Author: modernistudies

Please consider submitting a proposal for a roundtable presentation (5-10 minutes) for the MSA session at the 2017 MLA Convention in Philadelphia (January 5-8).

How does modernism anticipate, intersect with, or reflect upon struggles for racial equality and civil rights? How are the revolutionary aesthetics of modernist forms shaped by the resistance to the commodification of black lives? How might we reconsider canonical theories of modernism and the avant-garde in light of recent developments in critical black studies? What are the continuities between modernist and black radical thought, and between modernist aesthetics and the Black Arts Movement? How does a modernist literature construct intersectional solidarity across lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability? How might we rethink the genealogy of modernism if it culminates in radical black activism and the civil rights movement?

Possible topics include the afterlives of slavery, abolition, and/or reconstruction in political institutions, social relations, and cultural forms; periodizing American modernism between the Civil War and the civil rights movement; global, transnational perspectives on slavery, abolition, and civil/human rights; modernist aesthetics, politics, and critical race theory. Please send a 250-word abstract and brief cv to Michael LeMahieu (mlemahi@clemson.edu) by March 18, 2016.

Please consider submitting an abstract to a special session I am organizing for next year’s MLA annual convention in Philadelphia:

This panel seeks papers on the ecology of home landscape and war zone representations within modernist literature for the 2017 MLA Annual Convention in Philadelphia, 5–8 January 2017 (https://apps.mla.org/cfp_detail_8773). The centennial anniversary of World War I has coincided with what seems a critical mass in awareness of the urgency of our sustainability as a species. In looking at the role which that war and the literature it produced has played in structuring the past to our contemporary present—a present marked by ecological instability and crisis—it behooves us to explore how literary responses to World War I employ an aesthetic which can be said to reconfigure the subject in relation to both space and time as ecological. While much discussed modernist authors such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway will offer fruitful grounds for considerations of the separation and intercession of the spaces of war and home, as well as the trench poets and war memoirists of the period such as Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, the organizer especially invites inquiries into the works of less discussed authors such as Max Plowman, Rebecca West, and Robinson Jeffers.

Please send abstracts of 300-500 words and a brief bio statement by March 15 to Molly Hall (molly_hall@uri.edu). (Note: this is a special session and not a guaranteed session).

Mapping the Scope and Reach of the Digital Humanities

20 May 2016 | King’s College London, Strand Campus

This year’s conference theme is: Mapping the Scope and Reach of the Digital Humanities. Since computing in the humanities was renamed to what it is nowadays called ‘digital humanities’ (DH), the field has shifted significantly in its scope and has gained importance as an academic
discipline. The DH is envisaged to encompass a range of interests and tasks such as “refurbishing the humanities for an electronic age” (McCarty 2005), manipulating texts (Bradley 2004), gathering big data for macroanalysis (Jockers 2013), distant reading (Moretti 2013), building rather than
writing for algorithmic criticism (Ramsay 2011), speculative computing and visual forms (Drucker 2008), to name a few.

The digital has undoubtedly cut across the humanities disciplines, but how wide is its reach? Is the DH inclusive enough as “a trading zone and a meeting place”, as defined by Svensson (2012)? What do the other disciplines have to teach digital humanities? Are we capable of inventing
any new functions of the digital within and for the traditional scope of the humanities? How responsive are the institutions to the new demands and ideas of researching the digital? What forms and areas of collaborative research have been missing? Do the collaborative projects overshadow a
single scholar’s effort and will in any way? Are the digital tools going hand in hand with the needs of humanities research, theory and pedagogy?

We would like to put these and many other historical, empirical and pedagogical aspects of the digital in the humanities on the agenda of the DDH Student Conference 2016 at King’s. We invite humanists, regardless of their technical background, to share their ideas and research on the past,
present and future issues of the digital in and for the humanities.

Keynote sessions include:

– “Quality in Quantity? Stylometry on Ever Bigger Data” | Jan Rybicki,
Assistant Professor of English Studies at the Jagiellonian University
of Kraków, Poland
– “Community Building in the Digital Humanities” | James Cummings,
Senior Digital Research Specialist for the IT Services of the University of
Oxford
– “Open Access and Multi-media Monographs” | Rupert Gatti,
co-founder and Director of Open Book Publishers and Director of Studies in
Economics at Trinity College, Cambridge
– “Researching Born-digital Data” | Jane Winters, Professor of
Digital History and Head of Publications at the Institute of Historical
Research

The event will also feature a roundtable discussion chaired by Professor Willard McCarty, Professor of Humanities Computing in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London.

The conference committee seeks proposals for:

– Research paper presentations – submissions should include: a title, author list (including names, email addresses and institutional affiliations) and an abstract for the proposed presentation (no more than 250 words in length). Presentations on the day should last no more than 15 minutes and will be followed by five minutes of discussion time.

– Poster or digital art presentations – submissions should include: a title, author list (including names, email addresses and institutional affiliations) and an abstract for the proposed poster or digital art exhibit (no more than 250 words in length). Please note: creativity is greatly encouraged in these presentations. Your work does not need to be in the form of a traditional poster and can include digital elements (for example animation or design) – please email us to propose your idea.

Further information will be made available through the conference website (TBC), Twitter feed (https://twitter.com/KCLDHCONF) and Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/kcldhconf/). Submissions should be made by midnight on 11 April 2016 by emailing kcldhconf@gmail.com. Please indicate in your email whether you wish to propose a presentation, poster or both. Decisions on acceptance of abstracts will be communicated to applicants no later than 18 April 2016.

Gabriele Salciute Civiliene
PhD Student, Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College

E-mail: gabriele.salciute-civiliene@kcl.ac.uk
gabrielemucho@gmail.com

Virginia Woolf Scholars Come to Their Senses

I offer two possible approaches for the International Virginia Woolf Society’s 2017 MLA panel: (1) papers addressing sense modalities in Woolf’s writing.  How and to what end does Woolf evoke sensory experiences of smell, touch and taste in her writing?  Or, (2) papers offering or debating “corrective” readings of Woolf that suggest some kind of “progress” in Woolf criticism. Have earlier readings, such as poststructuralist or lesbian, been supplanted by contemporary approaches, or do we need a model other than “progression” to address Woolf’s critical heritage? Abstracts (250-500 words) by March 21^st to Pamela Caughie at pcaughi@luc.edu(please note the “e” is dropped in Caughie).  Participants must be MLA members by April 7, 2016.

Modernist Paratexts (CFP for MSA 18, 17-20 November 2016, in Pasadena, California)

In Seuils (1987), Gérard Genette posed a rhetorical question about a canonical modernist text to highlight the functional importance of the then largely ignored paratext: “reduced to its text alone and without the help of any instructions for use, how would we read James Joyce’s Ulysses if it were not called Ulysses?” Genette undertook a synchronic structuralist account of the paratext, the body of productions, such as the title, author’s name, preface, epigraph, footnote, illustration, or dedicatory letter, that constitutes the zone of transition and transaction surrounding a text and presenting it as a text.

CALL FOR PAPERS

2016 Midwest Modern Language Association Conference

“Border States”

St. Louis, Missouri

November 10-13

Permanent Section Call for Papers: Irish Studies

Remembering 1916: The Easter Rising and the Poetics and Politics of Memory

2016 marks the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising, a key event in the revolutionary decade, 1913-23, and in Irish and world history. “Ireland 2016,” the Irish government’s year-long commemoration program, is now under way, with the emphasis on remembrance and reconciliation; however, plans to commemorate the events of 1916—also the year of the Battle of the Somme—have produced deep divisions in communities on both sides of the border as to how Ireland should remember and interpret the rebellion. While the Rising can be seen as a foundational event for the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, and the United Kingdom, the events of Easter 1916 have also arguably had a global impact and influence on anti-imperialist movements as far afield as Russia, India, China, and Africa.

From the beginning, literature and myth were inseparable from the historical events of Easter 1916, most famously expressed in W.B. Yeats’s words: “All changed, changed utterly / A Terrible beauty is born.” Indeed as Declan Kiberd puts it in Inventing Ireland, the rebellion has been “remorselessly textualized: for it—more than any of its individual protagonists—became an instantaneous martyr to literature.” Revisionist readings down the years have variously attempted to contain or curtail the imaginative power of Easter 1916, but among the very things that change utterly and unceasingly is the contested meaning of the Rising itself, not to mention the subsequent War of Independence and Civil War.

In response to the MMLA 2016 conference theme, “Border States,” this Permanent Section devoted to Irish Studies seeks papers that explore the topic of “borders,” broadly conceived, in relation to the Easter 1916 Rising as well as any aspect of the period 1913-1923, and its continuing relevance to Irish culture and society as well as the Irish diaspora. Papers dealing with contemporary reappraisals of the Rising are also welcomed as are contributions dealing with global Anglophone and non-Anglophone responses to the events of 1916.

Please submit a 250-word abstract and paper title along with your full name, institutional affiliation, and contact details (email and phone) to session chair Dr. Desmond Harding (hardi1d@cmich.edu<mailto:hardi1d@cmich.edu>) by April 5, 2016.