Author: modernistudies

Randomness CfP

Queens University Belfast

15-17 September 2020

Keywords

Accidental, arbitrary, incidental, slapdash, hit-or-miss, unplanned, unintended (e.g. consequences), unexpected, unanticipated, unpredictable, contingent, volatility, excitement, wonder, fantasy, imagination, creativity, serendipity.

Chance encounters, unforeseen opportunities, and impulsive decisions play a bigger role in our life and work than we wish to acknowledge. Is reading not always random to some extent? It is only retrospectively, in shifting scale from the individual to social or perspective from reading to interpreting, that randomness becomes regularity and can get explained away as purpose and design.

Randomness and chance play a leading role in historical accounts, in narratives of war and battles, victory and defeat, in biographies and travelogues, in narratives of arrivals, encounters and departures. They resurface in stories, setting characters onto a course or hurtling them into the great unknown, towards their fate. People’s bookshelves, readers’ memories, and second-hand bookshops can produce a similar, puzzling – even dizzying – sense of randomness.

Fortunes of literary works and theory are not immune to the dictates of chance. What are the forces that get literary works published, translated, circulated locally or internationally, and nominated for and winning literary prizes? When do managed search algorithms fail and serendipitous connections appear? How do chance encounters with a literary work, a theory, or lead to translations or adaptations, new creative adventures, or additional and alternative theories?

Artists and writers can be more comfortable with randomness than scholars; they break away from the space of the familiar and the already-known and place trust in the process of the work itself. Critics are driven by institutional pressures to present their work as an execution of purpose, design and method. But randomness persists even in grand geo-political schemes. Randomness overcomes censorship and solutions are always found to circulate books without the support of publishers or the state. Randomness happens despitecontrol, and may be the more attractive for it. It is often random finds that are the most treasured with a sense of delight. Random encounters excite imagination and creativity.

Randomness is also openness; it stands more often at beginnings and turns of the road of many literary and critical careers. How do we cultivate a sense of wonder and open up our critical discourses and theories of comparative literature and world literature to more inclusive and elastic modes of thinking and writing? Can we use randomness in and outside texts and oeuvresproductively, to our advantage?

We seek panels that will work with the idea of randomness, particularly in relation to:

–      Encounters with literary works, theories and cultural others

–      Adaptations, new writings, performances, visualizations within the same literary/cultural field, or outside.

–      Representing randomness through visualisations and digital interfaces.

–      Multilingualism, heterolingualism, plurilingualism, translanguaging

–      Performance, performativity

–      Politics of the literary/cultural market, including publication, translation, circulation, literary prizes and literary festivals (and book fairs)

–      Critiquing randomness in the age of search algorithms

–      Unpredictable futures

–      Ecocritical approaches to randomness and unpredictability

–      Translation and translation studies, choice of work and language, choice of method and style

–      Theories and Methods of Comparative Literature and World Literature

Deadlines: 15 November 2019 for Panel proposalsand 15 December 2019 for Paper proposals.

Submit your proposal to: randomness2020bcla@gmail.comor through the conference website https://randomness2020.wordpress.com/call-for-papers/

“Out of the Archives” section in Feminist Modernist Studies

We are looking for previously unpublished and/or unknown material that illustrates modernism’s vibrant global presence. Fiction, poetry, drama, photography, visual art, advertisements, political propaganda, little magazines, diaries, personal and professional correspondence: Feminist Modernist Studies wants to connect your archival discoveries with ongoing conversations in modernist studies.

Submissions should be accompanied by an introduction which can be as brief as a few pages or up to 4000 words.

Inquiries should be sent to

Cassandra Laity, founding editor claity@utk.edu

or

Urmila Seshagiri,  Out of the Archives editor sesha@utk.edu

Best, Cassandra Laity

Prof. Cassandra Laity

Editor, Feminist Modernist Studies (FMS; Routledge; 2017–) 

Former Co-Editor, Modernism/Modernity (JHUP; 2000-2010)

Currently, Visiting Scholar
English Department
University of Tennessee-Knoxville
e-mail claity@utk.edu

Profession and Performance

30th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf

June 11th–14th, 2020

University of South Dakota (Vermillion, SD, USA)

“Profession and Performance,” the theme of the 2020 Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, calls to mind not only Woolf’s sense of herself as a writer (her profession) but also the set of specialized occupations she takes up in A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938), areas of study and livelihoods traditionally reserved for the sons of educated men. It also invokes the ACVW’s commitment over the past three decades to the arts, to theater, to music, to the spoken word, and to the resonances of these media with the performance / performativity of Woolf’s life and writing. “Profession and Performance” might also encourage us to reflect on the ACVW’s rich history and to consider the ways in which the professions of those who support and attend the conference might be changing. As an event open to all scholars, students, and common readers of Woolf and Woolfian connections, we encourage 2020 participants to sound and explore echoes of past professions and performances in our present ones.

The 30th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf invites papers addressing these issues as well as other topics addressing “Profession and Performance,” including, but not limited to:

• contemporary adaptations of Woolf, her circles, or her work on stage / screen (e.g., Vita and Virginia; Life in Squares; etc.)
• the dynamic link between Woolf’s social critique (what she professed) and her art (its performance)
• the rich archive of scholarship that brings together studies of the avant-garde, modernism, and the middlebrow
• intersections of modernist studies and performance studies
• modernism’s role in the professionalization of literature and criticism
• the livelihoods and lifestyles of Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group
• investigations of identity and community
• Woolfian meditations on professions (i.e., on occupations, commitments, allegiances, and declarations)
• interpretations of Woolf-inspired performance art (e.g., music, dance, theater)
• profession as (public) performance
• questions of affect and attachment
• strong and weak performances / professions / modernisms
• reflections on the selves and the worlds we profess / perform in daily life, in politics, in ethics, in institutions, and in ongoing efforts to teach and learn
• the performative life of professionalization (or the subversion of professionalization)
• life-writing as performance of self, professionalization of self
• gendered performances / performances of gender (on stage / page, in life)
• professions for women (history of, literary treatments of, performances of)
• Woolf and developments in medical sciences and psychology
• teaching Woolf / Woolf as Teacher
• performing Bloomsbury / performative Bloomsberries
• the life of the feminist academic; the professionalization and/or institutionalization of feminism outside of academia

Abstracts of maximum 250 words for single papers and 500 words for panels should be sent to Virginia.Woolf@usd.edu by February 1st, 2020. In addition to traditional presentations, we encourage proposals for workshops (such as bookmaking, translation, publishing, forming writing groups, etc.) and proposals for roundtable or group discussions (such as feminist / queer perspectives, Woolfian pedagogy, staging / performing Woolf, etc.).

For accepted proposals, we ask well ahead of time that presenters bring access copies of their presentations to their panels.

The conference welcomes proposals for presentations in languages other than English to foster a more open exchange at this international conference. A few caveats: the organizers ask that all abstracts and proposals be submitted in English. Also, to ensure a more effective exchange among all participants, we ask that non-English presentations be accompanied by a handout of main points in English as well as (if possible) a PowerPoint presentation in English. Note that Q&A sessions will be conducted in English as well.

Website: https://www.usd.edu/arts-and-sciences/english/annual-conference-on-virginia-woolf

Twitter: @vwoolf2020

Proposals requested for the 22^nd Annual Conference of

The Space Between Society: Literature and Culture, 1914-1945

University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia

June 4-6, 2020

Keynote Speaker: TBA

Join the Space Between Society in Charlottesville, June 4-6, 2020, for our 22^nd annual conference, Race in the Space Between, 1914-1945. Our conference this year focuses especially on questions and problems related to race and racial formation in the years between 1914-1945. Please send abstracts (300 words) along with a short biographical statement (100 words) to conference organizer Carmenita Higginbotham at ch6sv@virginia.edu by December 1, 2019.

In the Space Between Society, scholars who study literature, history, media, art, society, and culture between 1914 and 1945, or between and during the two world wars of the twentieth-century, exchange ideas about their approaches and their objects of study. This year’s conference addresses the key roles that race—including racial formation, racial ideologies and racialist practices—played in creative, intellectual, ideological, and political conversations from 1914-1945. Self-consciously or not, interwar and wartime authors, artists, political figures, public intellectuals, and public officials around the world invested in the concept of race. For some, race was a means to assert social identity (white, black, Asian, American Indian, Pacific Islander). For others, race informed concepts of modernity and/or modernism. For still others, race shaped views of time and place, structuring how interwar and wartime cultures were interpreted, received, deployed, and exchanged.

We invite conference participants to consider:

–  What different cultural and scientific assumptions about race shape various sites during this period and our knowledge about it?

–  What methods can we utilize in our particular fields to analyze race as a component of cultural production?

–  What are the challenges of thinking about race and bringing such work into conversation with scholars in the wide range of fields represented in the Space Between Society?

We welcome paper and session proposals that engage with multiple forms, definitions, and investments in race in the space between and during the two world wars, across all disciplines and media, on research and/or pedagogy.

Possible presentations or panel topics include

Race, place, and regionalism

Race and memory (monuments, storytelling, recollections)

Race and art, media, sound

Racial performance, racial spectacle

Race and science (Eugenics, technology, innovation)

Racial self-fashioning (passing)

Racism and racial hierarchies

Racial invisibility and absence

Language (slang, racialized vernacular)

Segregation, isolation, and confinement

Intersectionality (e.g. race and gender)

International and comparative contexts of race and movement (migration, immigration, relocation)

Interracialism and cross-racial cultural production

Race and the metropolis

International and comparative contexts of race and politics/political systems

Economies of race (labor, consumption, commercialism)

Race, violence, war, and social movements

The Holocaust

Anti-Semitism

Racial genocide

Whiteness

Marginality and the “other”

We welcome longtime Space Between Society participants and invite new members to join us in Charlottesville in 2020. Our conference will be supplemented with tours, museum visits, performances, and walks in the greater Charlottesville area (with proposed visits including Monticello, the Fralin Museum of Art, the Jefferson African American Cultural Center, and sites at the University of Virginia). The 2020 conference seeks to offer mentoring workshops and 1:1 mentoring sessions for its participants. Some travel grant funding will be available for graduate students and international and independent scholars; please indicate your interest in your cover letter.

Keynote Speaker: TBA

Networking May Sinclair
Université de Nantes, 18th-19th June 2020

Keynote speaker: Professor Suzanne Raitt, College of William & Mary

This international conference explores the diversity of connections, inspirations and influences in the work of modernist writer, May Sinclair (1863-1946). It will be held at the University of Nantes (France) on Thursday 18^th and Friday 19^th June 2019.

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, May Sinclair was one of the most successful and widely known of British women novelists (Wilson, 2001). She produced over twenty novels and six collections of short stories and collaborated with many modernist writers and poets, including Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, H.D. and Richard Aldington. Her life was also exceptionally rich. She took an active part in the women’s suffrage movement and published several pamphlets for women’s rights between 1908 and 1917. In the early 1910s, she got involved in medico-psychological research, and wrote half a dozen psychoanalytical research papers. In 1915, she spent two weeks near the Belgian front with an ambulance unit and her Journal of Impressions in Belgium was one of the first wartime women’s diaries published in Britain (Raitt 2000, 163). She was also the acclaimed author of two major philosophical essays on idealism (1917 and 1922) that led to her election to the Aristotelian Society. Last, she was an influential literary historian and literary critic and wrote several much-quoted articles and prefaces on the stream of consciousness, the Brontë sisters and imagist poetry.

Many reviewers and critics have shown that May Sinclair’s modernism was not so much a derivation of other contemporary aesthetics but was rather a product of her idiosyncratic articulation of her many research interests and experiences. In addition, “the interdisciplinarity of Sinclair’s output […] eludes straightforward categorisation and this has arguably contributed to the traditional critical neglect of her writing” (Bowler & Drewery 2016, 1).

As May Sinclair is now “gaining critical legitimacy” (Raitt 2016, 23), this conference seeks to explore Sinclair’s texts and contexts and aims to shed light on her place in literary history and on her contribution to “the radical modernist challenge to traditional assumptions about what it means to be human” (Bowler & Drewery 2016, 14). Papers comparing Sinclair and other writers are thus particularly welcome; suggested topics might include (but are not limited to):

–  May Sinclair and her contemporaries: Thomas Hardy, Henry James, H. G. Wells, D. H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, Charlotte Mew, H. D., Richard Aldington, T S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Bowen, Mary Butts, Olive Moore etc.

–  May Sinclair and modernity/the modern/modernism

–  May Sinclair & WW1 writers

–  May Sinclair and Victorian and late nineteenth-century authors: the Brontë sisters, George Eliot, George Meredith etc.

–  May Sinclair and romantic poets: Shelley, Byron etc.

–  May Sinclair and philosophy: Henri Bergson, Bertrand Russell, Baruch Spinoza, T. H. Green, Arthur Schopenhauer, Samuel Butler, Francis Herbert Bradley etc.

–  May Sinclair and psychology: William James, Sigmund Freud, C. G. Jung, Pierre Janet, Melanie Klein, Ella Sharpe, Joan Riviere, Alfred Adler, Charles Myers etc.

–  May Sinclair and mysticism: Evelyn Underhill, the Society for Psychical Research, etc.

–  May Sinclair and first-wave feminism

–  Contemporary reception of May Sinclair

–  May Sinclair and her literary legacy

–  May Sinclair in translation

–  May Sinclair and music

–  May Sinclair and films or TV adaptations

Proposals no longer than 350 words, together with a 200-word biography, should be sent to the conference organisers before January 15^th, 2020.

https://maysinclairsociety.com/2019/07/22/cfp-networking-may-sinclair-les-reseaux-litteraires-de-may-sinclair-universite-de-nantes-18th-19th-june-2020/

Conference organisers:

Leslie de Bont, Université de Nantes leslie.debont@univ-nantes.fr

Isabelle Brasme, Université de Nîmes isabellebrasme@gmail.com

Florence Marie, Université de Pau florence.marie@univ-pau.fr

Journal for Literary and Intermedial Crossings

Open Call for Articles

Spring Issue (May 2020)

The Journal for Literary and Intermedial Crossings (JLIC) is an international, peer-reviewed open access journal. It publishes high-quality, innovative research engaging with literary and intermedial phenomena from various methodological angles and a wide range of disciplines including studies on literature, theatre, media and culture. The e-journal is supported by an international editorial board and aimed at an academic readership. JLIC offers an online publication platform to researchers from various fields engaging either directly or indirectly with the study of hybrid literary and/or intermedial phenomena. Targeted squarely at investigating the ‘in-between,’ the journal seeks contributions from scholars broadly covering intra- or inter-, or trans-aesthetic crossings that bridge a plurality of potential discourses, modalities, and methodologies. We particularly welcome articles focusing on aesthetic ‘crossings’ of media, genres and spaces.

We welcome contributions between 5,000 and 6,000 words (references and footnotes included) in Dutch, English, French, German, Italian or Spanish. All manuscripts are peer-reviewed. JLIC supports textual as well as multi-media formatting. In addition to articles, we also welcome suggestions for thematic issues (including a minimum of 5 articles plus introduction). All work submitted to JLIC should reference and be formatted according to our Author Guidelines. Articles may be submitted in Word format. Figures, video and audio files etc. should be saved separately from the text.

The deadline for articles is 15 October 2019. Please send an abstract of maximum 500 words (in English and, if applicable, also in the language of your article, i.e. Dutch, French, German, Italian or Spanish) and a list of 5 keywords (in the same (two) language(s)) and a 100-word author bio (in English only) to jlic@vub.be by 1 September 2019. Potential contributors should bear in mind that a two-stage review process is envisaged for full essays. In the first stage, articles will be reviewed by one of the journal editors. In the second stage, articles will be double-blind peer-reviewed by at least one external anonymous expert referee.

JLIC considers all manuscripts on the strict condition that:

• the manuscript is your own original work, and does not duplicate any other previously published work, including your own previously published work.
• the manuscript has been submitted only to the Journal of Literary and Intermedial Crossings; it is not under consideration or peer review or accepted for publication or in press or published elsewhere.
• the manuscript contains nothing that is abusive, defamatory, libellous, obscene, fraudulent, or illegal.
• the author has obtained the necessary permission to reuse third-party material in their article. The use of short extracts of text and some other types of material is usually permitted, on a limited basis, for the purposes of criticism and review without securing formal permission. If you wish to include any material in your article for which you do not hold copyright, and which is not covered by this informal agreement, you will need to obtain written permission from the copyright owner prior to submission.

Journal for Literary and Intermedial Crossings – www.jlic.be

Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Centre for Literary and Intermedial Crossings (CLIC)

Pleinlaan 2

1050 Brussels

Belgium

jlic@vub.be