will notify applicants of the decision on their paper as soon as possible after the deadline, but can possibly also offer earlier notification if you request this.

Two bursaries of £50 are available for current postgraduate students giving a paper, which will defray travel or accommodation costs. Please indicate when you send your proposal that you wish to be considered for these and include a 200-word ‘statement of need’ (specify any current or past funding and any financial support you have received for attending this conference).

The registration fee is £10, which covers lunch and refreshments (the fee is waived for Keele postgraduate students).

For further details and updates, please see the website – http://adaptationskeele.wordpress.com/

Other Eliots: Contemporary Trends in T. S. Eliot Studies

Postgraduate Conference

University of Birmingham, April 18th 2014

Keynote speakers:

Dr Jason Harding (University of Durham)

Prof. Steve Ellis (University of Birmingham)

Call for Papers

In the past decade our understanding of T. S. Eliot and his work has been significantly enhanced by a number of important studies. Most recently, Barry Spurr’s ‘Anglo-Catholic in Religion’: T. S. Eliot and Christianity (2010) helped to clarify the nature and evolution of Eliot’s Christian belief. Elsewhere, in T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (2003), David Chinitz challenged the previous perception of Eliot as a highbrow elitist opposed to popular culture. In addition to the aforementioned seminal works, the commencement of the T. S. Eliot Research Project has granted researchers and academics unprecedented access to archival resources from around the world, including those owned by Mrs Valerie Eliot, the Eliot Estate, and Faber & Faber Ltd. To date, this has resulted in four volumes of correspondence, and scholars now eagerly await the release of new fully comprehensive collections of Eliot’s complete poems, prose and plays. Undoubtedly, this is an exciting period in Eliot studies and as we approach the 50th anniversary of Eliot’s death, this conference seeks to draw attention to the multifarious research into Eliot’s life and work which is currently being undertaken.

We welcome papers from postgraduate and early career researchers which address all areas of Eliot studies, which may include:

• Eliot and Popular Culture

• Eliot and Interdisciplinary studies – art, music, film, theatre, dance etc.

• Psychoanalysis – gender, sexuality and desire.

• Landscape, environmentalism and ruralism

• Eliot and Modernism

• Eliot and anti-Semitism

• Eliot and Publishing

• Eliot and Correspondence

Organisers: Jeremy Diaper (University of Birmingham) and Matt Geary (University of Birmingham)

The format of the day will consist of 20 minute presentations, followed by a discussion of each paper. The conference will be introduced with a keynote speech from Dr Jason Harding and Professor Steve Ellis will conclude the conference with his thoughts on the future of Eliot studies.

Please send 300-400 word proposals along with a brief 100 word academic biography to Jeremy Diaper (jxd668@bham.ac.uk) and Matt Geary (mkg703@bham.ac.uk) by December 1st 2013.

http://othereliots2014.wordpress.com

twitter: @OtherEliots2014

The deadline for abstract submissions to the Katherine Mansfield Postgraduate Day, which will be held at Birkbeck in London on 23 November 2013, has been extended to 31 August.

Please see the attached CFP for more details.

KMS Postgraduate Day Nov 2013

MODERNIST COMMUNITIES

The inaugural international conference of the
French Society of Modernist Studies

25-26 April 2014
University of the Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3
Paris, France

Keynote speakers:
Jessica Berman (University of Maryland)
Linnell Secomb (University of Greenwich)

Call for papers

The aim of this two-day conference is to foster discussion on communities in the modernist period. As discursive constructs and historical practices, communities constitute a privileged phenomenon from which to understand the political and ethical regime of modernist texts, as well as the actual forms of collective experience in which writers and readers were involved. More than a decade after Jessica Berman’s landmark work on “the politics of community” in modernist fiction, we seek to explore the various ways in which communities were configured across genres and artistic media, but also to acknowledge the grounds of their historical and cultural specificity. We hope that this will lead us to distinguish various versions of the communal, from the ideal to the empirical, from the utopian to the everyday, from consensus to dissensus.
Communities can be recorded at a symbolic as well as a material level, both inside and outside modernist texts themselves. We therefore encourage a variety of critical approaches, ranging from historicist and sociological, to aesthetic and philosophical. Through this critical diversity, we are particularly interested in investigating the historicity of modernist communities: how can we identify the historical singularity of modernist communal forms? How can we account for the changing scales, spaces and media of communal thinking in the modernist period? This emphasis on a historical being-in-common—what Jean-Luc Nancy defined as the community of the contemporary—can fruitfully be coupled with a critical reading of various later theories of community, from Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities” to Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic conception of “the common”. To what extent do modernist texts lead us to understand or challenge such theories? By taking a far-ranging approach to the concepts, forms, and historical practices of community, we hope to map out the plurality of this phenomenon, while recording its persisting elusiveness.
As the conference will inaugurate the creation of the French Society of Modernist Studies—Société d’Etudes Modernistes—, we seek to bring together scholars from all countries and hope to strengthen collaborations between French and international researchers.

Possible paper topics may include, but are not limited to:

– Communities across genres and literary forms
– Communities across artistic forms (painting, music, etc.)
– Writing, reading, and printing communities
– Academic communities and the institutional construction of modernisms
– Cultural communities and the ‘battle of the brows’
– Everyday communities: communal practices, communal occasions, communal emotions
– Utopian communities
– The places and spaces of community
– The temporalities of community
– National and transnational communities
– Technological and ecological communities
– Modernism and the discourses on community: international relations, sociology, anthropology, history, philosophy, psychology, sciences, etc.
– Modernism and later theories of community (Benedict Anderson, Jean-Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Rancière, etc.)

Organisers: Vincent Bucher (University of Grenoble 3) and Caroline Pollentier (University of Paris 3)
EA 4398 – PRISMES (VORTEX)

Scientific Committee: Isabelle Alfandary (University of Paris 3), Jessica Berman (University of Maryland), Catherine Bernard (University of Paris 7), Vincent Bucher (University of Grenoble 3), Antoine Cazé (University of Paris 7), Claire Davison-Pégon (University of Paris 3), Catherine Lanone (University of Paris 3), Laura Marcus (University of Oxford), Axel Nesme (University of Lyon 2), Caroline Pollentier (University of Paris 3), Linnell Secomb (University of Greenwich).

Papers will be delivered in English.

Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words and a short bio-bibliography to both organisers by 31 October 2013.
buchervincent@gmail.com
caroline.pollentier@hotmail.fr

Listening to Literature, 1900-1950
12-14 March 2014 – KU Leuven

Keynote
Julian Murphet
(University of New South Wales, Sydney)

This three-day conference seeks to survey the impact of aural media (phonograph, gramophone, telephone, radio) and other major sound events of the first half of the twentieth century on the literature of the period. Through in-depth analysis of the different ways in which modernist and avant-garde authors reflected on and incorporated sound and aural technologies in their writings, we aim to explore the literary soundscape between 1900 and 1950.
The first half of the twentieth century – “the age of noise” in the words of its contemporaries – is littered with events crucial to the history of modern aurality. The phonograph and its successor, the gramophone, enabled man to record and replay sound. Telephone and radio enabled long distance verbal communication. The combustion engine filled the big city with its incessant mechanical drone. And of course there were the two World Wars, whose aural impact – deafening bombings, nerve-shattering sirens, the rhythmic stamping of marching feet and the continuous drone of planes overhead – can hardly be overestimated.
This conference aims to explore the impact of these and other related events on the literary landscape of the period, looking for the answers to such questions as:

• How is sound represented? What techniques are used to represent sound?
• What kinds of sounds are represented and how do they compare? What function do the represented sounds fulfill within the literary work?
• Was the representation of sound altered by the introduction of new aural media such as the phonograph or telephone?
• How were the various aural media themselves represented? What is their function within the literary work? How are they used as a literary motif or device in the work of particular authors?
• How can we study sound within the literary work? How does fictional sound relate to actual sound?
• Are there substantial differences in the treatment of sound within the period, for instance between modernism and the avant-garde, but also between authors, genres, generations? And if so, how can they be explained?
• How does the literary representation of sound relate to that of the other senses? Do they fulfill different functions within the literary work?

We welcome both theoretical and case-based studies on these and other questions central to the mapping of the literary soundscape between 1900 and 1950. Proposals (in English) should be sent to ltlconference@arts.kuleuven.be by 1 August 2013. These should contain a 300-word abstract as well as a short bio listing contact and affiliation details.
The first day of the conference will cater specifically to postgraduate students, enabling young and promising scholars to present their research and collaborate with their peers.
This conference is organized by the Leuven-based research team MDRN. For more information, visit http://www.mdrn.be. If you have any further questions, please contact tom.vandevelde@arts.kuleuven.be or tom.willaert@arts.kuleuven.be.

Third international ESPRit conference

Backroom Business: The Production of Periodicals

10-11 April 2014
Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Proposals deadline: October 1, 2013

This conference seeks to explore every aspect related to the production of European periodicals, from the early eighteenth century to the present day. Papers could address issues of financing, sponsoring, editing, designing, advertising, printing and digitization. We are for instance interested in what Barbara Onslow called the “back-room workers”: the printers, typesetters, engravers and illustrators who are often invisible in periodical histories. We invite scholars to send in proposals for 15 to 20 minute talks on the above themes, both dealing with individual magazines and discussing wider trends, such as the evolutions in the production of periodicals. We especially look for papers that reach beyond national borders and challenge traditional literary-historical boundaries. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
 Editors and editing
 Financing and sponsoring
 Printing and digitization practices
 Photography, illustrations, and advertising
 Periodicals as producers of culture

Please send a 250 word proposal for a 15 to 20 minute presentation by August 15 to the conference organizers at esprit@let.ru.nl. A selection of papers will be published in a special issue of the future ESPRit e-journal.

Ordinary/Everyday/Quotidian

An International Two-Day Conference

The ordinary and the everyday are intuitively self-evident, yet notoriously elusive. Efforts to define “ordinary language” or “everyday practice” have preoccupied thinkers across many disciplines: philosophers, historians, sociologists, political theorists, geographers and critics of literature and the visual arts. And these subjects demand more attention from scholars working on race, class, gender and sexuality, as well as food studies and the digital and medical humanities. Yet existing efforts have rarely engaged in dialogue with their counterparts in other disciplines. We call for papers from scholars in all these fields to join in a spirited dialogue at an international, two-day conference to be held at the University of York, 26 and 27 September 2013.

Scholars in all disciplines are invited to ponder, celebrate, and critique the quotidian, ranging from the furtive pleasures of pop to the dubious delights of junk: “Does it glow at the core with personal heat, with signs of one’s deepest nature, clues to secret yearnings, humiliating flaws? What habits, fetishes, addictions, inclinations? What solitary acts, behavioral ruts?”

Confirmed events include keynote addresses by:

· Prof. John Roberts (History of Art, Wolverhampton)

· Dr. Jennifer Baird (Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck)

· Dr Bryony Randall (English, Glasgow)

It will culminate in a colloquium chaired by Prof Ben Highmore (Cultural Studies, Sussex) and featuring:

· Prof. Michael Sheringham (French, All Souls Oxford)

· Dr. Holger Nehring (History, Sheffield)

· Dr. Rupert Read (Philosophy, UEA)

· Dr. Michael White (History of Art, York)

· Dr. Neal Alexander (English, Nottingham)

What do the terms everyday, ordinary and quotidian mean at the beginning of the twenty-first century? This conference will confront head-on the challenges and opportunities presented by the interdisciplinary nature of such an enquiry.

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to oeqyork2013@gmail.com by 16 August; general enquiries are also welcome. You can also visit our website at: http://www.york.ac.uk/modernstudies/conferences/oeq/