Author: modernistudies

Modernism/modernity Print Plus Cluster Proposal

2020 marked the 100^th anniversary of “modernism’s lost masterpiece,” Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem. Published by Hogarth Press in the spring of 1920, and typeset by Virginia Woolf, this ground-breaking long poem maps the range of continental avant-garde aesthetics of the 1910s even as it both engages and anticipates the mythical methods and epic conventions of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot.

This proposed Modernism/modernity Print Plus cluster hopes to present new work that reassesses the singularity of Mirrlees’s poem as well as its place within the broader network of literary modernism and early twentieth-century poetics. While scholars such as Julia Briggs, who produced the first annotated edition of the poem in Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections (2007), and Sandeep Parmar, who edited the first critical edition of Mirrlees’s Collected Poems (2011), have done the important archival and recovery work that restored Paris to critical attention, Peter Howarth solidified Paris’s position within the modernist “canon” with his chapter, “Why Write Like This?,” in The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry (2011), which introduces readers to the disorienting pleasures of modernism’s most famous poems through an extended analysis of Mirrlees’s “difficult” work (16). Building on these approaches, this cluster aims to initiate a new wave of Paris scholarship that complicates and extends the poem’s aesthetic, cultural, and socio-political import on the occasion of its centenary.

This Print+ cluster will demonstrate how engagement with Paris speaks not only to Mirrlees’s text but also to broader interests within modernist studies. We therefore seek a selection of articles that both pay tribute to the exceptionality of the poem and insist on the “complex intersections” that resist canonical trends of exceptionalizing marginalized writers like Mirrlees. While some interventions may consider detailed aspects of the poem, its influences, and its legacies, others may focus on Mirrlees’s work more generally and in relation to her contemporaries. Additionally, given M/m’s long history of engagement with Eliot and the The Waste Land, especially their recent Print+ cluster on “Reading ‘The Waste Land’ with the #MeToo Generation,” we seek contributions that help us to respond to the urgent questions: why Paris and why now? As an alternative to revisiting TWL’s position within the High-Modernist canon, can we, to quote the editor of the Eliot cluster, examine the ways in which Paris “acts as a kind of test case of how the #MeToo generation can change the way we read”? How might this poem spark new conversations about the relation among gender, sexuality, and power in modernist studies?

Our hope is that a Print+ cluster, which will be widely accessible and allow for an unprecedented engagement with the poem through the platform’s ability to include digital material (archives, visual culture), together with the recent publication of a new, smaller, and more affordable edition of the poem (Faber & Faber 2020), will facilitate the inclusion of Paris on more syllabi, igniting future waves of scholarship centered on this long under-appreciated poem and its networks.

Topics may include:

Teaching Paris

Hogarth Press

The history of the circulation of Mirrlees’s poem

The poem in relation to its (anti)colonial and Imperial interventions

Paris in dialogue with non-Western Modernisms

Mirrlees and translation

Mirrlees’s materialism

Cinema and visual culture

The city poem

Psychoanalysis and poetic form

Politics of poetics/aesthetics

Gender and sexuality in Paris

Queer(ing) Paris

*Abstracts (~250 words) due: October 1 2021. Please send to editors Nell Wasserstrom and Rio Matchett at wassersn@bc.edu and r.a.matchett@liverpool.ac.uk with the subject line “Hope Mirrlees Print+ Submission.” The editors also welcome queries.

*Selected abstracts will be followed by short articles (~3000 words) due March 1 2022. The cluster will then be submitted in its entirety to M/m for peer review.

[Call for Articles]

Reading in theory
and in higher education practice

Special issue of CLW – Cahier voor Literatuurwetenschap (2022)
ed. by Janine Hauthal & Hannah Van Hove

deadline for abstracts: 15 July 2021; deadline for articles: 15 October 2021

Over the past few decades, the field of literary studies has increasingly been interested in the question of how we read (Bennett 1995; Littau 2006). Developments in cognitive and cultural studies, hermeneutics, reception theory as well as digital humanities have contributed to enlarging our understanding (of theories) of reading and have gradually brought together previously separated domains of study such as reader-response theory (Iser 1976), narratology (Genette 1972/1983), sociology of reading (Bourdieu 1979) and history of reading (Manguel 1996). While, initially and most influentially, approaches to reading in the context of literary studies have viewed reading as a cognitive process and focused on the content of texts, cognitive literary studies and narratology (Herman 2002) shifted the focus to the mental processes by which readers make sense of texts. More recent approaches have pushed further in this direction by conceptualizing reading as social cognition and exploring it as an embodied act (Caracciolo 2014; Kukkonen 2017, 2019). In distinction to the field’s tradition of ‘close reading’, different ways of reading have also engendered methodological innovations, tellingly called ‘distant reading’ (Moretti 2005, 2013; see also Bode 2017) or ‘hyper reading’ (Hayles 2012), which, in turn, have played a role in the current rise of interest in the future of reading in the attention economy of the (post)digital age (Berg/Seeber 2016; McLean Davies et al. 2020; Sommer 2020).

We invite articles which engage with reading as either cognitive process, physical activity, social behaviour or institutionalized practice (Birke 2016: 8-11) or blend these aspects in considering their interactive dynamics. Contributions may engage with, but are not limited to, the following questions: If meaning is no longer recognized as being carried solely by texts, where do we locate (the production of) meaning? Do experimental, hybrid and/or intermedial texts require different reading strategies? How are readers constructed and written (about)? How are we to account for the challenges posed by gendered and intersectional theories of reading? How do digital textualities affect reading practices? How do the readings we teach relate to the flourishing of online book culture and layman’s criticism? What are the (disciplinary, social, neurological) consequences when analysis through machine algorithms is recognized as a form of reading as valid as close reading? How do we as scholars understand (ourselves as) readers? In the age of the entrepreneurial neoliberal university, how (much time or credit points) do we invest in reading and what kind of readers and readings do literary curricula foster in the face of demands of employability?

For the special issue publication, we welcome contributions of 5,000 words (incl. footnotes) in English. The deadline for articles is 15 October 2021. Please send an abstract of max. 500 words and a 100-word author bio to Janine Hauthal (janine.hauthal@vub.be) and Hannah Van Hove (havhove@vub.be) by 15 July 2021. Contributions will be published in a special issue section of CLW – Cahier voor Literatuurwetenschap, a peer-reviewed journal published by Academia Press. All manuscripts should reference and be formatted according to the CLW style guide and may be submitted in Word format. All manuscripts are peer-reviewed and are scheduled for publication in autumn 2022.

References

Bennett, Andrew (ed.). Readers and Reading. Longman, 1995.

Berg, Maggie & Barbara K. Seeber. The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy. U of Toronto P, 2016.

Biebuyck, Benjamin. “Het aandikken van vriendschap: Zes thesen over het academische literatuuronderwijs [The thickening of friendship: Six theses on teaching literature at university].” CLW 11 (2019): 135-143.

Birke, Dorothee. Writing the Reader: Configurations of a Cultural Practice in the English Novel. De Gruyter, 2016.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, translated by Richard Nice. Harvard UP, 1984 [1979].

Caracciolo, Marco. The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach. De Gruyter, 2014.

Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, translated by Jane E. Lewin. Cornell UP, 1980 [1972].

—. Narrative Discourse Revisited, translated by Jane E. Lewin. Cornell UP, 1988 [1983].

Herman, David. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. U of Nebraska P, 2002.

Hayles, Katherine. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. U of Chicago P, 2012.

Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response, translated by the author with David Henry Wilson. Johns Hopkins UP, 1978 [1976].

Kukkonen, Karin. A Prehistory of Cognitive Poetics: Neoclassicism and the Novel. Oxford UP, 2017.

—. 4E Cognition and Eighteenth-Century Fiction: How the Novel Found its Feet. Oxford UP, 2019.

Littau, Karin. Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies and Bibliomania. Polity, 2006.

Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading. Penguin, 1996.

McLean Davies, Larissa, Katherine Bode, Susan Martin and Wayne Sawyer. “Reading in the (Post)Digital Age: Large Digital Databases and the Future of Literature in Secondary Classrooms.” English in Education 54.3 (2020).

Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees. Verso, 2005.

—. Distant Reading. Verso, 2013.

Sommer, Roy. “Libraries of the Mind: What Happens after Reading.” Diegesis – Interdisciplinary E-Journal for Narrative Research/Interdisziplinäres E-Journal für Erzählforschung 9.1 (2020): 83-99 (www.diegesis.uni-wuppertal.de/index.php/diegesis/article/download/376/580).