Author: modernistudies

CFP: Reading Joyce’s ‘Aeolus’

London: Saturday, 2 March 2019

Of the 18 episodes of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), ‘Aeolus’ has claims to be among the most neglected. Conspicuously revised after its first appearance in The Little Review in October 1918, it belongs exclusively neither with the opening chapters of Joyce’s novel nor with the more radically experimental narratives of the later episodes. In this way, it presents a textual curiosity in the book, long overdue critical reappraisal.

This workshop, a collaboration between the James Joyce reading groups at the University of Leeds and the Charles Peake Ulysses reading group, hosted by the Institute of English Studies at Senate House, aims to offer new perspectives on this all too easily overlooked episode.

We welcome papers that focus on this episode exclusively, or explore its relationship with other chapters of the novel, or the rest of Ulysses more broadly, or other texts besides. Possible paper topics include, but are in no way limited to:

• Newspapers, popular media, and advertising
• Technology, trams, telegraphs, and printing presses
• Parnellism, the Irish language question, and political history
• Alcohol, socialising, and homosocial spaces
• Geography, city planning, urban infrastructure, architecture, and mapping
• Minor and ‘real-world’ characters
• The Little Review: adaptation, revision, and annotation

Papers should be no more than 20 minutes in length. 250-word abstracts and brief biographies should be sent to the organisers, Helen Saunders (helen.saunders@kcl.ac.uk) and Steven Morrison (steven.morrison@nottingham.ac.uk) by 30 November 2018.

When: Saturday 2 March 2019

Where: Institute of English Studies, Senate House, University of London

Reading Joyce’s ‘Aeolus’ (URL)

Reading Joyce’s ‘Aeolus’ (PDF)

The 64th BAAS Annual Conference
25–27 April 2019, University of Sussex

Keynote Speakers:
Barbara Savage (University of Pennsylvania/University of Oxford), Robyn Weigman (Duke University), Jonathan Bell (UCL)

Conference Themes
Proposals are welcomed on any subject in American Studies, and submissions are particularly welcome that address our two broad themes: LGBTQ+ History. Inspired by the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall Riots and the heritage of the Brighton area, the conference welcomes submissions relating to the American sexuality, civil rights and sexual dissidence. Activism and Radical Thought. Inspired equally by the East Sussex career of Thomas Paine, we also encourage papers exploring the history and culture of radical thought and activism from all sides of the political spectrum.

Submission Guidelines
Given the size and scope of the conference, we will give preference to fully formed panel proposals, but will also accept individual paper proposals where possible. All individual paper proposals should be for 20-minute presentations. All sessions at the conference will be a maximum of 1 hour 30 minutes. Proposals for panels should therefore consist of no more than three speakers, or, if more speakers are desired, should be conceived as roundtable discussions. BAAS is dedicated to fostering a culture of diversity and inclusion. We will give preference to panels that reflect the diversity of our field in terms of gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and institutional affiliation. We will also give preference to panels that include a mix of participants from across the career spectrum (i.e., from postgraduate to professor). All-male panel proposals will not be accepted. Equipment for the projection of visual presentations will be available in all rooms.

Special Funding for Targeted Research Panels
As a step towards building a more inclusive and diverse scholarly community, BAAS has made available funding for convenors to organise two successive annual conference panels that will support, promote, and feature the production of research by and about people of colour, LGBTQ+, and disability communities. Through Targeted Research Panels, BAAS seeks to provide opportunities to foster and forward research that attends to and includes historically marginalised communities and scholars without regularised institutional support. Convenors who apply for funding to organise a Targeted Research Panel must commit to coordinating a thematically cohesive panel for the 2019 and 2020 BAAS Annual Conferences. Each selected Targeted Research Panel will be awarded £5000 for a two-year cycle of BAAS annual conference panels. The panel convenor might, for example, use funds to subsidise the travel and accommodation of the panellists. The deadline for Targeted Research Panel applications is the same as the general CFP. For further details click here.

Instructions on Submission
Paper proposals should be 250 words maximum, including a title. Panel proposals should include a 250-word abstract for each constituent paper as well as an abstract of no more than 250 words describing the panel session as a whole. Please submit proposals, along with a brief CV and email address for each participant, to baas2019@sussex.ac.uk by the deadline of 15 November 2018.

Further details at: www.baas2019.org

Call for Papers: Modernist Art Writing / Writing Modernist Art

An International, Interdisciplinary Conference, University of Nottingham, 24–25 June 2019

The sometimes fruitful, sometimes fraught relationships between literature and the visual arts within modernism and the avant-garde have provided rich terrain for scholarly investigation, and for understanding both art and literature within the broader field of cultural production. And yet the various ways in which modernist writers respond to, object to, defend, query, and seek to represent the visual arts through writing have not yet been fully investigated. If, as Jennifer Pap (1997) has argued in relation to Cubism, modernist works of art are resistant to exhaustive explanation and to narrative entry, then how can writing – produced from within modernism or in response to it – best set about representing it?

Following Susan Harrow’s edited special issues of French Studies on New Ekphrastic Poetics (63.3 (2010)) and Thinking Colour-Writing (71.3 (2017)), Catherine Grant and Patricia Rubin’s special issue of Art History on Creative Writing and Art History (34.2 (2011)), experiments in creative art writing by T.J. Clark and others, and a renewed interest in creative criticism (as evidenced by Stephen Benson and Clare Connors’ 2014 anthology and guide), this conference will examine the relationship between modernism and art writing, both in the past and in the present moment. It will consider the ways in which different forms and genres of modernist writing responded to the visual arts; the legacy of modernism in contemporary practices of art writing; and the ways in which writers, whether academic, curatorial or creative, have engaged with modernist works of art. If, as Baudelaire claimed, the best response to a painting is a sonnet or elegy, then where does this leave art criticism, or the didactic gallery text? How have written responses to works of art sought (successfully or not) to provide equivalents to these, to capture the work of art in words, or to capture the experience of looking? What forms (ekphrastic poetry, artist stories, critical reviews, instructional guides, experimental forms of writing) have these responses taken?

We welcome various forms of intervention considering art writing produced within the modernist period broadly defined, and/or contemporary writing responding to modernist artworks, from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. We are keen to investigate the transnational dimension of modernist art writing and encourage submissions from those working on non-Anglophone cultures. The working language of the conference will be English but proposals for interventions in other languages will be welcome.

Papers may wish to respond to any of the following questions (which are presented as a set of prompts rather than an exhaustive list):

• How has art writing mediated the reception of modernist art across linguistic and cultural borders? What is its role in transnational artistic currents?
• How does modernist art writing ‘translate’ or mediate the visual arts for different audiences? Equally, how might it resist reductive models of intermedial translation?
• How does modernist art writing depart from traditional models of art criticism (‘describe and explain’), or indeed adhere to them?
• What has been the impact of modernist art writing (by figures such as Stein, Mallarmé, Moore, Schwitters, Apollinaire) on contemporary writing?
• To what extent might modernism permit experimental approaches to writing about art? And to what extent might modernist art writing overlap with other genres (poetry, fiction, criticism)?
• Where does art writing stand within the field of cultural production? How does it relate (in terms of its concerns, and its cultural status) to modernist writers’ other literary production?
• In what kinds of venue is art writing published, and how do editorial practices (including placement of images) affect its meaning and reception?
• Given the historical exclusion of women from concepts of artistic genius and from art-critical authority, in what ways have women used alternative modes of art writing as a space for self-expression and assertion, to explore text-image relationships, and (in the case of women artists) to assert critical authority over their own work?
• What differences can we perceive between modernist artists’ own writings about art, and the writings of those who approach the visual arts from a literary standpoint? What are the approaches adopted (during the modernist period and now) by professional critics, curators, creative writers and visual artists, and how might we most usefully interrogate their art writings? How do we approach the work of practitioners who straddle visual and verbal media?

We invite

– Proposals for complete panels (3 x 20 minute papers) or roundtables (5 x 8-10 minute papers)

– Proposals for individual scholarly papers, creative and/or critical interventions (20 minutes)

– Posters or digital exhibits (to be accompanied by 5 minute flash presentations)

We also plan to organise practice-based art writing sessions; proposals to run these are very welcome, as are other ideas.

Please send proposals and queries to the conference email address: modernistartwriting@gmail.com

The deadline for all proposals is Friday 30 November 2018.

Organising committee: Katherine Shingler, Lila Matsumoto, Lucy Bradnock (University of Nottingham Interdisciplinary Modernism Research Network); Emma West (Centre for Modernist Cultures, University of Birmingham)

Organised in conjunction with Nottingham Poetry Exchange and the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Nottingham.

There will be a fee to attend the conference; we will aim to keep this as low as possible to ensure that the conference is accessible to all. A reduced rate will be available for PGs/unwaged/unaffiliated delegates.